On a Friday afternoon in March, 2013, a sheriff’s sergeant named Jody Hoagland noticed a red Nissan pickup truck drifting off a road. Hoagland was two hours into his shift patrolling Liberty County, Florida, eight hundred square miles of the state’s Panhandle. He had just come from a small shed fire, and was driving through the Apalachicola National Forest, which carpets the southern half of the county in longleaf pines. Two-lane roads meander past grazing cows, Baptist churches (“Good News: Jesus Loves You”), Confederate flags, and roadside stands peddling stink bait. Signs of humankind vanish, save for the solitary roadside mailbox. You live here because you want to be left alone.
Hoagland signalled the truck to pull over. A scruffy bearded man was driving and a blond woman was in the passenger seat. A silver .357 revolver lay between them. Two Chihuahuas barked excitedly. Hoagland asked the man, whose name was Floyd Parrish, to get out of the truck, and noticed a bulge in his right jeans pocket—a Titan .25-calibre handgun, it turned out, with one round in the chamber and the safety off. Parrish didn’t have a permit to carry a concealed weapon. It was easy to get one—all you had to do was take a class and pay a fee. Hoagland arrested Parrish and drove him to the county jail. Not long afterward, the sheriff, Nick Finch, called.
Finch had been Liberty’s sheriff for less than three months. He first decided to run for the job during a garage sale, after a customer locked her keys in her car and Finch called the sheriff’s office for help. There was only one deputy on the road, he was told, and the deputy was tied up in a funeral procession. Finch, who was raised on a farm in Iowa, had spent close to two decades in the Army and in the Air Force Reserve, so he was fluent in the language of God and country. White-haired and blue-eyed, with a meaty build, he was appealing to voters, and was helped by the fact that his wife’s family had lived in the area for generations.
Liberty County, with eighty-seven hundred residents, is the state’s second least populous. It is whiter, poorer, and less well educated than Florida as a whole. Timber has long been the chief industry, though the federal government has slowed logging in recent decades to protect the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. One local told me, “The saying goes, ‘In Liberty County, if you run out of toilet tissue try a woodpecker.’ ” A number of side roads bear the names of residents; when I visited recently, I drove down Jimmy Lee Drive and ran into the actual Jimmy Lee. The closest thing to a community history, “The Heritage of Liberty County, Florida,” has entries on the region’s tupelo honey; homecoming queens; and worm grunting, or coaxing worms out of the earth with a wooden stake and a metal strip. Several pages are devoted to a theory that the Apalachicola River’s east bank was the original Garden of Eden.
Liberty’s sheriff and his dozen or so deputies are the only law-enforcement agents in the county. As in much of rural America, the sheriff is far more than an administrator. He’s an aspirational figure and a moral touchstone. Eddie Joe White, the current sheriff, told me, “There’s no way to define the parameters of sheriff. From one day to the next, you’re a fireman, you’re a paramedic, you’re a grief counsellor. You can’t back away from any responsibility and say it’s not your job, because, as sheriff, you are responsible for everything as it deals with humanity.”
Finch won the election on his second try, in 2012, just after his fiftieth birthday. Before taking office, he went online to research his new position. Finch is conservative, and the sites he visited argued that the sheriff, in his county, is more powerful than the President. That argument was consistent with the beliefs of Finch’s law-enforcement hero, Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who last year was convicted of defying a court order to stop the racial profiling of Latinos. “I like Joe, because Joe’s a lot like me,” Finch told me. “He doesn’t take shit from nobody. He knows what his role is, and come hell or high water, he was going to do what he thought was right.” On Facebook, Finch posted a Breitbart story, about a sheriff named Denny Peyman, headlined “Kentucky Sheriff to Obama: No Gun Control in My County.”
