When Harley Walker put up the first Trump sign on his front lawn in 2020, the neighborhood rejected it like a bad organ transplant. Within days, someone approached it, ripped it out, and replaced it with a new sign.
It read, “NO WHITE HOODS IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD.”
Walker was jarred. He wasn’t a racist. He spent his career as a DJ, mixing a diverse blend of genres into his shows. He voted for Obama.
But, he wasn’t surprised. The shameless disrespect, the constant assumptions – after all, this was why he’d left the Democratic party in the first place.
That night, he ordered 50 more Trump signs. When they came, he strung them up throughout the neighborhood: intersections, telephone poles, and on the surrounding streets.
“I think they got the message not to mess with my signs again,” Walker said.
***
Walker lives in Durham, one of the most Democratic counties in the state, and his particular neighborhood – the 36th precinct – is among the most Democratic in Durham. Less than a fifth of Precinct 36 voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Walker is a red dot in a blue sea.
In some ways, he blends in with the rest of Durham. He’s 61 years old with a slight southern drawl and an eager smile. He lives just off of Martin Luther King Parkway. He’s gay.
But on his street, a wide leafy road with big lots and ranch-style homes, he stands out. It’s not just the many crimson “Catholics for Trump” signs that shout his choice to a neighborhood of Harris supporters, or the full-size American and Trump flags that flap in the wind on his flag pole. His neighbor, Mercy, lives across the street. She’s Black. She points to the other homes around him. “They’re Black, they’re Black, they’re immigrants,” she said.
“He’s surrounded by minorities.”
***
Walker grew up steeped in the conservative values of Roanoke, Virginia. He felt his family members’ Republican politics were too judgmental — so he became a Democrat in spite of them.
Plus, there was the gay thing — in the 1970s, Republicans were far less tolerant of homosexuality than they are today. That was a dealbreaker.
Still, he was a proud Southerner. His great-great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy. Walker says that when he was growing up, he didn’t know anything about the racial tensions involved — he just knew this flag was part of his family history.
In middle school, he volunteered to be the flag boy, in charge of flying and folding the American flag. He still remembers the precise technique — “13 folds for the 13 colonies!”
Walker moved from Virginia to Durham in 1989 to work as a DJ at the famous queer nightclub, the Power Company. He spent his free time going to raves and befriending an eccentric mix of music producers. He posed for the cover of his mixtape, “Have Harley, Will Travel,” in a skimpy leather getup, chaps and all. He belonged to the counterculture.
After he left that job, he worked in retail and is now retired.
Today, he spends his days operating model trains, maintaining his 6,000+ record collection and keeping up with the news on social media or Newsmax, a conservative website/TV channel that pushed, and later retracted, conspiracy theories about Trump winning the 2020 election. He visits his mom down in Florida for a week each month. He lives alone.
His house is a museum of his diverse interests. On one wall is a shrine to Jesus with a nativity scene lined with multicolored lava lamps. His miniature Christmas tree (up year-round) is covered in Confederate flags and LED lights that blink to the beat of his music.
Walker, a jolly man with a fuzzy white beard, wears a baseball cap on his head and a handgun on his hip. He did not want to be photographed for this story.
***
His drift to the political right began with a series of grievances.
He says he was fired from the nightclub because of complaints about his wide-ranging music choices by his boss and a drag queen, an incident that he resents to this day.
When liberals cry for LGBTQ+ rights, he thinks back to this moment. “I don’t want to be grouped in with all the other letters,” Walker said. “I’m just a G.”
He also thinks race is invoked too often these days. As evidence, he cites an incident when he worked at a local store and a Black woman called him a racist for not accepting a used item for return. He’d seen real racism, he thought, and this wasn’t it.
He’d fled a political party because it was too quick to judge before. Now, he was being pushed in the opposite direction for the same reason. And he felt being gay wasn’t a barrier to conservatism anymore: “All the bigots died,” he explained.
