President Donald Trump’s reelection and dramatic first week back in the White House have Virgin Islands Republicans cheering — a rare state of unity for the territorial party better known for their infighting.
While Trump’s undoing of many Biden-era social and environmental policies had Democrats in the territory queasy, prominent local Republicans said Trump’s national and USVI-specific policy would be better for the Virgin Islands than the previous administration’s.
John Yob, chairman of the Republican Party in the Virgin Islands, said V.I. Republicans had appealed to Trump’s transactional nature. Other Republicans advised the territorial government and USVI representation in Washington do the same.
“President Trump appreciates his friends and loves the U.S. Virgin Islands as a result of moving up our caucus and delivering a knockout blow to Nikki Haley prior to the South Carolina Primary. He thanked the Virgin Islands over and over again on the national stage, including on victory night in South Carolina,” Yob said by email Friday.
Dr. David Weisher, a neurologist at Schneider Regional Medical Center who held an election-night party at his home with members of the House of Representatives, the Florida attorney general, and other Trump advocates, said Congressional Delegate Stacey Plaskett should stop criticizing Trump and start making friends in the administration.
“I think Plaskett, in my opinion, she’s acting like she’s part of the problem. You don’t win favors by insulting them. This is not a time to be insulting people. This is a time to be befriending people,” Weisher said. “We should be treated not as some second cousin but more as a child of the government.”
Weisher and other Republicans said their contacts within the Trump White House would draw a new emphasis on the territory’s needs. He had particular disdain for the Biden administration, which he said did little to meet the Virgin Islands’ desperate medical needs.
“Our hospitals are in dire straights right now,” Weisher said he told his election night guests. “I wanted to explain to them that we really have needs down here that are unique. We need help from a medical standpoint. Our hospital needs help. I think Medicare and Medicaid need to look at us a little bit with a more favorable light.”
Yob had no misgivings about Trump unwinding many Biden-era policies and said the next four years would bring many of the things the territory had long sought.
“There will be more tourism, better economy, lower interest rates, faster federal assistance, and more respect on the national stage with President Trump back in the White House,” he said. “President Trump has accomplished more in one week than President Biden accomplished in four years.”
Democrat leaders in the territory were far less optimistic.
Carol Burke, state chair of the Virgin Islands Democratic Party, said the reelection of Trump and the ferocity of his first week in office — in which he suspended refugee programs, curtailed medical research and muzzled scientists, pardoned Jan. 6, 2021 insurrectionists and police officers found guilty of violent crimes, changed environmental policy to allow for expanded oil drilling, withdrew from international climate accords, attempted to end birthright citizenship, took aim at immigration policy and questioned whether Native Americans were in fact U.S. citizens — had her questioning the very nature of what it means to be an American.
“I’m lost for words and I’m one that’s never lost for words,” Burke said. “What is Team America, really? Is this what you’ve been identifying as all your life only to wake up one day and feel like you’ve been living a nightmare? I have a dual duty. Number one to lead the Democratic Party locally, and number two to still be an American. And I tell you, putting my feet on the ground, I’m not feeling the solidness of the ground right now. It’s rather shaky.”
Burke thought it was deeply unlikely the Trump administration would expand Medicaid and other federally-funded health and social services in the territory. She said Biden, who frequently vacationed in St. Croix and had family that had owned property in the territory, had paid attention to the Virgin Islands’ needs.
“There was a lot of wiggle room given to the Virgin Islands under President Biden. Today, that wiggle room, for me, in my opinion, is closed. As a matter of fact, it has tightened,” Burke said.
“It is my humble, humble request to President Trump that, in order for us to at least be self-sufficient, we need a solid rock economy in the territory. We have potential. I just hope that, with a growing tourism industry and the potential to the reopening of the refinery, that none of his initiatives stand in the way of any of these things happening,” she said.
Government House had not yet commented on Trump’s actions other than to say officials were attempting to parse the onslaught of changes. Burke said it was an unenviable task to walk the thin line of appeasing the Trump administration in Washington while standing firm to their own principles at home.
Some of those principles were efforts to combat historical institutional unfairness and social stigma based on race, gender, sexual orientation, mobility, and more. Republicans in the Virgin Islands applauded Trump’s rescinding of 78 Biden-era executive orders addressing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
“Yes. Thank God,” Weisher said. “I’m definitely thrilled with it. It’s long overdue.”
Trump also revoked a 1965 executive order by President Lyndon Johnson ensuring equal opportunity for people of color, women, and immigrants in federal contractors’ recruitment, hiring, training and other employment practices. Johnson’s actions have been called the bedrock of efforts to counteract centuries of policy that disenfranchised minority groups, limiting work, housing opportunities, and the accumulation of generational wealth.
To Yob, who lives on St. John, modern expansions of civil rights protections didn’t actually help.