There are roughly three thousand sheriffs in America, in forty-seven states. Arpaio and Peyman are among the dozens aligned with the “constitutional sheriffs” movement. Another is David A. Clarke, Jr., the cowboy-hatted Wisconsin firebrand who considered joining the Department of Homeland Security. (He now works at America First Action, a pro-Trump political-action committee.) There are even more followers of constitutional policing across America among law enforcement’s rank and file. One group, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or C.S.P.O.A., claims about five thousand members.
C.S.P.O.A. members believe that the sheriff has the final say on a law’s constitutionality in his county. Every law-enforcement officer has some leeway in choosing which laws to enforce, which is why it’s rare to get a ticket for jaywalking, for example. But, under this philosophy, the supremacy clause of the Constitution, which dictates that federal law takes precedence over state law, is irrelevant. So is the Supreme Court. “They get up every morning and put their clothes on the same way you and I do,” Finch told me. “Why do those nine people get to decide what the rest of the country’s going to be like?” To the most dogmatic, there’s only one way to interpret the country’s founding documents: pro-gun, anti-immigrant, anti-regulation, anti-Washington.
Finch was on the way to Dirty Dick’s Crab House with his wife when he started getting calls about the arrest. (If you are a rural sheriff, everyone has your cell-phone number.) After speaking with Hoagland, he drove to the county jail, where Parrish, a former logger, told his version of the arrest. He and his partner, Sherry Chumney, lived in a wooden house on forty acres of land, a half mile down a dirt road, past a barricade of tangled brush and two “No Trespassing” signs. Parrish carried the .357 revolver in case he came across an unfriendly panther or bear. He carried his small gun because he had a chronic lung disease; if he felt woozy, he fired it, and Chumney rushed over with his inhaler. That afternoon, Parrish said, he had driven to his brother’s place and forgotten that the small gun was in his pocket.
Finch listened to the story, and then told him, “Fortunately for you, young man, I’m a believer in the Second Amendment.” He let Parrish go, a practice that people in Liberty call getting “unarrested.”
Since its inception, in ninth-century England—when the sheriff was called the shire reeve, or county guardian—the office has been a kind of one-man government. The first sheriffs were appointed by the king, and charged with collecting taxes, investigating deaths, and commanding the posse comitatus, a gang of locals dispatched to hunt fugitives. (In Latin, the term means “the force of the county.”) The British brought the idea with them to America, where the office took on the characteristics of its new home. In 1652, when Virginia’s royal governor told each county to choose a sheriff, Northampton County let its voters decide.
Nearly every American county still has an elected sheriff. Over time, cities established police forces, which diminished the office’s power in the densely populated Northeast. (In 2000, Connecticut eliminated the post entirely.) But in the South and in the West, where many counties are far larger than in Eastern states, the sheriff ties together isolated communities. He is Andy Taylor, from “The Andy Griffith Show,” and Little Bill Daggett, from “Unforgiven.” Southerners call him the “high sheriff.” Almost every American sheriff is a white man. He’s more likely to come from the place he serves than a police chief is, and his deputies are intimately involved in everyday life. Casey LaFrance, an associate professor at Western Illinois University who studies law enforcement, told me, “The sheriff’s the one that’s going to tell me I’m getting divorced if I don’t know it, or tell me I have eight days to leave my house.”
In most states, including Florida, the sheriff’s office is written into the state constitution. Once a sheriff is elected, he can usually be removed only by a governor or by the voters. His average tenure is twenty-four years. “Once you become the sheriff, you’re likely to remain the sheriff until you retire or die,” LaFrance said. This gives sheriffs wide latitude to shape how the law is enforced. According to research by the political scientists Mirya Holman and Emily Farris, sheriffs who believe myths about abused women—for instance, that they can easily leave their abusers—are less likely to demand the mandatory arrest of domestic-violence suspects. Similarly, sheriffs critical of immigrants are more likely to order deputies to check a driver’s immigration status during a routine traffic stop. Holman, an associate professor at Tulane University, said that many sheriffs believe, “I’m this independent man that has control over this, and no one can tell me what to do.”
