The meaning of one vote

He got into his pickup truck. He used his turn signals. He didn’t exceed the speed limit. He parked between the lines. He opened the entrance door for someone else and let that person go through first. He believed in courtesies and in rules, and he believed that anyone who held doors, didn’t cheat, worked hard, and treated people with respect would have a shot at a life of opportunity and meaning.

“Here to vote?” a poll worker asked him.

“Yes sir,” he said, and when he walked out of the voting booth a few minutes later, it was with the feeling he always had after voting in his beloved country, that he had done something that mattered.

***

Fifty-five years old now, Brent Cummings has played many roles in his life: a southerner born in Mississippi with family roots that trace back to the Confederacy, a teenager in New Jersey who played on one of the great teams in high school football history, an Army officer who retired as a colonel after a 28-year career.

Of all his roles, though, the most significant to the United States in 2024 was as one of the 154 million Americans who voted in the 2020 presidential election. As this year’s election moves into its final nine months, and as attacks on democracy widen and efforts to subvert the integrity of voting deepen, the story of what he experienced in the previous election is a reminder of how much is at stake for any American when a vote becomes something to be doubted rather than believed in. His is a story of what one vote can mean.

This article was adapted from the book “An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country” by David Finkel. It will be published February 13 by Random House, © 2024 by David Finkel. All rights reserved.

To understand more fully, it helps to go back to the 1980s, when Brent was in high school, driving around New Jersey with his friends Rich and Irene. His car then was an old Volkswagen Beetle with no rear seat, and Rich always sat up front next to Brent, leaving Irene to squat in the back on the seat frame as Brent drove faster and faster along hilly back roads. It was a wonderful time. “Slow down!” Irene would yell every time a bump sent her flying toward the ceiling, and all of them would be laughing, and the radio would be blasting out the Howard Stern show, where the guest sometimes would be Donald Trump bragging about his wine and his steaks and his casino and, of course, sex, lots of sex, the best sex ever.

“He was a buffoon,” Brent said. “But we all knew it was a gag. We were all in on the gag.”

Twenty years later, after Trump had just been elected president in 2016, one of the thoughts Brent had as the news settled in was of his father, the man who did everything right. Always, his father had been Brent’s guide. He had been a salesman. He had gotten married and stayed married and had three children and had called Brent “Hot Rod” for some reason, which Brent really liked. It was a joyous, safe, upper-middle-class life, and through all of it his father had given Brent a vision of America that became his own. Anything was possible in this vision as long as you did the right thing, and his father had always done the right thing, right up to the end, when he was filled with cancer and hours away from dying and choking his way through one more can of Ensure in an effort to make it to another day.

His father had been sixty-two years old when he died, and now Donald Trump, a man who did everything wrong, was alive at seventy and being rewarded with the presidency. And what, Brent wondered, was the lesson there?

“My whole life I’ve been taught that people like him fail,” Brent said of Trump. “And he’s not failing.”

It wasn’t Trump’s positions on issues that bothered Brent, who regarded himself as more conservative than liberal, more Republican than Democrat, it was Trump’s behavior. His bullying. His vulgarisms. His lies. His lack of morals. Often, because it meant so much to him, Brent would think of the oath he took when he was sworn into the Army and pledged that he would “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” It was an oath of loyalty to a document rather than a pledge of fealty to a person, and it had been his guide through an Army career that had spanned four commanders in chief. Two had been Republicans and two had been Democrats, and he had willingly followed the orders of all four because as far as he was concerned they believed in supporting and defending the Constitution too. Even on the very worst days in Iraq, when the death count in his unit had climbed into double digits, he would remind himself of his oath, and his belief in it kept him going through those worst days to better days, and from better days all the way forward to the man he had become in early 2020, when the presidential campaign was underway and he had just retired from the Army.

“What a cesspool,” he said one day of what he was seeing on his Twitter feed, which he was looking at constantly, even though it riled him up.

