“This is Donald’s room,” Phyliss Shobe says as she ushers me into the neat, spare room where the 81-year-old retiree has covered almost every available space with MAGA memorabilia. Arrayed on the bed, there’s the Gulf of America shirt she got for a friend, as well as a Trump calendar, a Melania book, a fake American Express card identifying her as a charter member of the 2020 Republican Presidential Task Force bearing Trump’s signature, and of course, the “MAGA King” hat she was wearing when I first met her last year at a Trump rally in Richmond, Virginia.
When I arrive at her house, Shobe apologizes for not having a cake ready for my arrival. She bakes cakes for everyone, including her doctors, but a family emergency the night before had kept her out of the kitchen. She’s dressed up for the occasion, her nails expertly painted purple. She’d gone to the hairdresser that morning. Shobe’s home, 20 miles south of Richmond, is modern but comfortably cluttered with her well-organized collections of elephant figurines, antique tea cups, and other “junk,” as she calls it.
The “junk,” however, can’t possibly compete with the spread in Donald’s room. When we enter the shrine, Shobe narrates a tour with the confident delivery of a professional docent. She points out the special shelves her son designed to display more Trump tchotchkes than I’ve ever seen outside of a Trump rally.
There’s the iconic photo of him, bleeding, with his fist in the air after he was shot at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally in 2024. Christmas ornaments, glasses and coffee mugs, lighters, bottle openers, coasters, and every sort of pin are laid out with care, not a speck of dust on them. The 2024 Trump “revenge tour” gold coin takes center stage on one shelf, along with a Make American Great wristwatch. Trumpy Bear presides on a little chair in the corner.
Looking around her sanctuary with pride, Shobe assures me, “This is all going to be treasure someday.”
Shobe is what you might call a Trump superfan. She’s one of the 96 percent of Republicans who strongly supported Trump in 2024 and who, according to an AP-NORC poll, still believe Trump has been a great president. They’re the folks who’ve stuck with him through his mismanagement of the Covid pandemic, his impeachments, his various criminal prosecutions, and the January 6 insurrection.
Typically white, Christian, over 65, and less likely than most Republicans to have a college degree, MAGA voters like Shobe are a small but vocal minority. They make up only about 15 percent of all American voters and about a third of all Republicans, according to a 2024 study by researchers at the University of California Davis. But they’re devoted.
As Trump’s erratic tariffs threaten the economy, federal health and safety agencies have been gutted, and the military has been deployed to corral peaceful protesters who oppose his immigration tactics, his overall approval rating has plummeted in less than six months. Only 38 percent of Americans approve of the job he’s doing, according to a June poll. Yet Trump’s support among Republicans like Shobe has remained sky high—nearly 90 percent still strongly approve of his performance.
“I fight anybody that has anything bad to say about Donald Trump,” she told me before I went to visit her in March. “I just admire the man so much for what he goes through and put up with when he didn’t have to.” She’s not alone among her cohort. “All my friends are true believers,” she says.
But have Trump’s marital infidelities, for instance, ever dimmed his star in her eyes? Maybe the allegations that he paid hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels? “What goes on in his personal life,” she says, is between him and his wife. “As long as it doesn’t affect the American people.”
What about the New York City civil jury that found that Trump had sexually abused E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room? Shobe, like more than 90 percent of Trump’s 2020 voters, simply doesn’t believe it. And don’t get her started on January 6, which she knows was caused by government agitators; otherwise, the Capitol Police would never have let it happen.
Many Democrats and now even some Republicans are a bit bewildered by people like Shobe, for whom Trump really can do no wrong. The diehards who make up Trump’s base tend to get parodied in the media and dismissed as cult members. But after covering Trump for nearly a decade now, I’ve learned that his most devoted fans are often far more complicated than the stereotypes suggest. Shobe is no exception.
Look beyond her MAGA hats and “Missed Me?” T-shirts and it’s clear that a whole confluence of things have brought her to this place. She’s had a difficult life and one that more often than not, the government has done little to ease, regardless of who was in office. And she is deeply unsettled by the rapidly changing world that manifests in everything from the George Floyd protests to gender fluidity— and especially in the recent influx of immigrants. “Donald is sending ’em back,” she adds approvingly, explaining that she sees him as a stabilizing force, someone who will put an end to all the madness.