The idea of a constitutional sheriff emerged in the nineteen-seventies, in California. It was first proposed by William Potter Gale, who had been an aide to General Douglas MacArthur. According to Daniel Levitas’s book, “The Terrorist Next Door,” Gale embraced a belief system called Christian Identity, and, as a self-styled minister, preached that the Constitution was a divinely inspired document intended to elevate whites above Jews and racial minorities. From his Ministry of Christ Church, outside Yosemite National Park, where he sermonized in front of a giant Confederate flag, Gale produced a newsletter, “IDENTITY,” its name reflecting his ideology and his fondness for unnecessary capitalization. In 1971, he mailed Vol. 6, No. 1, to his flock. Its featured story, written by Gale, appeared under the byline of Colonel Ben Cameron, a character in the film “The Birth of a Nation” who helps found the Ku Klux Klan. Gale railed against civil-rights laws, the income tax, the United Nations, and the showering of tax dollars on foreign allies. He believed that a conservative posse comitatus offered a solution:
Gale was writing not long after Bull Connor, the public-safety commissioner in Birmingham, Alabama, had turned dogs and fire hoses on nonviolent protesters. His innovation was to wrap his rants in constitutionalism and legalese, a tactic intended to make them sound legitimate. Michael Barkun, who has written extensively about the radical right, told me that Gale’s message was, “We know what the law really means. It’s all those lawyers who have erected a kind of apparatus of deception.”
By the early nineteen-eighties, Gale’s dogma, in the form of the Posse Comitatus movement, had taken hold in the Midwestern farm belt, which was reeling from a foreclosure crisis. A sympathizer who ran Cattle Country Broadcasting, in Dodge City, Kansas, played Gale’s screeds nightly. “The law is that your citizens—a posse—will hang an official who violated the law and the Constitution,” Gale said in the summer of 1982. “Take him to the most populated intersection of the township and at noon hang him by the neck.” Posses had formed in nearly half the country. Some convened their own “common law” grand juries and “indicted” officials for ostensibly failing to uphold their oaths of office. A few turned violent. Posse members assaulted an I.R.S. agent in Wisconsin, tried to “arrest” a cop in Idaho, and nearly provoked a shoot-out in a California tomato field.
The movement’s violent side was eventually its downfall. In 1983, authorities in North Dakota tried to arrest a Posse acolyte named Gordon Kahl, a mechanic who had violated probation in a tax-evasion case, and two U.S. marshals died in the ensuing standoff. Kahl went into hiding for four months, and then was killed in a second gun battle, in Arkansas, along with a local sheriff. Although some Posse members rebranded themselves Christian Patriots, it was too late. A few years later, Gale was convicted of mailing death threats to a judge and to I.R.S. agents. When he died, in 1988, the movement was fading from prominence. His vision of sheriff supremacy, however, persisted.
After Sheriff Finch released Floyd Parrish, Sergeant Hoagland couldn’t let the incident go. “The more I just sat there and stewed on it, steamed on it, it just ate away at me,” Hoagland told me. He had no problem with guns; he hunted gators, deer, turkeys, and squirrels. But he suspected that Finch was doing a political favor. Hoagland wasn’t the only deputy suspicious of Finch. The sheriff’s experience was mostly in the military and in state agencies, not in small-town policing. When I met Mark Mallory, a former lieutenant at the office, he handed me paperwork from four incidents that he believed Finch had mishandled. Other former deputies recalled a botched attempted arrest in which Finch told the man detained, “I’m fucking God in this county.” (Finch told me that he didn’t remember the incident, and added, “I’m a Christian, and I would never compare myself to God.”)