“It makes little sense for the U.S. Virgin Islands and its people to be lost in the fight for transgender bathrooms and other DEIA practices that have nothing to do with helping minorities in the workforce,” Yob said.
Reed Compton, owner of St. John’s perennially popular Beach Bar restaurant, has used his social media presence to celebrate the Trump presidency and disparage DEIA initiatives he calls “lunacy.” When Walmart began dismantling its diversity program in November, Compton said it was a positive move toward “meritocracy and earning your advancements.”
“My only question is why does it take so long? The only DEI we need to be promoting is discipline, excellence, and intelligence,” he wrote.
Compton, who did not respond to several requests to comment for this article, referred online to Democrats as “totalitarian Marxist dems” and appropriated the sexual-discrimination #MeToo hashtag to reveal Democrats’ powerless objections to Trump’s cabinet appointments.
In 2022, when basketball star Brittney Griner was in a Russian prison, Compton wrote “Enjoy the Gulag” and posted a photo of Griner marking herself “safe from hearing America’s national anthem.” In 2023, he posted that if a child says they consider themselves another gender, parents should say, “Well, you’re not.” In August, Compton falsely claimed in a social media post that Democrats were using the 1940s Nazi slogan “Strength through joy.”
He wrote: “They’re not even trying to hide it anymore, WAKE UP FOLKS!”
A counterpoint to Compton’s bombastic online presence was former Virgin Islands Republican Party Treasurer Todd Hecht, who said he was close with Washington insiders in Trump’s orbit.
“I just don’t want to be divisive,” Hecht said by telephone Thursday. “There’s some work going forward that is good for all of us.”
Hecht said he distrusts mass media. He claimed dishonest people at national news networks, particularly MSNBC, were secretly fundraising for political action groups, known as PACs. This serves to misinform the public against Trump, he said.
“A lot of the information they are getting is inaccurate. I would say get rid of cable TV,” Hecht said. “The people that sometimes give the news that makes you hate Donald Trump so much are also involved in Republican PACs that benefit by gaslighting people.”
Hecht said some of this misinformation came from how Trump’s policies were framed. While news that the White House was looking at scaling back the Federal Emergency Management Agency braced many in the territory, Hecht said the plan was taken out of context.
“Virgin Islanders are more than capable of using the funds themselves and not bringing in a bunch of people that take up our hotel rooms,” he said. “FEMA is a perfect example of an absolute waste of funds that make people feel good but they get no results.”
Hecht said he had firsthand knowledge of Trump being “set up” after the 2017 storms when he was filmed jovially tossing kitchen supplies at a crowded room in Puerto Rico.
“This is the exact kind of gaslighting that we get when Trump is throwing paper towels at people in Puerto Rico,” he said.
Hecht also said Trump, a convicted felon, as a force for law and order.
“I think the Trump administration is going to concentrate on helping legal immigrants, not illegal aliens. And we should concentrate on helping those in need in the Virgin Islands, not condoning illegal immigration and illegal activities. They are illegal aliens. They are not undocumented workers. We need to concentrate on Virgin Islanders not illegal aliens and if someone is here illegally they should be deported,” he said.
Like other Republicans in the territory, Hecht thought Trump would soon be solving many of the Virgin Islands’ problems.
“I think the Trump administration is eager to help the people of the Virgin Islands get food prices down, get gas prices down, to stop the crime that we are experiencing with our young Black men, to help improve the economy so that we can have jobs for Virgin Islanders — which right now a lot of our young people don’t have the opportunities that they had because of our dollar, which is inflated because of all the wars and spending. The Trump administration is very concerned about the Virgin Islands. I can guarantee you that. I’ve talked with people in the Trump administration who care deeply about the Virgin Islands, who care about the Virgin Islands people, and they are looking forward to having a good relationship with us,” he said.
Dennis Lennox, the Virgin Islands Republican Party’s executive director, did not respond to several requests for comment for this article.
Lennox penned an article in the Washington Examiner Thursday decrying the inclusion of “false religions” in a service at the National Cathedral Wednesday. The event drew national attention when the Episcopal bishop, Mariann Edgar Budde, asked Trump to show mercy on the disadvantaged.
While many Republicans chastised Budde’s audacity, Lennox said the real affront was the inclusion of non-Christian religions.
“The inappropriate end to the sermon wasn’t the real controversy. The real controversy was the inclusion of the Islamic call to prayer, the use of syncretist prayers, the denial of the Holy Trinity, and the overall universalism within the service, which until today had been an important, apolitical moment in the national life of our country,” he wrote. “Any kind of interfaith service should have been in an auditorium or other non-consecrated space with clear distinctions between Christian prayers and Christian elements of the service and prayers or worship from false religions. Instead of featuring Muslims and Buddhists or having a pagan Indian prayer, where were the Roman Catholics?”