Shobe is so committed to Trump that last year when he finally staged a rally near her house, she made the pilgrimage, even though she was battling what she called “Mr. C”—cancer. I met her as she was waiting to go inside the Richmond Convention Center with her brother and sister-in-law, all three using walkers. She was wearing a one-of-a-kind Trump T-shirt, so I asked if I could take her picture. She happily agreed but told me to wait so she could hide a bag full of urine under her shirt. She didn’t want it to show up in the photo.
Not long after the rally, she had her kidney removed along with part of her bladder and went through several rounds of chemotherapy. (She’s now in remission.) While she was recovering, Shobe had to stow all her Trump merch so that a live-in caregiver could stay in the spare bedroom. When the woman left after a month, Shobe was relieved, and not just because they argued about politics. As her son told her, “You can have Donald Trump’s room back.”
Much of her collection is bounty from the political donations she’s made over the past five years, mostly in $20 or $50 increments, which have netted these expressions of gratitude from a host of GOP luminaries. “I got a message from Trump that says he loves me,” she says, beaming. Alongside autographed Christmas cards from Trump, there are others from Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). “I can’t find the DeSantis one,” she laments.
“I got a message from Trump that says he loves me.”
Shobe doesn’t want to say how much money she has donated to political campaigns, but she’s given to various Trump committees, the Republican National Committee, and MAGA congressional candidates: Hershel Walker in Georgia, Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s race in California, Blake Masters in Arizona, and former Ohio Sen. JD Vance among them.
As a prolific small donor, Shobe is part of a trend. A 2022 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the number of voters from both parties donating $200 or less grew from 5.2 million in 2006 to 195.0 million in 2020. Meanwhile, the average size of a contribution plummeted, from $292.10 to $59.70. Those small donors, like Shobe, tend to be the most ideological voters in the country, and their donations are a major driver of political polarization.
Richard Pildes, an NYU law professor and campaign finance expert, told the New York Times in 2023 that Trump-supporting House Republicans who voted against certifying the Electoral College count on January 6, 2021, received an average of $140,000 in small contributions in the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans who voted in favor of the peaceful transfer of power received only an average of $40,000.
In that sense, Shobe’s modest donations add up to a lot of influence for a senior from “chicken country” in Moorefield, West Virginia. “I’m just a dumb hillbilly,” she tells me with a laugh. On the wall in her TV room is a photo circa 1958 showing the inside of the one-room log cabin where she first attended school. Pointing out a picture of Jesus on the classroom wall, she asks, “You wouldn’t see Christ in a classroom now, would you?”
Shobe has never been wealthy. Her working life started at age 13 when she moved in with West Virginia State Senator Don Baker (D) to take care of his children. Baker died shortly after taking office, and his wife Betty got elected to his seat. Shobe stayed with her until she graduated from high school in 1961. Then she moved to Washington, DC, sharing a crowded apartment with other girls from her high school drawn to the city for jobs.
After bouncing around between Maryland, West Virginia, and DC, she eventually moved to Virginia to do typesetting for the Masons. In the late 70s, she got stomach cancer that was misdiagnosed and left her in and out of hospitals for three years. The fraternal organization took care of her. “They paid my rent and everything,” she told me.
Among her other many jobs, she helped Israel “Izzy” Ipson, a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor, work on his memoirs. He would record his thoughts on tape, and Shobe would transcribe them and clean up his English. “He was a lovely man, oh my,” she told me. “That’s why I don’t like to hear people cutting down Jewish people.” Her work with him contributed to a 2004 book, Izzy’s Fire: Finding Humanity In The Holocaust, by Nancy Wright Beasley. (Ipson’s son Jay founded the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond.)
“He loves getting to us uneducated people. I knew he couldn’t be bought.”