Hoagland started looking for another job, and two months after the Parrish incident a nearby fire department offered him full-time work. On his last day at the sheriff’s office, Hoagland called an inspector at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, a state agency that investigates misconduct by public officials. Three days later, he travelled to F.D.L.E. headquarters, in Tallahassee, for a taped interview. He told inspectors that he had kept a copy of the paperwork from Parrish’s arrest but that when Tim Partridge, another deputy, went to retrieve the jail copy it was missing. Partridge also checked the logbook for Parrish’s name, and found that someone had whited it out.
Eleven days later, a friend tipped Finch off that his arrest was imminent. Finch, who was at the sheriff’s office, went home and changed into a blue shirt and jeans so that reporters couldn’t take an arrest photo of him in uniform. When he got back to the office, F.D.L.E. officials were waiting for him. An inspector read him Executive Order 13-140, in which Rick Scott, the Republican governor, suspended him from office. “I thought, This is crazy. I haven’t done anything wrong,” Finch told me. The headline in the Calhoun-Liberty Journal read “Sheriff Arrested for Official Misconduct.” In the next issue, the paper listed him in the police blotter alongside men arrested on suspicion of domestic battery and armed robbery.
Shortly after the arrest, Finch got a phone call from Richard Mack, who had followed news of the arrest from his Arizona home. Mack said that he was the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. In Finch, he saw a fellow-patriot, and he wanted to help.
One day last fall, Mack bounded to the front of a school lecture hall in suburban Phoenix. At sixty-four, he has dark hair and a grandfatherly charm. The night before, I’d met him at a mall where, for exercise, he likes to ascend the descending escalators. This morning, he was proselytizing to about three dozen people at his group’s Oath of Office Training, one of several workshops that it puts on across the country each year.
The workshop was held in a white room draped with six American flags and a canary-yellow Gadsden flag, reading “DON’T TREAD ON ME,” which was a mainstay of Trump and Tea Party rallies. “We have a moral responsibility to obey just laws, and we have a moral responsibility not to obey unjust laws,” Mack told the audience of mostly older white men, echoing Martin Luther King, Jr. “Who decides? The person who takes the oath decides.” There were murmurs of approval.
The crowd was a cross-section of today’s anti-government right: a retired male cop fed up with “Antifa nonsense,” a retired female cop concerned about “the jihadi threat,” an elderly couple afraid of “the conspiracy to put us into world governance.” Another man told me that the world is controlled by the Vatican, the District of Columbia, and the Queen of England, then handed me seven stapled pieces of paper and promised, “It’s gonna make your eyes fall out of your head.” It was an indictment issued by a common-law grand jury, one of William Potter Gale’s innovations.
In the eighties and nineties, Mack served two terms as the sheriff of Graham County, Arizona. One of his influences was the Salt Lake City police chief and author W. Cleon Skousen, who believed that the Founders were God’s disciples and the Constitution a Christian document. As a young officer, Mack had attended one of Skousen’s workshops. “That man spoke with the power of angels,” he told me.
In 1994, Mack and a Montana sheriff named Jay Printz sued the federal government over a provision of the Brady Bill, a gun-control measure that would have temporarily required sheriffs to run background checks on gun buyers. As the case worked its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Mack became a hero of the burgeoning militia movement, a collection of anti-government paramilitary groups that descended from Posse ideology. His status was bolstered after the Court ruled in the sheriffs’ favor, in Printz v. United States, in 1997. Each person at the Arizona workshop received a booklet dissecting the case, which, on the cover, had been renamed “Mack/Printz v. USA.”
As the decade wore on, the militia movement lost momentum, and Mack’s speaking gigs dried up. He worked as the public-relations director of Gun Owners of America, the N.R.A.’s more strident cousin. He also sold cars, ran for the U.S. Senate as a Libertarian, and was a contestant on the sole season of the Showtime reality series “American Candidate.” Disgruntlement with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and the dismal economy of the late aughts, helped revive anti-government fervor, and, along with it, Mack’s influence. In 2009, he self-published “The County Sheriff: America’s Last Hope,” a fifty-page manifesto with a sheriff’s star on the front and an endorsement from Arpaio on the back. “There is a man who can stop the abuse, end the tyranny, and restore the Constitution, once again, as the supreme law of the land,” he writes. “Yes, it is you SHERIFF!” Mack said that he sold a hundred thousand copies of the book.
