In an Atlanta suburb, American realities collide over Trump’s indictment

MARIETTA, Ga. - Hours after former president Donald Trump was indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election, Jenny Peterson was heading off to pick up Mexican food for her family. She’d tried to cut back on listening to the news in the car in favor of soul music. Politics left her too angry and agitated.

But on this night, the news was too big to ignore.

Peterson, 55, listened to NPR and flipped over to Fox News on her satellite radio to see what the other side was saying. She believed that so many of America’s core institutions were failing under the pressure of the former president and his followers. Convicting Trump wouldn’t fix those problems. But it was an essential first step.

“It’s important to me as a mom that my 16 and 14-year-old will see this one thing happen,” Peterson said. “Things will be improved when someone who has committed crimes in plain sight is held accountable.”

A few miles away, Jerry Ramsey, 79, was finishing up a landscaping job for the company he owns and heading home for dinner with his wife, Carolyn. She usually kept Fox News on in the background, but Ramsey didn’t feel the need to learn the intricacies of the case against Trump. As he saw it, the 45-page indictment was just another effort to tear down the country he, a Vietnam vet, had worked so hard to defend.

“They just dream stuff up,” he said. “They just keep coming after him.”

Peterson and Ramsey share a few things in common:

Both of their lives have been forever altered by Trump. His presidency has driven them to advocacy and enriched their social circles with new, like-minded friends.

Both live in Cobb County, a politically contested Atlanta suburb in a state at the center of the legal battle over the 2020 election. The latest Trump indictment detailed the former president’s attempts to strong-arm Georgia officials, with a separate, Georgia-specific indictment possible later this month.

And both believed that the legal proceedings and the 2024 election would finally render a judgment not just on Trump the man but on the future of America’s democracy.

The two Georgians, though, inhabited opposite poles in a divided America. They voted differently, took in information through different outlets and had radically different views of the threats to the country’s democracy.

It had been eight years since Trump first seized the American political spotlight. Two and a half years since he left office. Nine months since he declared his campaign to win back the White House.

If anything, it felt as though the two sides - those appalled by Trump and those who adore him - were growing ever more suspicious of each other. The divisions were reflected in opinion polls, which showed that Americans held diametrically opposite views of whether Trump should face criminal charges for his role in the attack on the Capitol. And they were reflected in the lives of Peterson and Ramsey.

On the day Trump was arraigned for his alleged crimes, they were living in close proximity but inhabiting separate political worlds and drawing radically divergent conclusions about the state of their nation. Trump’s coming trials and the November 2024 election seemed certain to escalate the tension.

The poles of American politics were on a collision course.

Ramsey woke up and, as he did almost every morning, turned on “Fox & Friends,” the popular show that starts the morning for many Republicans. On this Thursday, Trump was flying to D.C. from his Bedminster, N.J., estate. Sitting in his red armchair, Ramsey was already decked out for the day in his Trump 2024 hat and rubber Trump bracelets.

When conservative commentator Mark Levin appeared on screen, Ramsey picked up the remote and turned up the volume.

“This indictment is crap!” Levin bellowed. “They went after him before he was elected, they went after him when he was elected, they went after him during the four years of his presidency, and they’re going after him now.”

“He gets so excited!” said Ramsey’s wife, Carolyn, who was sitting across from him.

Levin was the angriest voice of the morning and the person Ramsey most wanted to hear. He spoke to Ramsey’s sense of outrage and fear for the country.

Ramsey was among Trump’s earliest outspoken supporters in Cobb County, which had long been a Republican stronghold but, like many growing suburbs in America, was increasingly trending toward Democratic control.

Ramsey had felt the magic and energy of Trump’s early rise as a candidate in 2015. He served in the Army in Vietnam and ran a series of small businesses, including his current venture as a landscaper. He liked that Trump was a fellow businessman, but what really drew him in was the energy and dedication of the crowds that rallied to him.

“That first summer there were twelve of us, and by the end, it was up to 300,” he recalled of the campaign’s active supporters in Cobb. He remembers the first time he climbed aboard a bus adorned with Trump’s campaign logo in early 2016 and headed to the Daytona 500. A local owner of a charter bus company had taken one of his buses and decorated it with Trump’s name as part of a freelance effort to support the candidate.

Ramsey awoke that first early morning in Florida to 100 people standing outside the bus, ready to buy the MAGA baseball caps he and his friend had brought down to sell. They didn’t stop until after 7 p.m.

“I know exactly what it is to be a rock star,” he said. “Stop the bus anywhere in the southeastern United States and within five minutes, there would be 50 people there.” Other trips on the bus followed, and he and the owner became close friends.

More than seven years and 38 Trump rallies later, Ramsey is a regional supervisor for the Cobb County Republican Party, overseeing 16 precincts. As the 2024 election approached, he was determined to awake others to the dangers he believed the country faced - which he described as deep-state globalists and a broken election system that was subverting the will of the American people. Trump, he was sure, had the unique ability to stop them. Some days he wondered why more people weren’t putting in the hours for Trump.

After listening to Levin’s burst of anger - which reflected his own frustration - he started to go over his notes for a coming meeting with his precinct captains. He wanted to help them hone their own messages with potential voters, downplaying abortion and religion and hitting harder on the issues he thought were most important to Americans: inflation, the border and what he characterized as liberal ideology in schools.

The solution to all those issues, he believed, was Trump, who had built a movement of true believers who saw the world just as Ramsey did.

Nothing had dissuaded him from that conviction, not even the riots on Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol. He had listened to Trump’s speech on the Mall that day and even walked toward the Capitol with the angry crowd. But he was feeling cold and tired, he said, so instead of joining the protesters at the steps of the Capitol, he went to Starbucks. His memory of that day is of a peaceful protest.

