Pennsylvania<\/a> sat quiet, as they have since the plant closed in 1995.<\/p>\nOn a frozen January morning, three former steelworkers \u2013 third- and fourth-generation employees who had literally shut the place down \u2013 gathered beneath the stacks to talk about the old days.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe made the armored plating, we made the guns, we made the battleships,\u201d said Frank Behum, 71. \u201cWe set records that will probably never be broken as far as building ships in world war two.\u201d<\/p>\n
At its apex, the plant had employed tens of thousands of people in difficult, dangerous jobs that paid well and fostered true pride.<\/p>\n
\u201cUs three guys right here, we lived the middle-class dream,\u201d said Behum. \u201cIt\u2019s gone. I don\u2019t see it coming back. I think Jesus Christ himself would have to come down here and run the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though Behum voted for Hillary Clinton, enough of his former colleagues supported Trump to help flip Northampton county in 2016. It had voted twice for Barack Obama, but this time opted for the Republican candidate, the one promising to Make America Great Again.<\/p>\n
Trump supporters here say the president is delivering on that promise, pointing to the booming stock market and bustling regional economy. But that\u2019s not the view from the extinct blast furnaces.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe audacity of the president saying everything that\u2019s coming together now, he did \u2013 what a joke,\u201d said Behum. \u201cI\u2019m almost ready to put a barf bag alongside my television when that guy comes on.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was Donald Trump\u2019s way he got over on people,\u201d said Frank Hawkey, 71. \u201cBecause everybody was hoping for change \u2013 because things are not great. But there\u2019s just too many impossibilities. You can\u2019t resurrect the steel mill.\u201d<\/p>\n
The promise<\/h2>\n
Is Trump delivering on his promise to make America great again, in the eyes of the people who voted for him?<\/p>\n
The question is especially potent in places like Northampton County, with its almost mythic history of industrial greatness, and where a few voters either way in 2020 could determine whether Trump serves a second term.<\/p>\n
Over a year of repeated interviews with dozens of Trump voters in the area, it has become clear that Trump has lost a critical measure of support in the county, though his base remains strong.<\/p>\n
Trump voters such as Bruce Haines, the managing partner of the Historic Hotel Bethlehem, credit the president with generating an optimism that has boosted local business.<\/p>\n
Hotel revenue was up 7% year-on-year, Haines said; there are three new storefronts downtown; and attendance at the city\u2019s annual Christmas crafts festival was up 28% to 89,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know one Trump supporter that wouldn\u2019t vote for Trump again, including Democrats,\u201d Haines said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of blue-collar Americans who like his message.\u201d<\/p>\n
But there are wavering Trump supporters who say some of the president\u2019s rhetoric, especially his displays of perceived personal coarseness or pettiness, is hurting him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe biggest thing, if he\u2019s gotta learn a lesson from all of this that he\u2019s gone through, he should learn that he\u2019s gotta act more presidential,\u201d said Joe D\u2019Ambrosio, 77, a barber in Bethlehem who switched parties in 2016 to back Trump and remains a strong supporter.<\/p>\n
Locating regretful Trump voters in Northampton County willing to describe their second thoughts requires some legwork.<\/p>\n
Walk into Miller\u2019s Paints in Bangor, in the north of the county, and there are two examples: the owner, Duane Miller, 80, and the counterman, Dalton Tucker, 20.<\/p>\n
Miller was a popular Democratic mayor of the small town for 16 years. Yet he voted for Trump \u201cat the last minute\u201d, \u201conly I didn\u2019t tell a lot of people\u201d. But Trump\u2019s \u201cchildishness\u201d had put Miller off, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s surprising after some of the president\u2019s verbiage that people will still say, \u2018Well, that\u2019s all right, but I still could vote for him\u2019,\u201d Miller said. \u201cBut that\u2019s diminished a lot. It\u2019s diminished from what it was before around here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tucker, the counterman, said: \u201cI did have a little bit more faith in him a year ago compared to what I do now.\u201d He had hoped that Trump would show more bipartisan leadership.<\/p>\n
