I accidentally spent my first ever Thanksgiving with a family of Trump supporters and I’m thankful for it

Anastasia Miari
9 min readNov 25, 2020

“Did y’all see Melania’s dress the other day?” was the first clue.

Two English girls, driving through Texas

It was 2019, pre-mask wearing, pre-travel bans, pre-covid and the forthcoming US election was still an entire year away. We were two British girls on a five-week road trip, snaking through the B roads of the southern states of the USA, culminating in Thanksgiving in Texas.

We had no contacts in the US, just a mission to drive across the bible belt in our little Ford Fiesta, taking as many foodie pit-stops as possible in a bid to better understand what America’s all about through its food. We’d had our fill of New York and its bagels. We’d spent enough time in LA eating organic salad. This trip was all about seeing the real America, not another city akin to London in its multiculturalism.

And so we found ourselves driving alongside monster trucks trailing billowing TRUMP flags (I can’t say which shocked us more- the enormous cars or the Trump trumpeting), through North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana into the red barn dotted, lone star state.

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Anastasia Miari

Freelance journalist writing about travel, the environment, food and life for The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times and The Telegraph.