Shobe had been a Trump fan on some level since the ‘80s when he was a brash young real estate developer. He “is a nice-looking man,” she has told me more than once. And, of course, she watched him on “The Apprentice.” She got on board with his political ambitions as soon as he announced he was running for president in 2015. “He loves getting to us uneducated people,” she explains. “I knew he couldn’t be bought.” But she didn’t make her first campaign contribution until 2020 when she started reading “about the Federal Reserve” and watching YouTube videos with her friend Angie, who does hair.
Since then, she’s been all in, driven by her anger about the direction the country is going. Shobe’s modest political donations have earned her eternal gratitude from GOP candidates—and an avalanche of fundraising calls, texts, and emails. Her landline rang nonstop while I was at her house. She showed me one fundraising email that claimed Trump has ended taxes on Social Security taxes—he hasn’t. Others contained invitations to become a “special member” of this or that exclusive Republican club. She has responded to a lot of them, answering polls from Elon Musk asking what hat he should wear to the Inauguration, and making small donations.
As a result, she now owns an inch-thick stack of commemorative membership cards from everyone from now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), all of which went into the shrine. Shobe says she is such a sought-after Trump supporter that she occasionally talks to Musk on the phone. I asked her how she knew it was the billionaire. “They know things about me,” she confided in a whisper. (AARP has warned that financial scams originating with phone callers claiming to be Elon Musk have become epidemic.)
By the time I visited Shobe, Trump had already imposed aggressive policies well beyond what he did in his first term. Musk and his DOGE boys had dismantled the US Agency for International Development and sacked thousands of federal employees, including about 3,000 from Social Security.
“How do you think Trump is doing?” I ask her. “I don’t know if he’s doing that the right way,” she replies earnestly. “I thought, ‘Oh Donald. Slow down a little.’” But mostly she’s thrilled with his presidency. I wondered if she knew about Musk’s effort to seize control of personal information the government held on Americans. She didn’t but she also didn’t care. “You know why it doesn’t bother me?” she asks with a laugh. “My bank account is empty.”
“I don’t know if he’s doing that the right way. I thought, ‘Oh Donald. Slow down a little.’”
When I arrived, Shobe had just gotten off the phone with the bank, trying to recoup money that had mysteriously vanished from her account. Her credit card numbers have been stolen multiple times. “There isn’t anything out there that’s secret,” she says.
I mentioned that Trump had shuttered the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the only federal agency whose mission was to protect Americans from financial scams. She’d never heard of it but conceded that it was a good idea. Her brother lost $17,000, his life savings, after getting a call from someone claiming to have kidnapped his grandson.
Shobe may not know about Trump’s destruction of the CFPB, but she does know all about men in women’s sports, the 300-year-old people receiving Social Security who Musk “discovered,” the Covid “lab leak” theory, murderous immigrants, DEI ruining the FAA, and Hollywood’s involvement in child trafficking. I ask where she gets all her news. “Fox, Fox, Fox,” she says. “I don’t even turn to other channels.”
Her media diet definitely does not include Mother Jones, which she didn’t realize was a liberal publication until after I arrived at her house. After the tour of Donald’s room, I took Shobe to lunch and her sister called while we were in the car. “You’ve reached the famous Phyliss Shobe,” she said, explaining that she was still busy with “the reporter.”
“Do you know she’s a Democrat?” Shobe says in amazement. “Tell her to get out of the car!” her sister responds, before asking if Shobe was converting me to Trumpism. They both laugh and Shobe assures her that even though I’m a liberal, I’m still a nice person. We go to an Italian place near her house, and over a steak and cheese hoagie, she tells me more about her life.
When Shobe was pregnant with her first child, her husband was in a bad motorcycle accident that left him unable to do manual labor. She worked to put him through college in another part of the state while she stayed behind to raise her two children. The strain was eventually too much, and they split up after 10 years. But her children did well and are now taking good care of her, even if they don’t necessarily share her enthusiasm for Trump.
When Shobe was 50, the young daughter of a West Virginia friend was struggling. Shobe took in her baby, Tim, and raised him as her own. It wasn’t always easy. When she was on the night shift at a gas station, she’d push two chairs together for him to sleep on while she worked.
