'People respect that'?????
Voters admit Trump is a 'crook' but reveal why he still got their vote.
Youngstown, Ohio used to be a Democratic stronghold, but it has since become one of Republicans' most reliable towns in the Buckeye State, with President-elect Donald Trump carrying it by 13 points in November.
The last time Donald Trump was president, he travelled to Youngstown, Ohio, among the most depressed of America’s rust belt cities, and promised voters the impossible.
The high-paying steel, railroad and car industry jobs that once made Youngstown a hard-living, hard-drinking blue collar boom town were coming back, he said. “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house,” he crowed to a rapturous crowd in 2017. “We’re going to fill up those factories – or rip ”em down and build brand new ones.”
None of that happened. Indeed, within 18 months, General Motors (GM) announced that it was suspending operations at its one remaining manufacturing plant outside Youngstown, throwing 5,000 jobs into jeopardy in a community with little else to cling to. Trump’s reaction was to say the closure didn’t matter, because the jobs would be replaced “in, like, two minutes”.
That, too, did not happen. People moved away, marriages broke down, depression soared and, locals say, a handful of people took their own lives.
Ordinarily, politicians who promise the moon and fail to deliver get punished at the ballot box. But that did not happen to Trump either. Instead, he has steadily built up his popularity in Youngstown, a city that was once a well-oiled Democratic party machine but has now turned into one of his most remarkable bases of working-class support.
“Does [Trump] understand at all what you’re going through?” Joe Biden asked Ohio voters during the 2020 presidential campaign, referring directly to the GM closure. “Does he see you where you are and where you want to be? Does he care?”
To which the answer, in Youngstown, has been an astonishing and vigorous “yes”.
Trump might have lost to Biden overall that year, but he became the first Republican presidential candidate in almost half a century to win in Youngstown and surrounding Mahoning County. This past November, he extended his margin there to a decisive 13 points, giving so much cover to local Republican party candidates that they won a majority of county-wide offices for the first time in 90 years.
Anyone seeking to understand the earthquake that has shaken US politics – to the point where a convicted felon, serial liar and twice-impeached former president can return to the White House in triumph, as Trump will do on 20 January – might learn a lot from the disillusioned working-class voters of northeast Ohio.
They tell blunt, profanity-laden stories of watching their city slump ever deeper into decline and express a real bleakness about the future. They see a political class corrupted by big-money donors who, they say, don’t care about communities like theirs. White voters point to conversations about justice – for racial minorities, for the children of immigrants, for women worried about losing their reproductive rights, for transgender teenagers – and question why nobody ever talks about justice for them.
Few expect Trump to fix everything or believe him when he says he will. What they do believe is that the system is broken and corrupt, just as Trump says it is, and that a candidate who promises to tear it down and start again might just be on to something.
“We just want a change, a change in the weather,” a retired aluminium worker wanting to go just by his first name, Paul, said as he sat with a group of friends in a cigarette shop in Struthers, a down-at-heel overwhelmingly white Youngstown suburb once known for its thick clusters of bars, pizza parlours, strip clubs and illegal gambling joints.
Paul and his friends come to the shop most days not to smoke – smoking is not allowed – but to scratch away at lottery tickets and reminisce about the old days, when a single factory salary could support a whole family and the main drag in Struthers was packed every Friday night with working men flush with their weekly pay packet.
Back then, a local mafia ran the gambling rackets, which were secreted away in the back rooms of laundries or in private clubs posing as something innocuous like a knitting circle.
Now that same drag, the Youngstown-Poland Road, is reduced to a handful of pawn shops, dollar stores and auto repair shops in half-deserted mini-malls. The high-paying factory jobs started disappearing in the late 1970s with the closure of Youngstown Sheet & Tube, based in Struthers, and the bars and other businesses followed soon after. The mob was broken up in the late 1990s, ceding its turf to small-time street gangs who now run the drug rackets and make the locals a lot more nervous.
“We feel left behind,” said another cigarette shop patron, a former railroad worker who wanted to be known just as Joe. “People who’ve lived here all their lives are working two or three jobs just to pay their bills.”
Insecurity is woven into the fabric of Youngstown now. Part of the reason Paul, Joe and their friends come to the cigarette shop each morning is to make a show of strength in the front room and deter would-be burglars. “There’s a corner gang on every street,” the owner of Cigarettes 4 Less, Brian Acierno, said. “There’s no organisation. People get shot and killed wherever.”
When Youngstown first sank into decline in the 1980s, voters turned to a populist congressman named Jim Traficant, a Democrat who had a Trump-like disregard for the ordinary rules of political decorum and was widely adored because he would stand up for his constituents in Washington and yell at his colleagues to stop ignoring them.
Traficant was also a crook, with long-standing ties to the Youngstown mob and a pattern of taking bribes and falsifying his taxes that eventually sent him to prison for seven years – but most of his working-class voters didn’t care. In their view, politics was corrupt and government authority fundamentally untrustworthy, but he at least was on their side. “We got the best politicians money can buy,” Joe the former railroad worker joked.
Now they see the same virtues – and the same flaws – in Trump. As Acierno explained: “The Democrats and the Republicans are all a den of crooks. Only one side lies about being crooks, and one doesn’t. If you’re going to be a crook, I’d rather know it than be lied to.”
Trump, in other words, comes across as someone who doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what he is, and that perceived authenticity counts for more with many Youngstown voters than his character flaws or even his policy positions. They’d rather have his gut instincts, ugly as they often are, over the carefully scripted messaging of a Democrat like Kamala Harris or even a mainstream Republican.
Tex Fischer, a Republican state representative who cut his teeth working on Mitt Romney’s doomed 2012 presidential campaign, said Trump had done the party a huge favour by ripping the old order apart because it chimed with voters’ anti-establishment instincts and gave them real hope for the change they thirst for.
“When Romney came to Youngstown,” Fischer recalled, “he wore blue jeans and rolled up his sleeves, and nobody bought it. Trump doesn’t pretend – here he comes in his suit and tie and gold jewellery, and people respect that.”
Former Mahoning County Democratic Party chair Dave Betras sympathized with the view that the Democratic Party was out of touch with eastern Ohio's working-class population. He lamented that his party neglected to address the exodus of blue-collar jobs from cities like Youngstown after the passage of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s, and noted that they failed to hold accountable the financial institutions responsible for the 2008 financial crash. He insisted Democrats now have to rebuild their brand from scratch to stay competitive.
"American voters have a unique ability to smell bulls—, and they smell bulls— with the Democrats," Betras said.
“Most Americans think the system is rigged. And Trump shuffled the deck on us,” he added. “Not only does Trump say this thing is rigged, but he says: ‘I know, because I rigged it. I was part of the rigging.’”