***
Mercy, who asked that her last name not be used, lives across from Walker with her husband, Thomas, and their 5-year-old daughter. The couple is in their thirties, and they work for a corporate event company Mercy founded. Their house sits at the end of a long, tree-lined driveway — a contrast to Walker’s bold streetside display.
Mercy met Walker at a neighbor’s housewarming party. He was, by all measures, lovely.
But when, a few months later, she says she caught sight of a Confederate flag outside his house, his charm didn’t matter anymore.
“You can be the funniest and most personable guy ever,” she said. “But when you choose to draw that line in the sand, even when you know the names and faces of all the people around you, that tells me all I need to know.”
She doesn’t argue with him, and neither does the rest of the block, she said. But their silence is merely sufferance.
“There’s a lot that goes unsaid but is deeply felt,” she said.
She feels it when she sees the non-white workers he hires to do his yard and electrical work, toiling beneath his high-flying flags. She feels it when she sees her neighbors’ children in their front yard, playing alongside his field of Trump signs.
Mercy is from D.C. At first, her city-girl instinct was to say something. But Thomas, a lifelong Southerner, kept her calm. To him, it’s better to keep his head down and mind his business. You don’t grow up Black in the South without learning to pick your battles.
After 12 years in North Carolina, Mercy agrees. She recognizes that Walker is set in his ways.
“The older the tree, the harder it is to bend.”
***
Walker says he voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, but started to sour on the Democrat during his second term. He cites various transgressions: Obama saying that Cambridge police officers acted “stupidly,” Michelle Obama reportedly scoffing at the meticulous manner with which the American flag is treated. “That was huge for me,” he said. (However, it’s not clear that incident really occurred. A Google search of “Michelle Obama American Flag” and other variations produced nothing.) Walker was also disturbed by Obama’s pastor saying “God damn America” in church.
It’s hard for a proud American like Walker to ignore it when those kinds of stories keep cropping up. What kind of leader resents the country they’re supposed to represent?
For someone who says he avoids “the news” (“Too many lies!”), Walker is up to date on current events. He scrolls on X, where he follows Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson. He listens to Trump rallies on Right Side Broadcasting Network. He frequents Joe Rogan’s podcast on Spotify. And when he turns to TV, it’s usually Newsmax. The channel relies primarily on opinion, boasting programs like “The Right Squad” and “The Gorka Reality Check.”
When Walker explains his views, he sounds like the media he consumes, relying on anecdotes difficult to verify and offbeat to consumers of mainstream news.
But whatever details sealed the deal for him, Walker sees a political left that lost respect for their country.
“I didn’t change,” he insists. “The Democratic Party changed.”
Perhaps it’s simply a matter of growing older, he acknowledges. Maybe he is a tree that’s too old to bend. In a sense, he has remained firmly planted in the values that surrounded him in Roanoke. But knowing that isn’t enough to make him sway with the winds of progressivism.
“It’s just too much.”
***
His front yard, with its signs and flags, suggests he is a zealous Trumper. But he insists he doesn’t worship the former president. “He’s not my friend,” Walker said. “The Trump supporter thing is only about 5% of who I am.”
Keeping the signs is not actually about Trump, he says — it’s about his freedom of speech. Take them down, and he’ll hit the neighborhood with 50 more.
Still, Walker thinks Trump’s path is a noble one: He’s a billionaire, he’s already been president, and he’s been the target of an assassination attempt twice. “I would retire if I were him,” Walker said.
Personal grudges initiated his shift rightward; nationwide resentment cemented it. Walker may be a rebel on the surface, but he is a loyalist at heart. Peel back the experimental music and the neighborhood spats, and you’ll find the same diligently flag-folding middle schooler he’s always been.
From Walker’s perspective, the left is burning the flag while Trump is willing to die for it. And for him, that’s what matters.
Photo at top: The American flag and a Trump flag in front of Walker’s house. Photo by Sofie Buckminster – The 9th Street Journal