She was never close with her father, but she went back to West Virginia to care for him for 18 months before he died at age 103—“The best thing I ever did.” Later, she took in her 95-year-old dying sister. “That’s how I tore up my body,” she says, explaining that she had to have her shoulder replaced after all the lifting. “But it was worth it.” Her family prided itself on its self-sufficiency. “We never got help from anybody,” Shobe tells me. “We gave help to people. We don’t believe in welfare.”
“We never got help from anybody. We gave help to people. We don’t believe in welfare.”
In that way, Shobe resembles the avid Trump supporters sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild profiles in her new book, Stolen Pride, whom she calls the “elite of the left-behind.” She writes of discovering that “those most enthralled with Donald Trump were not at the very bottom—the illiterate, the hungry—but those who aspired to do well or who were doing well within a region that was not.”
Shobe may have escaped poverty-stricken West Virginia long ago, but her roots there are still profoundly shaping her worldview in a way that’s masked by her current prosperity. Even her relatively new suburban lifestyle hasn’t shielded her from more trauma, however.
In 2020, one of her two sons nearly died from Covid and was in a coma for a month. Not long after, Tim was shot in a drive-by outside a Roanoke nightclub. The bullet went through his arm and into his side, where it tore up his intestines and colon. Given all she’s endured, perhaps it’s not surprising that Shobe believes we’re in what evangelicals call the End Times. All the crazy weather from the changing climate? “That’s God,” she assured me, “trying to let the people know he’s coming.”
After lunch, we return to her tidy bungalow in a 55-and older community. Inside, Tim is snoozing on the couch while his almost 2-year-old toddler naps nearby in a travel crib. We sit in recliners in the cozy den where Shobe watches Fox News, and she recommends some books to me by the controversial evangelical writer Sarah Young. She shows me her worn copy of Jesus Calling Devotions for Every Day. The phone keeps ringing.
After listening to Shobe’s life story, I had to wonder why she wasn’t a Democrat. After all, the party’s platform revolves around helping people just like her, advocating better health care, supporting children, and opposing gun violence. As it turned out, she had a political shrine once before—for President John F. Kennedy. “I loved John Kennedy,” she says. “That was my first voting experience.” She also voted for Bill Clinton, though she thinks Hillary is “scary.”
During the Obama years, Shobe says she wasn’t paying enough attention to know much about what he did in office. “He’s a Muslim, you know.” She’s also sure Barack and Michelle are getting divorced—there’s a YouTube video about that. As for former President Joe Biden, she feels only pity. “We watched [him] deteriorate in front of our eyes,” she tells me with a shake of the head. “I felt sorry for the man because his family let him go out there and embarrass himself and the country.”
She isn’t necessarily opposed to voting for Democrats, it’s just that she has no idea what their agenda is. I suggest they are, among other things, trying to save Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. She’s unconvinced. Medicare costs for her have been going up even when Democrats were in office. And the Social Security office was almost impossible to reach on the phone before Trump was elected. She can’t imagine it getting much worse.
The politics talk ends when the toddler awakens. Even though Shobe’s back is in bad shape, she picks him up and cuddles him. He’s already joining her Trump fan club. The dark-haired sprite loves Trumpy Bear and when he sees the president on TV, he will raise both arms and yell, “Go Donald!”
Eventually, it’s time for me to go. I bid Shobe farewell and she invites me to visit again any time—and promises next time there will be cake. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch. One day in early June, I asked her if she knew Trump was making cuts to cancer research and the Veterans’ Administration, both things she cares about. “I’d have to read more about that,” she said skeptically. “I don’t think Donald is responsible for that.” The next day, she sent me this text:
“After we talked yesterday I thought about things you said and I have followed Donald Trump for many years but when he and Melania came down those steps I knew in my heart that this country needed those two people… So, I guess nothing will change my opinion of my President I’m behind this couple one hundred percent. I like you a lot and although we disagree on politics. I hope we can stay in touch and be friends. I think we meet people for a reason. Just think you might end up with all of my keepsakes. Ha! Ha!”