The attacks. The viciousness, and the megaphone aspect of it, too, not only from the extreme right but also from the extreme left, which he detested just as much. Tweets that were retweeted, and liked, and disliked, and argued about, and eventually reduced to arguments of: F--- you. No, f--- you. “Everything is outrageous,” Brent said of Twitter. “Well, no. Not everything is outrageous.” But his feed made it seem so, insisting that every minor confrontation was of worldly significance. In a better world, he would have no interest in that whatsoever. He would know it was being blown out of proportion. And he did know that, but he also found himself caring, taking sides, having an opinion, becoming exasperated.

Once, he had downloaded a meditation app, hoping it would calm whatever was going on inside him. Focus on your breathing, it said, so he focused on his breathing. Focus on the tip of your nose, it said, so he focused on the tip of his nose. But then the session would end and he would be back on Twitter and thinking, “Go f--- yourself.”

The angry man — that was who he could feel himself becoming on many days because everything was fraying. That’s what it felt like.

He watched a clip of a Trump rally in Wisconsin.

“We are going to win four more years,” Trump said.

“Four more years! Four more years!” the crowd chanted.

“And then after that, we’ll go for another four …” and as the crowd cheered, Brent thought: Why are they cheering? Have these people read the Constitution? Ever?

He watched clips of windows being smashed and fires being set in downtown Atlanta after another police shooting; of Black Lives Matter demonstrators surrounding some people eating outside a restaurant in Washington, D.C., and trying to intimidate them into raising their fists in solidarity; of protesters in Portland marching along a residential street at midnight and shouting, “Wake up, motherf-----, wake up! Wake up, motherf-----, wake up!”

He went with Laura to Costco, where a worker approached a woman with a dangling mask and told her that because of the coronavirus, she needed to pull the mask up over her mouth and nose.

“I don’t like your demeanor,” the woman said.

“Sorry. It’s just the policy,” the worker said.

“Well, this is ridiculous!” the woman said, raising her voice. “How am I supposed to drink my water with a mask on?” She yanked up her mask, raised a bottle of water she was holding, poured it out over her mask and clothing, and yelled, “Is this what you want?”

It was nighttime now. It started to rain and Brent went out onto his front porch. All during his time in Iraq, he’d held on to a vision of what would be waiting for him after the war, and a porch was always part of the deal, along with his dog, a beer, and a rainstorm. Yes, it was sentimental, but to a man who had been scared sometimes and often lonesome, it had seemed a version of life worth defending.

“You okay?” Laura had once asked him during the war, when he’d come home on leave. They were living in Kansas then, and Brent had awakened to the sound of explosions. Just thunder, he’d realized, so he’d gone outside to see his first rainstorm in months. He’d watched the lightning flashes come closer. He’d felt the air turn damp. The rain, when it came down on the roof, and fell through the downspouts, and washed across his lawn, and flowed along his street, had felt cleansing, and he was hoping it would wash through him too.

“Yeah, just watching the storm,” he’d said to Laura.

He’d also gone to a coffee shop when he was home, where one of the regulars clapped him on the back and motioned to one of the other regulars. “Come on over and meet Brent Cummings,” he’d said. “He’s just back from Iraq. He’s a hero.” Brent had winced at the word, but the idea of sitting in a coffee shop, reading the paper and talking about the world with a bunch of regulars who might disagree on some things but always agreed on how good the coffee was, appealed to him in its civility, and it became part of his vision of life after the war.

If only things had worked out that way. Instead, he was reading another tweet from the president of the United States: “Don’t buy GOODYEAR TIRES — They announced a BAN ON MAGA HATS. Get better tires for far less!”

Brent called an old college friend of his named Dan and asked if he had seen the tweet.

“What’s the big deal?” Dan said. “So what?”

“The problem is you have the president of the United States injecting himself into private company business and affecting the stockholders’ share value by tweeting about it,” Brent said.

“We don’t want to affect the rich White people!” Dan said.