“I didn’t see any violence,” he said. To Ramsey, it was inconceivable that his fellow Trump supporters would have ransacked the Capitol, so he blamed the violence on shadowy outside groups.

Around 11 a.m. on Thursday he headed out to meet a friend who was a fellow veteran and one of those first dozen early Trump supporters in Cobb. They began to discuss an issue they believed was critical if Trump was going to prevail in 2024: They needed to replace electronic voting machines in the county with paper ballots.

The federal indictment filed Tuesday was full of examples of Trump’s advisers telling him that there were no major irregularities or fraud in the 2020 election. Numerous expert and legal reviews had come to the same conclusion.

But no one Ramsey listened to took the indictment seriously, and Ramsey had almost no interest in what was in it. “They don’t have a case against him,” he said to his friend, “and they’re going to eat their words.”

As Trump was making his way to the courthouse just down the street from the U.S. Capitol on Thursday afternoon, Peterson was sitting down to lunch with Tamara Stevens, one of her closest friends and a woman she would never have met if not for the Trump presidency.

She and Stevens felt the same sense of horror on election night in 2016 and vowed to get involved in local politics. Their opportunity came when Trump nominated their congressman to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services in early 2017, opening up a House seat.

Like scores of women in their suburban neighborhood, they rushed to volunteer for Jon Ossoff, who they believed could be a small but significant check on Trump’s power. He narrowly lost the House race but won a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia in 2021. “We were all finding each other,” she said. “And we were all for the same thing.”

Peterson and the friends she met working on that race called themselves “the resisters.” She lost a few old friends who were Republicans. “Trump and 2016 broke us,” she said. But her new friends more than took their place. Together they volunteered for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot. When Trump visited Georgia in 2018, they shouted and waved signs at him. “I am a witch on a hunt for JUSTICE!,” Stevens’ sign read.

During their lunch, Peterson and Stevens picked at their salads and talked about the prospects of Trump going to jail. “It’s hard to get your hopes up,” Peterson told her friend.

“He might be walking around with an ankle bracelet,” Stevens replied.

“Cholesterol could be our best option,” Peterson said.

“Burger King is going to take him out before the justice system ever does,” Stevens joked.

Around 3:30 p.m. Peterson headed off to the high school where it was her day to drive carpool for her two teenage kids and their friends, who rushed into her minivan as a thunderstorm erupted. She worked from home for her husband, who is a financial adviser, a job that gave her the freedom to be around for her children and came with a duty, she believed, to give back. “We’ve been soaked in grace and privilege,” she often told her children.

In the early years of the Trump presidency, Peterson would call her lawmakers from the car to object to Trump’s policies and plead with them to take a stand.

She phoned former senator David Perdue’s office so often that her 16-year-old daughter can still recite the message on his old answering machine from memory: “Thank you for calling Senator David Perdue, I can only do my job by listening to you.”

Now Peterson wondered if all of those calls had been “useless.” Sometimes she wondered where she could make the most difference fighting back against the forces she believed that Trump had unleashed. She talked about ways to pressure the school board to change the name of her children’s high school, which had been named in the 1960s after a Confederate general.

On this day, NPR was playing on her car radio and a reporter was announcing that Trump had arrived at the courthouse. It was his third felony indictment this year, following his arraignments on separate charges in Florida and New York. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges and has claimed he is being persecuted by his opponents.

“Third time’s the charm,” Peterson said under her breath.

In the early days of Trump’s presidency she and her friends were fueled by the same sense of outrage and mission. These days they text as much about their kids, their husbands and their days as they do about politics.

Even if Trump was sent to prison, Peterson believed that the threat of Trumpism remained. At the state level, his followers were passing laws to restrict abortions. They were changing election laws and redrawing legislative maps to limit the Democrats’ growing power in Georgia, Peterson said. In Cobb County, they were banning the teaching of critical race theory and, in at least once instance, disciplining a teacher who read a book to her class that they didn’t like.

All of her “resister” friends were taking up different causes. “Everyone has their own most important thing,” she said. After seven years, some had taken a break from politics. One thing that hadn’t changed was the threat, Peterson believed. “We live in precarious times,” she said.

On opposite sides of Cobb County, Ramsey and Peterson were sitting down for dinner at the end of another long day in which they’d both been thinking about Trump and the future of the country’s democracy.

Ramsey, his family, and the head of the county’s Republican Party had met up at a local barbecue restaurant. He was still wracking his brain for ways to motivate his fellow Republicans to turn out for Trump and show them what was really at stake in 2024.

He floated an idea to the GOP chair: Maybe the answer was to invite someone who could provide proof that the election was stolen. Douglas Frank, a high school math teacher with a chemistry doctorate, had been making the rounds nationwide, evangelizing that he had an algorithm that proved that 2020 was rigged. His theories had been widely discredited, but Ramsey believed them.

“We have to bring back Dr. Frank,” Ramsey said.

Peterson was defrosting some fish for her family’s dinner when a text message from her niece in D.C. appeared on the phone. She had been standing with the crowd outside the courthouse where Trump had been arraigned hours earlier.

“Did you see the big orange pumpkin?” Peterson asked her.

“No,” she replied. “Too many vehicles.”

Peterson then checked to see if any of her friends were talking about Trump. They weren’t. “People are living their lives. They aren’t worried about this guy,” she said. “That’s good.” Her children were doing their math homework. PBS NewsHour was playing on her television.

“This is not that significant to me,” she said of Trump and the indictment.

But she also couldn’t look away or stop thinking about the prospect of another Trump presidency and the damage she felt it would do to the country. On NewsHour, William P. Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, was talking about his unfitness for the presidency. Peterson looked at Barr with disgust, thinking of all the moments when he had protected Trump.

“What did you do about it?” she yelled at the television.