Hang on, did a Maga lout just try to kill me because he thought my car was too woke for Idaho?

When Jonathan Margolis drove into Idaho in a sports car with a Canadian number plate, he didn’t think it would make him a target for aggressive pickup trucks. Unfortunately, he may have been wrong…

Margolis and his partner were nearly driven off the road during a recent trip to the US – but why? (Jonathon Margolis)

My partner, a fan of The Handmaid’s Tale as well as half Canadian, was nervous as we approached a crossing point into the US from British Columbia, in the west of Canada. “Into Gilead we go,” she muttered as the US flag came into view. Her fear wasn’t wholly misplaced; not far into the state of Idaho, you pass a large roadside billboard proclaiming, “Welcome to TRUMP Country. LOVE GOD, GUNS, FAMILY, FREEDOM & your NEIGHBOR”.

As a foreigner watching the US unravel, you know about the fanaticism of backwoods America, but, even so, this menacing sight was quite a shock to the senses.

Despite its glorious mountains and lakes, Idaho is among the Trumpiest states, with a longstanding reputation as a hideout for Nazis, secessionists, survivalists and assorted conspiracists and tin-hatters. Even “normal” Republicans living there are trying to ban abortion for victims of rape and incest.

We were on our way in a Canadian-registered hire car to stay with some dear – and very liberal – American friends who have a generations-old family holiday home on a lake not far south of the border.

Our first meetings with the locals on the drive to our friends’ place were reassuringly friendly. The people in the isolated garage where we stopped for petrol couldn’t have been more relaxed and welcoming, although they were surprised to see a car from Canada. Almost no one crosses the border in either direction these days, since Trump laid claim to Canada as the 51st state.

Later, a kindly man at a supermarket checkout, hearing our British accents, told us how he is distantly related to Shakespeare. And so we were lulled into thinking the dear old US of A was still its old self, even out here in Maga territory.

A few days later, however, that reassuring view changed. It was a sunny Friday morning. We’d just had coffee in the local town and had cheerfully bought some cowboy hats in a store for actual cowboys, when things turned distinctly darker. We became victims of what I now believe was a Maga-lout-fuelled road-rage murder attempt.

We were driving alongside the glistening, blue lake at 60mph on what we would call a B-road. I was at the wheel. To our right was an unprotected embankment with a 20 metre or so drop down to the lake below.

Coming towards us, we saw a cluster of white pickups. At around 200m in front of us, one of the rear two vehicles pulled across the solid double yellow lines as if to overtake illegally. Seeing us, instead of steering back into the space he’d vacated as you’d expect, the driver held course and seemed to accelerate.

To our horror, he – and I’m sure it was a he without having registered a face – appeared to be barrelling head-on towards us. There was no front number plate on the pickup and I knew I had to take evasive action immediately, but there was no convenient verge to swerve into, just the sheer drop. If I crossed the road to avoid the oncoming pickup, I would crash into the other two still on their side of the road.

The BMW two-door sports coupe that appears to have upset a Maga fanatic (Jonathon Margolis)

A head-on collision, almost certainly fatal to us, seemed a certainty. In the passing microseconds, I wondered if the driver coming toward us was having a heart attack. Sarah Jane and I both registered the inevitability of us dying in a second or less.

But the pickup just kept on coming. The driver deviated not an inch. But some 10m from us, I saw a possible way out – a wide sightseeing layby came into view. We might just avoid the oncoming lunatic and make it to safety with only a glancing sideswipe collision.

Somehow, I steered into the layby and scraped to a halt just short of the edge. I think I saw the pickup smoothly rejoin his group on the road, but I am not sure. He certainly didn’t crash as he would have done if he’d had had some kind of medical problem. And neither of the other guys in the white pickups who would have seen the whole thing stopped to check if we were OK.

Sarah Jane and I just sat staring at each other. Shocked to our core, we quietly discussed the possibilities of what had happened. Was he merely distracted? Drunk, stoned, dying? Or was it a deliberate attempt on our lives?

Having gone over it over and over again, I believe we’ve exhausted the possibilities, and the sinister scenario is, depressingly, the most plausible. The car we were in was, I believe, the most significant factor. It was a BMW two-door sports coupe. We hadn’t requested anything so fancy – the rental company up in Calgary had given it to us when they couldn’t find the Fiesta we booked.

