She stuck out among the thousands of retirees, lawyers, and CEOs on the Federal Election Commission form. A self-employed “TV PERSONALITY BAIL BONDSMAN/BOUNTY,” she had gifted Donald Trump with $2,700 on Sept. 4, 2015.Her name is Alice Chapman, but you may know her as Beth Chapman, or “Mrs. Dog.” She is the wife of Duane “Dog” Chapman, the mulleted star of A&E’s Dog the Bounty Hunter for six years beginning in 2004, during which time they chased down criminals and in the process, sprinted their way into the realm of cult reality TV celebrity from their home in Hawaii.This being America, Chapman is now one of the few thousand people who is helping to fund Donald Trump’s allegedly self-funded presidential campaign.“He’s just no pussy,” Chapman told me. “I’m sorry to use that word, but that’s the fact, he’s not a pussy. When he says something, he means it.”Chapman’s not a pussy either. She’s a little like Trump herself, albeit blonder, tanner, louder, and smarter. But she’ll call you “honey” in a voice that belongs to an America—far away from Trump Tower, populated by real people with real problems who look for answers in the wrong places, sometimes, or in religion—that the candidate is just getting acquainted with now, as he travels the country trying to secure the Republican nomination.But it’s being “a person who works in the streets every day of my life,” as Chapman puts it, that makes her want Trump in charge, even if the candidate’s feet have hardly touched anything but marble and only the classiest carpets for the majority of his four decades as a famously wealthy real estate tycoon.Chapman believes it’s Trump and Trump alone who will be a “law and order guy” in the White House. In Chapman’s view, “the criminals are winning and I think there has to be somebody where, if he’s gonna say ‘no,’ he’s gonna mean it.”Chapman, like a lot of Americans—and all Trump supporters—is concerned that the country is spiraling out of control, and that our open and unprotected borders are a bigger security risk than our leaders will admit. And what she hates almost as much as that—maybe more, it was hard to tell—is all of this criminal justice reform bullshit about being kind to criminals if they’re drug addicts, being spouted by the likes of Chris Christie and Rand Paul. No, that’s pussy stuff.Trump is the guy who will do something about American crime, Chapman said, even if “I don’t agree with his whole ‘no Muslims whatsoever.’”But she does agree that something needs to be done by way of limiting entrance into the United States, at least temporarily. “Until we understand who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy, we have to shut it down,” she said. “I don’t agree with a full shutdown, but I do agree with some type of shutdown somewhere.”Chapman said she met Trump in 2000 in Denver, at an even put on by the motivational speaker Tony Robbins. She and The Donald only spoke briefly, during a meet and greet, but he left a lasting impression.Chapman, who said she went from “welfare mom” once incarcerated for failing to return a VHS player on time to being the sort of person with thousands of dollars to give to a politician, takes success seriously.“You know, it takes an exceptional kind of person to make it to the top, all right?” she said. The fact that Trump had faced hardships in business and overcome them was even more exceptional. “That deserves admiration, because that’s a person who, you know, they can persevere, they can push through, they are a winner at adversity. That’s the kind of person I want to get behind.”Trump repeatedly asked Dog to be on The Apprentice, she said, but Dog was too busy fighting bad guys.It’s not much of a surprise that someone whose job is to do what the government can’t would support an anti-establishment candidate. Chapman described herself as a “staunch Republican,” but she confessed that, in May of this year, she donated $1,500 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, in an effort to support another strong woman like herself.Trump’s inartful if not downright misogynistic statements about women—among them that Fox News’s Megyn Kelly was hard on him because she had her period—bother Chapman, she said, especially because “Rosie O’Donnell is a very, very dear friend of mine who he has a love-hate relationship with.” (Trump has called O’Donnell, among other things, a pig and a degenerate, a word he also applies to ISIS, the terrorist organization.)But even so, Chapman said, “I gotta look past all that. I just have to look past that. He knows those things were inappropriate. I think he’s getting better day by day, realizing he can’t just say those things.”Clinton might have Katy Perry and Ricky Martin, but Trump has the reality star vote all locked up.Two of his central campaign surrogates are former Apprentice contestants: Katrina Campins and Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, both from Season 1. Campins can frequently be seen on CNN, defending The Donald, while Stallworth has attempted to help Trump branch out to black voters, standing with him in Trump Tower two weeks ago as he met with pastors, although, in September, Stallworth told me she didn’t know if she’d vote for her one-time boss, because votes are serious things.Additionally, Trump has the endorsement of Gary Busey, the actor-turned-famous eccentric whom Trump cast on Celebrity Apprentice. He recently appeared on Dancing With the Stars.Like The Donald or, perhaps, any person who can become famous just for being themselves, Chapman is an imposing force.Toward the end of our conversation, it sounded like she had suggested President Obama wasn’t really from America—something Trump spent years trying to prove, once even claiming to have sent private investigators to Hawaii to gather evidence.I asked Chapman to clarify what she meant. “Uh, I know that he went to Punahou [High School], but I don’t think his stay in Hawaii was very long,” she told me.She said she thought he was from America, because “I have no evidence to prove anything different.”She knows a guy, a police commissioner, who knew Obama in high school and still plays basketball with him when he visits, “So I know he’s got friends here from Punahou from his high school years, but before that, you know, it’s a little sketchy.”
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