How much can Trump deliver on his wild promises? I'm so skeptical ...
What Trump Voters Want Now
The blue-collar workers who put Donald Trump in the White House are ready for him to deliver. How much time will they give him?
By Michael Kruse
November 18, 2016
Trump’s road to the White House ran through Cambria County, where once steel and coal let people with high school educations buy houses and take vacations and lead relatively want-not middle-class lives—and where it doesn’t work that way anymore. In this Rust Belt notch, where peeling paint, vacant storefronts and the dark hulks of shuttered mills are reminders of all that’s been lost, Trump’s mantra of Make America Great Again sounded not like a ball-cap slogan but a last-ditch chance—to reverse an economic decline that has been choking this region for decades. “Your government betrayed you, and I’m going to make it right,” Trump told a boisterous crowd at the Cambria County War Memorial Arena less than three weeks before Election Day. “Your jobs will come back under a Trump administration,” he said. “Your steel will come back,” he said. “We’re putting your miners back to work,” he said.
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“The infrastructure for the steel is all gone,” Daloni said. “It just doesn’t exist anymore in Johnstown. It did used to be a steel boomtown, but it was long before Obama was elected. It was decimated, really, before Bill Clinton was elected. The mills were going down in the ‘70s and ‘80s.”
The Trump voters say they want change, but Daloni and Rininger say the change has happened already. And despite what Trump promised at the downtown arena a month ago, they believe there’s a real chance that Trump’s solutions could make things worse. Incomes won’t go up—they’ll go down. “I make $32 an hour, with good benefits, and that’s because I’m union,” Rininger said. “I wouldn’t even be f--king close to that if I wasn’t union.”
And jobs, they worry, won’t come back—they’ll disappear faster. And before long, they said, the only work in Cambria County will be minimum-wage counter jobs at the familiar collection of ring-road fast food-joints. “The service industry, I’m afraid,” Daloni said.
“If Trump starts trade wars,” Rininger said, “you hurt us. You hurt our plant”—which is owned by Swedes, with a CEO from India. And the steel the workers do still make, Rininger said, is sold to Brazil. It’s sold around the world.
It’s 2016, he said. “We’re a global operation.” |