But the sleek, black BMW with those characteristic BC license plates stood out in these rural parts. The overwhelming majority of vehicles in northern Idaho are brontosaurus-sized trucks of some variety, usually white and always, always of a US brand. There are simply no foreign cars.

Idaho is among the Trumpiest states, with a longstanding reputation as a hideout for Nazis, assorted conspiracists and tin-hatters (Jonathon Margolis)

Another thing about pickups in Idaho is that a lot are driven without a front licence plate. Refusing to carry a front plate is, in rural Idahoan culture, and especially among younger men, a subtle sign of a “don’t tread on me” or libertarian ethos. It’s not legal, but the fines are light and rarely enforced.

But could the driver who ran us off the road just be drunk or stoned? Well, 11 in the morning is rather early to be hammered. And stoned drivers tend to be ultra-cautious, not reckless. Maybe he had simply been distracted by a phone call, a dog or a child? But, if so, he would have surely taken some evasive action. Many people may have experienced a driver briefly swerving into their lane in a way they might if distracted. But usually they immediately correct.

Was the Idaho incident merely careless driving? Maybe, yet in its way, what the driver did was rather skilful. I think it’s probable he knew there was a layby coming up for me to swerve into, so he could give the foreigners an almighty scare, but avoid murdering them and hurting himself in an accident. Maybe he’d done the same there before?

He thought it might be fun to show off to his buddies in the other pickups by playing a high-stakes game of chicken with a tourist from the liberal world

Could it have been a suicide attempt, with the intention of disguising it as a crash? Yes, but why pick on the lowest down, most vulnerable-looking car for miles around to smash into? Driving into a massive truck would do the job better.

After discussing it endlessly with each other and with American friends and acquaintances, we are almost sure now that the perpetrator was some kind of Maga maniac incensed by our distinctive British Columbia number plates, and possibly by the kind of car we had.

The key thing for me supporting the malicious attempt on our lives theory is the element of coincidence. Of all the cars in Idaho, the one that this person, by design or accident, almost eliminated was a Canadian-registered, £40,000 BMW coupe. How likely is that?

Plus, I have discovered that the particular BMW we had is listed by a website called gaycarboys.com as, if you can imagine such a thing, a gay car. There’s something else. I was wearing an extravagantly floral shirt I love. So, bonkers as it sounds, I think it’s entirely possible that this driver got a glimpse of that shirt and decided I was gay – completing a trilogy of wrong for him – Canadian, rich and not at all like a real Idahoan.

And with all that, he thought it might be fun to show off to his buddies in the other pickups by playing a high-stakes game of chicken with a tourist from the liberal outside world.

Here’s something else that I think supports my theory. There is evidence on social media of there being people, hyped up by the new political norm, seeing red on encountering anyone identifiable as being from outside Idaho.

A pro-Trump truck drives down a street in Maryland (Getty)

Locals to our holiday spot admitted that driving merely on California plates, with their implicit liberality, can now be sufficient to get honked at and given the finger. There’s even a Facebook group on which Idahoans and visitors relate incidents of being run off the road for appearing to be from out of state.

One poster to the group, when they rented a car that happened to have California plates, felt obliged after parking at a Walmart, to write a note pinned to their windscreen proclaiming: “I am a local. This is a rental. Trump 2024”.

An article on a local news website in May posed the question, “Is road rage taking over Idaho?” “The usual suspects are those who drive large SUVs and pickup trucks,” the piece observes. And just the day before our near-collision, another news source ran a story headlined, “There’s growing mayhem on Idaho roads,” flagging up a 22 per cent increase in the state’s road deaths in a year.

Neither story attributes the rise to xenophobia, I have to admit, but it feels too much like a coincidence. And, forgive me if this sounds a little too Netflix: had we been killed, might the locals have closed ranks? As it is, we didn’t bother to tell the police – even if we’d had dashcam footage, it would not have been very useful, seeing as there was no front licence plate on the pickup. Plus, we had no witnesses.

You could see how any accident could be played – that it was a dumb Brit used to driving on the left? Just another rich idiot who shouldn’t have been driving in the States at all, let alone in a powerful sports coupe.