“But it hurts the workers, and it hurts their pension plan, the blue-collar pension plan workers of Goodyear,” Brent said.

“Look, I’m with you,” Dan said. “I’m with you.”

“So why would you vote for him?”

“Because I don’t trust Biden,” Dan said.

“But you trust Trump?” Brent said.

“Hang on. I’m getting a call,” Dan said. “I’ll call you back.”

Dan hung up. Brent was pretty sure he wouldn’t be calling back.

Breathe.

Tip of nose.

He called one of his old soldiers.

“Hey, man, how are you? It’s Brent.”

“Hey, sir,” the soldier said.

“A little thunderstorm going on here,” Brent said in case the soldier was hearing explosions.

It was a big thunderstorm, but Brent stayed on the porch anyway. The soldier wanted to know what life was like after the Army, and they talked about the meaning of what they had done. “Hey, sir. Thanks,” the soldier said at the end of the conversation. “Be safe, man,” Brent said, and ten minutes later, he was still on the porch listening to the rain. It was turning into one of those nights. He didn’t want to go to sleep because a dream he had sometimes would be waiting, and the reason it would be waiting was because he was thinking now about what all of them had been through, including the day he almost died under the fuel truck. The day he almost died when he was waiting for his laundry. The day he almost died in the mortar attack that blew out his window. The day he almost died in the rocket attack that decapitated a contractor. The day he almost died in another rocket attack, when the chaplain was in the midst of giving him a haircut. The day he almost died when a roadside bomb exploded just after his Humvee had passed where the bomb had been buried. The day he almost died, which had been every day. Fourteen months in Iraq and twenty-eight years in the Army, all in the name of defending democracy, and now he wasn’t defending it, he was in it, just in time to feel it unravel.

***

“Here to vote?” a poll worker asked Brent on Election Day.

“Yes sir,” Brent answered that day, and now it was six months later, May 31, 2021, Memorial Day.

Awake before sunrise, Brent got dressed, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, and took a quick look at himself in the mirror.

“Are you okay?” Laura asked him.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” was what he wanted to say.

“Yeah,” was what he did say.

He kissed her, loaded his dog Finn into his truck, loaded in one of his shotguns, drove out of his neighborhood, and headed west.

It was a day that had gotten increasingly mournful for him in the years since Iraq. He supposed he should go to a public ceremony of some kind, or a military cemetery, but instead he got a cup of coffee and kept driving until he was in a part of Georgia that was deep in the heart of Donald Trump territory. There were still Trump signs in yards and nailed to trees, and he guessed they would be there forever.

It wasn’t lost on him that one of the things he despised about Trump was his lack of empathy, and here he was, incapable of anything kinder. But every day since Election Day had done that to him, including Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump had addressed a crowd that included people with knives, bats, chemical spray, brass knuckles, Tasers, zip-ties, the makings of a gallows, batons, and Trump flags on poles they soon would be smashing in to police officers trying to keep them out of the Capitol.

“So,” Trump said, “let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” and as the crowd began to move, and Brent watched on TV, it occurred to him that his war wasn’t over. It was just that it was here now, not there, and the enemy was no longer them. It was becoming the American next door.

Rage over what was happening felt like it was everywhere. In Brent, too. The accusations about voter fraud. The lying. The relentlessness of it. The shamelessness of it. Since Election Day, when he had walked out of the voting booth with the belief that his vote would matter, and then had watched helplessly as people tried to warp his vote, to undermine it and turn it into something worthless, a growing sense of outrage had been building in him, and Trump’s behavior on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, had cemented it in. “It’s going to happen” was how he had started that final day of Trump’s presidency, and then, giving in to the uncertainties Trump had created, he’d amended that. “Is it going to happen?”

