Czech-American businessman Kutek on why he backs Republicans

A Czech-American entrepreneur named Kutek, who lives in Illinois, told Novinky why he supports the Republicans. “I voted for Donald Trump twice and I’m not ashamed of it,” he says, aware that his view may be unpopular today. His wife, Irina, is originally from Ukraine.

He says he was drawn into state politics for pragmatic reasons: once you have built something, you start to wonder where your taxes go. In Kutek’s view, the Illinois bureaucracy, run by Democrats for decades, is bloated and inefficient. He also dislikes some of the taxes – property tax in the state, for instance, is among the highest in the US. “The Republicans I’ve talked to here have common sense,” he explains.

From cinema cleaner to company owner

At first glance, his story reads like an advertisement for the American dream. When he arrived in the US in the late 1990s, he did not know a word of English and worked part-time as a cinema cleaner. Today he owns a thriving company that imports disposable work supplies from factories in Asia and distributes them across the country. The path was not a straight one, though: by his account, in the 2008 financial crisis he lost everything he had built in construction and had to start over.

Kutek now lives in a quiet neighbourhood on the outskirts of Chicago. Like the US president, he sees the high level of violent crime in some parts of the city as a major problem, although, as the author notes, statistics show it has been falling in recent years. “I’m afraid for my daughters. I don’t let them travel around the city by train, bus or the L,” he says. Like many Republicans, he is convinced that in some Democrat-run states many illegal migrants vote.

What he thinks about Ukraine and Russian diesel

On Ukraine, he partly shares Trump’s position: in his view, nothing will change as long as Zelensky remains there, and Ukrainians should choose someone new who is willing to negotiate. At the same time, he understands their intransigence. After the Russian invasion began, he himself organised a difficult trip to bring his wife’s mother and two children from Europe to the US.

He takes a pragmatic view of Trump’s recent deal on Russian diesel supplies, with an eye on the upcoming US elections. “Global oil stocks have dropped sharply, and we have elections now. It’s simply a matter of making sure farmers in America and everyone else in the world have diesel and that prices don’t climb too high,” he says.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz