The Poughkeepsie Retiree with Trump’s Phone Number

Richard Rhoades is a seventy-six-year-old retired respiratory therapist and E.M.T. who lives with his wife in Poughkeepsie. Lately he’s been laid up with a broken back—“I can’t even lift my toothbrush right now,” he said by phone the other day—and he suffers from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a result of his time as a marine in Vietnam. “I go to the shrink,” he said. “We talk about why I swear like a sailor and destroy stuff. If I’ve got a baseball bat or a pitchfork when I’m mad, I’ll throw that at you! My neighbors, they don’t bother me.”