Ten Images of Hell in the Twenty-first Century

If you drive into Youngstown on Ohio Route 7, you will pass a large roadside sign that reads simply, “Cross Over: Vote Trump.” And in Youngstown, and many other places that have long defined America’s white working class, traditional Democratic voters did just that, offering Donald Trump an injection of support that would be critical to his electoral success. In Mahoning County, where Youngstown is located, and which Barack Obama won re-election by 28 points, Hillary Clinton won by only the narrowest of margins. In neighboring Trumbull County, where Obama also won handily in 2012 by 22 points, Trump actually beat Clinton—a remarkable reversal of fortune.

I followed a well-worn trail to Youngstown. Reporters have for years been using its shuttered mills and blue-collar bars as a backdrop for stories on the decline of the Rust Belt. Youngstown has been literally shrunken by deindustrialization. In 1950, Youngstown was a major city, larger than Kansas City, Kansas, or Phoenix. Today, it is smaller than Albany, New York, and Albany, Georgia, and barely bigger than Albany, Oregon, a city with the distinction of being just the 11th largest city in all of Oregon. The people who are left in Youngstown are pretty dedicated to it, and they have an infectious belief that their 40-year losing streak may come to an end. It is easier for me to count the number of people who didn’t tell me about the new-business accelerator in the old downtown, or the city’s plan to lead the world in 3-D printing, than those who did. I want to believe.

I arrived in Youngstown to ask people how they thought Trump was doing so far. In an ordinary year, it would be a ludicrous question, some four weeks before the inaugural. But this is no ordinary year and no ordinary transition. The mainstream media have been relentlessly critical of Trump during the transition, criticizing him for virtually every action: how he has engaged with foreign leaders, how he has tweeted about Saturday Night Live (or North Korea, or Chuck Schumer, or Israel), his process for picking Cabinet members, the quality of the selections for the Justice Department, the E.P.A., H.H.S., H.U.D., the ambassador for our embassy in Tel Aviv (or is it Jerusalem now). The list goes on seemingly endlessly. And there is some reason to think that some of Trump’s actions, like using Goldman Sachs as a personal employment agency and selecting a secretary of state from the executive suite of Exxon Mobil, might not be warmly embraced in an area that feels victimized by Wall Street and big business. I was curious to see how this was all playing out, whether there are early signs of buyer’s remorse or not.

At the Royal Oaks Bar & Grill, a Youngstown landmark, the conversation drifts between football and the local economy, and there was obvious burnout at the end of a much too long political cycle. My incessant questions about Trump were met with a certain amount of good-natured groaning and good-natured (I hope) threats of what would happen to me if I didn’t change the topic. The qualifications or not of Trump’s appointees and other criticisms were generally shrugged off mostly as media obsessions. Viking Jim, a local radio host who sports a Minnesota Vikings hat and matching tattoo, told me that the only political topic his listeners will talk about now is the Carrier deal.

The Carrier deal, which Trump struck to at least temporarily retain some 500 to 1,000 or manufacturing jobs in Indiana (Mike Pence’s home state), had clearly become a local obsession. In Washington, and on the left, the deal was generally derided as an example of political posturing (what would 500 jobs really do to overturn the inexorable tide of globalization), executive meddling (can a president threaten a company?), and a bit of pure political gamesmanship (Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, was largely perceived as acceding to Trump’s demands to avoid losing lucrative government contracts).

Among the people I met in Youngstown, however, there was little of this skepticism. Instead, there was a widely held belief that no other politician, at least no other national politician, would have done the same. Sitting next to me the next morning at the counter of the Golden Dawn Restaurant, Marty McKenna, a retired postal worker, told me that he loved what Trump did with Carrier: “He is Ronald Reagan on steroids. I haven’t felt this good about a politician in years, because he is not a politician.” The day after the election, General Motors announced the closure of the third shift at the nearby Lordstown plant, putting another roughly 1,200 people out of work, and there was a whiff of hope that Trump could do for Youngstown what it believed he did for Indianapolis.

The Carrier deal plays so well because it fits with what people expect of Trump and what they believe Hillary Clinton would not have done—fight for the jobs that they want. Throughout the campaign, voters in Youngstown heard Trump talk about how he would protect good jobs and bring back lost jobs. From Clinton, regardless of what she said, what people heard was something different: talk of putting miners out of work, talk of retraining (a four-letter word in Youngstown), and a disinterest in fighting for the jobs that people in Youngstown aspire to. Dave Betras, the chair of the Mahoning County Democratic Party, told me, in between swearing about the election results, that national Democrats have forgotten “how to talk Democratic,” how to fight for jobs for people who “shower after work, not before.” He laughed bitterly when he explained that a billionaire from New York who “shits on a gold-plated toilet” did a better job of connecting with Youngstown workers than the Democratic standard-bearer.

The criticisms that Democrats and media have leveled at Trump over the last weeks simply have not landed with Youngstown residents, and to the extent they have registered, they tend to have worked in Trump’s favor. Shake the press pool? Take phone calls from the president of Taiwan? Tweet about cost overruns on the F-35 program? It all works because it is a different way of doing business, one that has the added bonus of irritating media and Establishment Washington. If traditional politics and traditional politicians of both parties have failed to deliver for two generations, doing things differently, even if they sometimes feel crass or off-kilter, is worth the gamble. Congressman Ryan told me the story of one of the last electricians left at Delphi, who was sent down to Mexico to train his own replacement. After the election, that same electrician approached Ryan and exclaimed, “I have been waiting 30 years for something new.”

If you’ve waited 30 years for something new, you’re going to give the new guy a chance. Around town, even for those who voted for Clinton, there was a palpable sense that the media and political elites of both parties were not giving Trump a fair shake. The fact that Trump was disliked by all the right people, as Paul Sracic, the head of the political-science department at Youngstown State, evocatively put it to me, worked in his favor.

If I expected that Trump’s affinity for Goldman Sachs bankers and Exxon executives would rub the wrong way among people who have been at the short end of every corporate merger, acquisition, and outsource decision, I was sorely disappointed. If you judge by Youngstown, President Trump will have the opportunity for an extended honeymoon, not just from a supportive Congress but, at least, from this slice of the electorate that is hungry for something, anything different. Congressman Ryan recognized this, himself, and told me that out of fairness to the voters, the Democrats should not just be the straight opposition.

Nevertheless, he could not help but wonder how Trump, who has been so free with his promises, will do anything other than disappoint the voters of Youngstown once more. It is a critical question not just for the future of these voters but for the electoral control of the swath of states that run from Wisconsin through Pennsylvania, which until November constituted the Blue Wall. For the moment, the people of Youngstown are giving Trump the chance to paint it an entirely new color.