The Guardian
Many in Youngstown, Ohio, believe the president-elect will tackle the town’s decline this time. Others are worried about his character flaws. Their concerns help explain how he returned to power – and how his second term might play out
Andrew Gumbel
Sat 11 Jan 2025 07.00 EST
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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”...
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 north-east 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...
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...
“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.”
www.theguardian.com
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When Henry Ford started his first assembly line in 1913 he said, "It will be a haven for those without the brains to do anything else." For four generations it was. Now that haven is coming to an end.
To pass the test to get into a trade school to learn a skilled blue collar trade one probably needs an IQ of at least 80. That is the cut off point to get into the military. Trump cannot solve the problems of those people below 80. He does articulate their anger and gives them people to hate.
Many in Youngstown, Ohio, believe the president-elect will tackle the town’s decline this time. Others are worried about his character flaws. Their concerns help explain how he returned to power – and how his second term might play out
Andrew Gumbel
Sat 11 Jan 2025 07.00 EST
Share
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”...
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 north-east 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...
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...
“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.”
‘There are a lot of bitter people here, I’m one of them’: rust belt voters on why they backed Trump again despite his broken promises
Many in Youngstown, Ohio, believe the president-elect will tackle the town’s decline this time. Others are worried about his character flaws. Their concerns help explain how he returned to power – and how his second term might play out
www.theguardian.com
-------------
When Henry Ford started his first assembly line in 1913 he said, "It will be a haven for those without the brains to do anything else." For four generations it was. Now that haven is coming to an end.
To pass the test to get into a trade school to learn a skilled blue collar trade one probably needs an IQ of at least 80. That is the cut off point to get into the military. Trump cannot solve the problems of those people below 80. He does articulate their anger and gives them people to hate.
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