With less than four hours to go until noon, when the Twentieth Amendment dictates a new presidential term begins, he was still wondering as he’d watched Trump get on Marine One and fly away from a city where, because of him, there were twenty-five thousand National Guard troops to help keep peace. He had listened, nodding, to what was being said on TV: “Reprehensible” … “Grievances and lies” … “He is leaving in disgrace.” He had watched as Trump, after landing at Joint Base Andrews, spoke his final words as president, “So have a good life, we will see you soon, thank you, thank you very much,” and the fact that Trump then got on a plane to fly away, rather than attend the inauguration, was what had gotten to Brent most of all. It was the final act of a coward. “Good riddance,” he had said as Trump waved and boarded Air Force One, and at 11:59 a.m., unable to sit for another moment, standing now, leaning forward, eyes glued to the TV, willing it to happen, he’d said, “One minute, one minute,” and then it was noon and President Biden was saying, “We must meet this moment as the United States of America,” and Brent was turning away from the TV to Laura. “Wow,” he had said, and then had said quieter, to himself, not so much about Biden but about the country, “Good wins.”

Four months later, the sun was up now. He had always loved being outside in this light, the first light, when the feeling of a day’s promise was at its purest, and he wanted to take it fully in. The morning was still chilly. The windows were up. He turned on the radio. He kept driving, though towns and pine stands. His thoughts at that point were still drifting. His mood at that point was contentment.

An hour or so after leaving home, he reached the base of Garland Mountain and began driving up. At the top was a sporting-clays facility where he could practice his shooting, and on this Memorial Day, that was where he wanted to be. Just him, by himself, and his Beretta 694 shotgun, and whatever thoughts came to mind.

The facility wasn’t open yet when he got there, but someone was at the desk, and he was able to sign in and say he wanted to shoot one hundred rounds. He was hungry, but the restaurant wasn’t open yet either. A waitress, early for her shift, brought him a cup of coffee, and he sat by himself at a table, listening to the conversations as a few more people came in.

“Beautiful day.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Absolutely beautiful.”

And it was. It was absolutely beautiful.

Here came the waitress again to take his order, and here came his pancakes, and here came his bacon, and here came three more customers, a man about his age, his son, probably, and his father, probably, and here came thoughts of his own father and his first tears of the day.

He was glad he was sitting by himself and that no one could see him.

He wiped his eyes. He pulled himself together. He finished his pancakes.

Here came the waitress, looking over her shoulder for some reason as she approached, and saying very quietly to him, “Are you a veteran?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I am.”

She had already placed his check on the table, and now she picked it up, began walking away, turned back, and pointed at him.

“I want to make sure I give you a discount,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, and after she was out of sight, he began laughing.

This was what those fourteen soldiers in his unit had died for?

A ten percent discount?

His thoughts were no longer drifting.

“Thank you,” he said when she came back, and he paid the bill and then went outside into the beautiful day.

His first shot couldn’t have been better. He hit the flying clay dead on. His second shot was just as true, and his third. A great shot anyway, he was really on his game today. A fourth shot.

Perfect.

A fifth.

And on it went until feelings of guilt began creeping in and he began missing.

It was guilt over the pleasure he was feeling.

“Look, man, it’s not your fault,” he told himself.

Over being alive on a beautiful day.

“Shoot the clay.”

So he shot the clay, hitting some and missing some, and more thoughts kept coming at him, as he’d known they would since he awakened. The dead, the injured, all of them, even himself – and for what? What were their sacrifices for? Was it all so someone could come along a decade later and get elected president and try to divide the United States into a broken country that would produce even more people ruined by war?

“Enjoy the view,” he told himself, and he tried, but it was too late.

He was in his truck now, crying. For thirteen years, he had been trying every day to recover from the man he had become in war to the man he wanted to be in peace, and where had he gotten in that effort? He wasn’t a better man, not yet, only a man who still wanted to be better and suddenly wished to be home. He stopped crying. He hit the gas. He headed east. It took him an hour, but then he was pulling up to his house, and this time when Laura asked, “Are you okay?” his answer was, “I’m good.”

In fracturing America, he grilled some hamburgers, drank a beer, sat for a while on his porch, and headed to bed that night, hoping.