Arkansas Loves Trump More than Ever

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

West Plains, Missouri, and Mountain Home, Arkansas, are separated by a little over fifty miles of a curvy, meandering country highway that crosses the stateline approximately halfway between the two communities.   Both towns have a light industrial base, an agrarian hinterland, and a basic contingent of small national businesses - such as discount stores and fast-food joints - that are present in most American population centers.  Mountain Home, Arkansas, is also located very near Lake Norfolk and that stirs some tourist trade.  Both communities are similar in size, each being home to approximately 12,000 individuals.

A few of my doctors are in Mountain Home, which necessitates trips there several times a year.  My last trip south had been back in September or October, before the national election, and at that time I noted a lot of Trump signs on both sides of the border.  Yesterday I made my first post-election to Mountain Home and found that while most of the Trump signs had been removed along the roadway in Missouri, the Trump political fever had intensified substantially south of the Missouri-Arkansas border.

There were still sporadic Trump yard signs along the Arkansas roadways, but there was a marked increase in in yard displays where signs and flags were arranged in manners to catch the eye and attention of passers-by. When I got into Mountain Home one of the first things I came across was a "Trump Store" along the major thoroughfare - a commercial building apparently dedicated to Trump merchandise with flags and other paraphernalia flapping in the breeze outside of the store.

Further on there was a trailer of a semi-truck sitting along the side of the same busy road.    The trailer had a Trump-Pence "Keep America Great" sign covering its entire side along with portraits of the two politicians.   The advertisement was professionally prepared and obviously expensive - not counting the cost of renting the trailer and the prime spot of highway frontage.  Somebody had put some big money into the gaudy display.

Then I passed a largeTrump kiosk along the side of the road that was an open-air affair selling Trump-Pence merchandise - and even though the weather was cold, it seemed to be doing a brisk business.

(Significantly I had not noticed the two Trump businesses and the large trailer display during my last trip to Mountain Home just a couple of months ago.  They were relatively new.)

While passing all of those bastions of diehard support for Trump, I was also listening to Mitch McConnell on the car radio as he was finally acknowledging - six weeks after the election - that Joe Biden had beaten Trump in the election and was now officially the president-elect.  

Those Arkansawyers aren't going to be happy when they turn on their televisions on January 20th and learn that they have a new president!  Maybe they need to be listening to something other than Fox News!