From an Atlanta suburb to Seattle, the hearing played out in closed captions on televisions — another familiar sport to follow, or not. At a Dunkin’ Donuts in Hiram, Georgia, the small dining area was packed, but no one was watching. At an oil-change shop, customers glanced up every now and again. A couple of employees watched for a few free minutes on a TV in the cramped waiting area — but only long enough, it seemed, to substantiate their disgust.
“It’s a bunch of BS. If it was any other president they wouldn’t be doing it,” said one employee, who said he could not give his name because of company policy.
So it went in restaurants, cafes and lounges in this Atlanta suburb, a city of about 4,000 residents in Paulding County, where Trump captured nearly 70 percent of the vote two years ago. The hearing either was not playing, or was being largely ignored.
But at a Krystal hamburger restaurant in town, Dwight Young, a retired Baptist pastor, and his wife were among the only customers glued to the television.
“He’s trying to save his own neck, you know,” Dwight Young, 88, said of Cohen, echoing a tweet Trump had issued earlier about his former personal lawyer, who was convicted of campaign finance crimes and is scheduled to begin a three-year prison sentence in May. “It’s not going to hurt. I don’t think most people believe Mr. Cohen.”
Young said that he already knew Trump was not a perfect man. But he said that he and other evangelical Christians were pleased that the president had moved the country to the right the way he had promised.
“Christians voted for him because of the stand he took. The stand on abortion. The stand on the Supreme Court judges,” he said.
Across the country, Marten King, a law student at Seattle’s University of Washington campus, caught a few minutes of the hearing as he cooked breakfast. A while later, he watched with his classmates and professor during a class on federal courts and the federal system.
For King, 26, the central question was whether Cohen’s testimony would lead anywhere.
“It’s very hard to assess — is there criminal wrongdoing here?” said King, who supported Hillary Clinton two years ago. Only a true indisputable blockbusting piece of hard evidence would move the needle, he said.
In Colorado Springs, Colorado, Louellen Welsch, 63, saw the hearing as little else than a circus put on by Democrats with an unreliable witness in the main ring.
“This guy’s already convicted for lying,” she said. “I’m fed up. I pretty much read the headlines and don’t listen to a lot of it. I’ve disengaged.”
Welsch, a conservative-leaning voter who prizes anti-abortion issues, is no fan of Trump. But she said the allegations of affairs and sexual harassment against President Bill Clinton had long ago inured her to sex scandals in politics. “I’ve sort of given up on that aspect of morality,” she said. “I wish none of it was there. But it’s all there. You have to pick who’s the best and who’s running.”
About 2,000 miles away in an office in West Palm Beach, Florida, Julio Gonzalez, a business owner and avid supporter of Trump, saw nothing to change his mind about the president. He was glued to the television and described the hearing in two words: devastating and disappointing, mostly because Gonzalez believed that Trump was an honest man.
Gonzalez, a donor to Trump’s inauguration committee, was particularly incensed by the accusation that the president is a racist. It is the kind of charge, he said, that lands hard in a nation bitterly divided, often along ethnic lines.
“The things that stick out the most, is Cohen’s statement that Trump hates blacks, how he is a racist,” said Gonzalez, 52.
“I do not believe he is a racist at all,” Gonzalez said, pointing to Trump’s push for programs to rehabilitate blighted areas and the presence of Darrell Scott, an African-American pastor and a member of Trump’s executive transition team and diversity coalition. “And I have been to his properties such as Mar-a-Lago and the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., where I have seen plenty of African-Americans on staff. He would not be hiring and appointing African-Americans if he was truly a racist.”
Gonzalez had already read articles about the hearing. He knew what to expect. Still, he said he found the process upsetting because it was a deterrent from more important issues, such as border security and economic growth.
Jason Porter, 44, a gym teacher from Durham, North Carolina, agreed.
Trump has been a decent president, he said, pointing to low unemployment and a strong economy.
“Whether you believe in the wall or not, he’s doing it,” said Porter, finishing dinner Wednesday evening at Johnny’s Barbecue in nearby Louisburg, North Carolina, where he was waiting for a basketball match.
Porter, a registered independent, said he often voted Republican in presidential elections. He said he did not vote for Trump enthusiastically, but could not face another Clinton in the White House. Besides, his former job, as an IT consultant for a large phone company, was outsourced to Manila in 2015, and Trump spoke to that. Porter said Trump was a lot like Ronald Reagan.
“Reagan was pegged for being stupid, but he had an idea of what America should be,” he said. “Trump is like that. He has a vision for what he wants.”
When asked whether he would vote for Trump if the election was happening now, Porter said it would depend on whom the Democratic candidate was. “If they run another Hillary,” he said, Trump would “get my vote all day long.”
Porter said he did not have time to watch Cohen’s testimony because he was at work. But he thought it would probably be another Washington spectacle that would not really register in the rest of the country anyway.
Late Wednesday morning, every television at Leon’s Cuts and Styles Barber Shop in Hiram, Georgia, was tuned in. Leon Holmes, 48, the owner, had begun watching it at home and demanded, when he arrived at work, that the numerous TVs all be turned from an entertainment channel to the news.
Holmes, an African-American who voted for Hillary Clinton, said he was never much of a fan of Trump, and said he thought Cohen was credible. And maybe, he said, the hearings were the beginning of something — a slide into a much more complicated phase in Washington politics.
“I think a lot of stuff’s going to pop off, and he’s going to respond, and it’s going to get crazy,” he said.
Connie LaRue Jackson, 58, a barber, agreed: “I think he’s going to get impeached.”
“I think he’s going to resign — like Nixon,” Holmes said.
“Oh, he ain’t going nowhere,” said another barber, Rashaun Blankumsee, 27, who said that everyone already knew what Trump was — a fact that he believed would dull the effect of Cohen’s testimony.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.