By this time, sheriff supremacy had cross-pollinated with other kinds of right-wing thought, resulting, for example, in the county-supremacy movement, in which dozens of counties adopted ordinances claiming control over federal land. Each repackaging of the idea helped to slightly shift the broader public’s perception of what constitutes normal governance. This is how fringe ideas work. In a recent study published in the journal Political Behavior, participants were given a list of ways to address a divisive policy issue, such as immigration. Participants whose lists included either radically conservative positions (ban immigrants entirely) or radically liberal positions (accept all immigrants) were more likely to recalibrate their view of what the centrist stance was. Matthew N. Lyons, the author of the upcoming book “Insurgent Supremacists,” told me that this is how the extreme right wields power without holding office. “Their notion of political change is based on shifting the parameters of the political culture as a precondition for transforming institutions,” he said.
When Mack launched the C.S.P.O.A., around 2010, he described it as “the army to set our nation free.” He recruited supporters, in part, by playing to sheriffs’ Second Amendment ardor. (In Holman and Farris’s survey of sheriffs, ninety-five per cent said that defending gun rights was more important than restricting access to firearms.) After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, and the subsequent push in Washington for gun control, Mack published a list that eventually included almost five hundred sheriffs who, in his words, “have vowed to uphold and defend the Constitution against Obama’s unconstitutional gun control measures.” (Several sheriffs later said that Mack had added them without their knowledge.) One Tennessee sheriff told the Southern Poverty Law Center, “If you come in here trying to take up the guns, it’s not going to be a nice day for somebody.”
Mack told me that he has spoken at more than a hundred and twenty-five rallies. Many supporters were also Skousenites, because the conservative commentator Glenn Beck routinely touted Skousen’s books. At C.S.P.O.A. workshops, everyone gets a Mad Libs-style workbook based on Skousen’s “The Making of America.” Speakers emphasize the Second Amendment, the Fourth (searches and seizures), and the Tenth (states’ rights). They portray officers as arbiters of morality and justice.
Mack personally disavows discrimination and infuses his lectures with the language of the civil-rights era. He likes to say, “We should have never heard of Rosa Parks,” explaining that a constitutional sheriff wouldn’t have arrested her. Yet, according to his ideology, a sheriff could, for example, reject the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship and rights to former slaves. (Mack described such a scenario as a “hypothetical,” and said, “I don’t do hypotheticals. I deal with what’s real.”) A speaker at one C.S.P.O.A. event I attended, an attorney, encouraged us to memorize the chorus of a song he’d written:
Mack brought Finch’s case to the attention of the conservative media. Within days of Finch’s arrest, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was floating the notion on his Web site, Infowars, that the case was an example of political persecution. An Infowars contributor said that Finch had won office as a nonpartisan candidate, “which to me is probably why you had a Republican governor sic his minions on this constitutional-following sheriff, because he owes his allegiance to no one.” Soon Mack called into the Infowars talk show and raised the possibility that Finch’s suspension was the result of an attempted coup. “That’s very common, to have enemies within,” he said.
Amid the flurry of coverage, a radio host named Burnie Thompson invited Finch on his afternoon show, on Talk Radio 101. Thompson prided himself on his independent thinking. “I’m not one of these—what do they call them?—whatever, these fringe groups,” Thompson told me. “I’m a pretty mainstream guy. I’m an Air Force captain. I got a master’s in journalism.” Still, he was impressed by Finch’s certainty that he’d done nothing wrong. After the interview, he read Mack’s book about constitutional sheriffs and became a convert. During the next few months, he interviewed Finch around a dozen times, helped him raise money for his defense, and asked a listener to record a song about the case to the tune of Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” replacing “shot” with “saved.”