Christopher Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, said that while a majority of Trump voters in the county still backed the president, there were significant defections among people who had voted for Trump out of impulse or protest.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there is some exhaustion among a slice of Trump voters from 2016 that is constantly on the defensive,\u201d said Borick in a kitchen counter interview in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. \u201cFor some others, it\u2019s a bunker mentality: \u2018It\u2019s only strengthening my resolve why I like this guy.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cIn all, I think the Trump coalition that voted him into office in the fall of 2016 isn\u2019t unified.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steely support<\/h2>\n
As weak as Trump\u2019s coalition may be, the devotion of his core supporters is impressively strong. Lee Snover, 49, a state Republican party leader and an early Trump adopter, spoke with the Guardian as she wrapped up Friday payroll at her drywall business, which, she said, had \u201cthe largest gross sales in many years\u201d in 2017.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think America\u2019s moving in the right direction now,\u201d she said. \u201cPeople are just as strong [in their support for Trump]. I haven\u2019t had anyone who\u2019s complained or regretted, or who has contacted me saying \u2018I can\u2019t believe we did this\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Snover\u2019s brother, Jerry Pritchard, 51, who runs drywall crews, said \u201ca lot of people are seeing prosperity through this guy\u201d.<\/p>\n
Challenged on the question of whether prosperity is enough, given the painful divisiveness that for many people has defined the first year of the Trump presidency, Pritchard denied that the country is divided, dismissing the notion as a creation of the media machine.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrump answers stuff from a common approach that sets the whole media a-spin,\u201d Pritchard said.<\/p>\n
Examples, he said, included the president\u2019s response to racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, for which Trump blamed \u201cboth sides\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s right, you had two parties fighting, you can\u2019t pick a fight with someone that ain\u2019t there,\u201d said Pritchard. \u201cYou can do a little shadowboxing in front of the mirror, that\u2019s you and yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Obama was the race problem, it wasn\u2019t Trump,\u201d Snover agreed.<\/p>\n
The conversation underscored the dramatically variable quality of the experiences Americans are having during the Trump presidency. One man\u2019s hate speech is another man\u2019s common sense. Trump critics think the country is foundering, while Trump supporters think it\u2019s undergoing a renaissance.<\/p>\n
\u201cTell me something that he did wrong this year,\u201d said D\u2019Ambrosio, the barber.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s certainly been an eventful year anyway,\u201d said Peg Ferraro, a Republican county councilwoman. \u201cBut I still stick with him, and I think there\u2019s good things going to be happening, I really do.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything is positive,\u201d said Larry Hallett, a paving company owner and a Republican. \u201cI don\u2019t have any contact with anybody that isn\u2019t positive about what Trump\u2019s doing. I really don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
A lot of love<\/h2>\n
But some Trump voters, especially those who chose him in an attempt to defibrillate the national politics, shared growing concerns about the turn America has taken. \u201cThe country is in divorce mode,\u201d said Miller, sitting in his paint store. \u201cAnd that\u2019s precisely what I feel from people coming in. It\u2019s like a divorce. Who\u2019s right, who\u2019s wrong, who\u2019s going to get custody of the kids?<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd if the country, in my opinion, is going to be great, great again, we have to resolve some of those problems.\u201d<\/p>\n
The steelworkers, reminiscing about what made their heyday great, described rewards beyond a big paycheck. \u201cIt was something you had to live to fully understand the way it was here,\u201d said Behum.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a lot of love here. Not like it is today, everybody hates everybody else, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n
The Guardian<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Tom McCarthy, London, Sat 20 Jan 2018 After a year of interviews in Northampton County, which voted twice for Obama before supporting Trump, the Guardian\u2019s project ends at the closed-down furnaces of Bethlehem Steel Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. A year after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president, the furnaces of Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania sat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2467"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2468,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2467\/revisions\/2468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}