In rural Bilgewater, Trump voters stand by their man.

In an Appalachian town, political dedication — and unusual honesty.

Tildy Vintner lost her job as a coal chute lubricator in May, but that hasn’t changed her faith in Donald Trump.

“He’s white, like me,” Tildy says, in between visits to customers at her new place of work, Jimmy’s Pancake Shack. “I don’t like people who aren’t white, and neither does my President.”

Most everyone seems to agree here in the little Appalachian town of Bilgewater. On a muggy summer Saturday, serenaded by the rattle of cicadas and the rumble of distant combines, you can watch kids with skinned knees ride rusted bicycles down Main Street, past clapboard houses and the chained link fence around the tire yard. On rickety wooden porches, built before the Great Depression, men with robust bellies rest on rocking chairs and talk about the “Good old days,” while nearby their wives hang klan hoods on the clothesline to dry.

“I voted for that Arab fella last time,” says Stenny Feltman, who at age 83 still maintains the same gravel farm his great-great-grandfather took by eradicating a tribe of Native Americans. “I didn’t trust that Mormon, and my grandson told me if I elected a half-Black, then the liberals would have to stop making everything about race.”