Thompson told me that, in a bid to get Finch’s case thrown out, he had met with Governor Scott and his general counsel, Peter Antonacci. Thompson shared a theory with them, gleaned in part from Mack’s book, that a sheriff can do whatever he wants in his own jail. Antonacci repeatedly told him that there was no legal precedent for this theory. “I’m thinking, His chief counsel believes that?” Thompson said. “You know that feeling when you go, ‘Oh, my God, the world’s not what I thought it was’?” (Neither Antonacci nor Scott’s office responded to multiple requests for comment.)
In addition to official misconduct, a third-degree felony, Finch was charged with falsifying public records, a misdemeanor. Jack Campbell, the prosecutor in the case, told me, “To me, it was always a public-records case. If you want to stop enforcing a law, O.K., I guess you can. You can fire all your deputies and just sit over there in your office all day, if that’s what you want to do.” He continued, “But you’re the sheriff: you can’t hide and not tell people what you’re doing.”
Finch’s trial started just before Halloween. By then, his Facebook page had more likes than there are residents in Liberty County, and his defense fund had raised almost fifteen thousand dollars. “Somebody even sent me money from Australia,” Finch told me. There had been three rallies in three towns, the last in front of the Liberty County courthouse. More than a hundred people, some in American-flag shirts or scarves, strung up a Gadsden flag, set out lawn chairs and coolers, and waved signs: “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty”; “Protect our Constitution”; “Nick Finch, the people’s sheriff.” One woman had strung a container of Bic Cover-it correction fluid around her neck, a nod to how Floyd Parrish’s name had vanished from the jail records.
On the day Finch testified, the mood in the Liberty courthouse was as electric as the opening night of a play. Mack had flown in from Arizona. Reporters came from Tallahassee. Finch wore a dark jacket, a blue dotted tie, and beige slacks. On his right lapel was a tiny American-flag pin.
“Sheriff Finch,” Campbell said, “do you think you’re above the law?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you think your judgment trumps everybody else’s in the court system?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Do you believe that you had the authority as a constitutional sheriff to do away with this case, on your own authority?” Campbell asked.
“Absolutely,” Finch replied.
The case against Finch was mostly circumstantial. The jailer who’d been on duty that night testified that the sheriff walked out of the building with Parrish’s file. “Now, whether it’s under his bed at the house, or it’s out in the woods, or it’s in the shredder in a burn pit, it doesn’t make a hell of a difference. It’s not where it belongs,” Campbell told the jury. No one admitted to whiting out Parrish’s name in the jail records, though investigators had a lab analyze the splotches, which proved that someone had. “The fact is,” Campbell argued, “that the sheriff told this jury that he believes that his discretion allows him to decide which laws he’s going to follow and which laws he’s not. Ladies and gentlemen, if he’s going to break the law concerning carry-and-conceal firearms, how are we to believe that he won’t break the one for perjury in this trial?”
The jury deliberated for about an hour, and found Finch not guilty on both counts. Finch hugged everyone within reach, made a few remarks to the TV scrum outside the courthouse, and then called Alex Jones, who told his audience, “He needs to be the next governor—I’m telling you right now—of Florida. It’s these type of men that stand up for the Constitution that are going to save this country.”
Finch, reinstated, sued the county for attorneys’ fees and won about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars. The rest of his term was less triumphant. He fought with county commissioners over his budget. Three female employees sued him—two alleging gender discrimination in the department and one that he had sexually harassed her. Finch settled with all three. Trump’s emergence as a Presidential front-runner was a rare bright spot for Finch, who said he was among the first sheriffs in Florida to endorse him. Finch got to meet the future President at a rally in Tampa. “You know what?” he told me. “I look at Trump and I see myself. Because this guy is getting the shit beat out of him from Day One.”
Finch ran for reëlection in 2016. His chief opponent was Eddie Joe White, who was related to three previous Liberty County sheriffs, including one who was shot and killed in the line of duty in 1919. White chose a pointed campaign slogan: “It’s time we restore the trust.” Finch’s ads touted him as “Your Constitutional Sheriff,” but he and his wife, the Liberty County native, had divorced, and he knew this would count against him. Late one night about a month and a half before the election, Floyd Parrish and an acquaintance got into an argument. According to Parrish, the man, drunk and threatening, lunged at him, and he had no choice but to shoot. The man died. A deputy called Finch in the middle of the night to relay the news. Finch told me he thought, “Jesus. I’m done. There’s the election.” He lost the sheriff’s race, earning only six per cent of the vote.
For the constitutional-sheriffs movement, however, Finch’s defeat didn’t matter. The C.S.P.O.A. named him Sheriff of the Year in 2014, and Mack mentioned the trial in his book “Are You a David?” (The government is Goliath.) The movement’s ideas have now spread far beyond a few renegade sheriffs. In Nevada, for example, members of the Bundy family have emerged as leaders of a movement to wrest control of public lands from Washington. During an armed standoff on the ranch of the family patriarch, Cliven Bundy, which drew anti-government crowds from around the country, including several constitutional sheriffs, Bundy demanded that his local sheriff disarm federal authorities. The sheriff refused. Earlier this year, after charges against Bundy related to the standoff were dismissed, Bundy said to a TV reporter, “I think we’re going to protest the county sheriff: ‘Why didn’t you do your job?’ ”
In 2015, a Nevada lawmaker introduced a bill to give sheriffs veto power over some federal law-enforcement activities. Last year, in Washington, D.C., Jason Chaffetz, at that time a U.S. representative from Utah, introduced a bill that would, in practice, transfer law-enforcement responsibilities to sheriffs on certain public lands. Soon after Trump took office, he met with representatives of the National Sheriffs’ Association, including a sheriff from Pennsylvania who had served on C.S.P.O.A.’s advisory council, and one from North Carolina who had ties to the group. That summer, Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, who is now running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona. A few years back, when Mack visited D.C. to decry the Obama Administration’s immigration measures, only three lawmakers met with him. One was Jeff Sessions, now the Attorney General. Ryan Lenz, a senior investigative reporter at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me that “the migration of these ideas to the mainstream primed the election for Trump.” Trump’s election, in turn, “finalized the migration.”
I met Finch one night in December at a McDonald’s in Blountstown, Florida. We sat at a table near the window, the restaurant wreathed for the holiday. Finch was working as a long-haul trucker and had just finished a trip to South Carolina. He wore a Harley-Davidson T-shirt and a “Thin Blue Line” baseball cap; its insignia, an American flag with a single blue stripe, honors police. He recounted his time as sheriff, and when he got to the trial he stopped and shook his head. Occasionally, he strayed into national politics, asking, “How in the hell does Hillary Clinton get to lie, cheat, steal, and probably kill, and nobody cares?” As we talked, a former deputy stopped at our table and said, “What’s going on, Sheriff?” Finch responded with a pained smile.
Finch remains a powerful symbol for constitutional sheriffs. The day after Trump’s Inauguration, under a gray, drizzling sky, I drove to an Embassy Suites near the Baltimore airport for a C.S.P.O.A. training workshop. While I waited at a table in the lobby for my packet—and my black-and-gold lanyard that said I was part of the “posse”—a group of pink pussy-hatted women passed by, on their way to the Women’s March in Washington. In a conference room, the C.S.P.O.A. audience flipped through their “Making of America” booklets. Mack wasn’t there, but, via a video monitor, he introduced Finch as a sheriff whose “strong stand for freedom” had cost him his badge. Finch stood up, put his hand over his heart, and led the room in the Pledge of Allegiance. ♦
Reporting for this piece was supported by a grant from the Reporting Award at N.Y.U.’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
