In the weeks leading up to the inauguration, Yahoo News visited towns and cities across the country, speaking to voters who had supported Donald Trump in the election. As the shape of his administration emerged, we asked voters if they were happy with their choice and optimistic about the future. Here is some of what we found:
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MINGO JUNCTION, Ohio When Donald Trump talked about running to represent the forgotten men and women that the American dream had left behind, he could very well have been talking about the residents of this tiny village at the foothills of the Appalachians, in the heart of the Ohio River Valley.
A little less than 40 years ago, a young Robert De Niro piloted a gleaming white Cadillac up Commercial Street here, filming a pivotal scene in the Vietnam War epic The Deer Hunter. But today, the street stands bleak and empty. Many of its buildings are boarded up and condemned, dark against the rusting iron husk of the vacant steel mill that rises tall above town like a haunted tombstone for the villages better days.
Thousands of people used to walk down the hill toward the river to jobs at the former Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel mill before it closed permanently eight years ago after a series of ownership changes. The restaurants and shops that depended on the workers soon went away too leaving just a handful of businesses, almost all of them bars, patronized by residents who struggle to keep their lives afloat in a town that sometimes doesnt have enough money to keep the streetlights lit.
Almost everybody here in this town of 3,300 people is a registered Democrat, a party affiliation that dates back to their parents and their parents parents. But during the past 20 years, as the mining and steel industries here have collapsed, the die-hard Democrats have become less die-hard, disillusioned by a party they feel has left the working class behind.
A closed steel mill in Mingo Junction, Ohio. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)
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In November, Trump easily captured Ohio, a victory fueled in part by winning over blue-collar workers in eastern arts of the state who had turned out in historic numbers for Barack Obama in the previous two elections. In Jefferson County, where Mingo Junction is located, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by nearly 35 points, but despite his resounding victory, many here remain deeply divided over Trump and whether he will really deliver on his promises to revitalize Rust Belt towns like this.
Weeks after the conclusion of what was widely considered one of the most divisive campaigns in recent memory, Trump was still a touchy subject in Mingo Junction. At Townhouse Bar, an old tavern on a now-deserted end of Commercial Street that used to be a hangout for steelworkers on break, a woman named Darla stopped the conversation when asked about the election. There is a rule here: Never, ever talk about politics in a bar, she warned, as other patrons on nearby stools nodded in agreement. Its nothing but trouble.
But a few minutes later, after playing a round of keno, Darla relented. I know where to take you to talk about this, she said, leading the way down the block to a members-only bar called the Schultzen Club, where Lynn Jackson, a 65-year-old retiree from nearby Steubenville who had been laid off from her job at a coal-fired power plant, sat with her friend Gary Webster, a 63-year-old retired teacher from Mingo Junction. Both had spent their lives in the region, raising families, only to see the city around them fade away as the industry died. We dont even have a gas station, Webster lamented.
They spoke with nostalgia of a time when the air was so dirty that birds barely flew in the sky. I called it boiling the stacks, Webster recalled of the soaring blast furnaces and smokestacks that now sit idle at the mill just outside the bars backdoor. When they were running, pollution floated in the air. It looked like glitter falling.
Even though the air was dirty, the town was booming. People didnt want for nothing really, Jackson recalled. Its not that everybody was rich, but you made a decent income that you could raise your family on. But those days are gone, replaced by a struggle that seems never-ending.
Mingo Junction, Ohio. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)
After living here most of their lives, it was now mostly the older generation that was left. The kids who had grown up here had escaped, looking for better lives elsewhere. Not that their families blamed them. A town that had once held so much promise now seemed like something of a dead end.
There were appealing things about Trumps message, they acknowledged, including his pledge to bring back jobs and industry to struggling towns like this. But for all his promises, there was something that didnt ring true. Jackson, who said she started out giving Trump a chance even though she rarely votes Republican, was turned off by his litany of promises with few details and then by his propensity to shoot off his mouth. She felt uneasy about his temperament to be president and concerned that he was simply saying anything to win. I dont trust him, she said. Hes nothing but a mouth.
But Jackson acknowledged she was in the minority. A few feet away, on a billboard set up near a pool table, someone had hung images of Clinton, one from a newsstand tabloid depicting her with an Adolf Hitler mustache (World War 3, the headline warned) and another of her behind jail bars. She had an idea about who might have hung them there, but fearful of fights, people shied away from talking about whom they did or did not vote for. Oh, you dont talk about religion and politics in a bar, Jackson said, adding, I say, I do, if you ask me.
But down the block, at an old bar called the Parkview Inn, there was one Trump supporter willing to own up to his vote. Joe Mannarino, a 57-year-old steelworker who had bounced from plant to plant after losing his job at the mill out back years before, was a registered Democrat who crossed party lines to back Trump. It wasnt that he believed everything Trump said, he explained, but he saw him as a change candidate who would be more likely to help working-class people like him and towns like this.
The Schultzen Club in Mingo Junction, Ohio. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)
Residents here have a long memory, Mannarino said. They still recalled how Bill Clinton went to Weirton, W.Va., just across the river shortly after he won the Democratic nomination in 1992, where he visited a mill and pledged to stop foreign steel from being dumped at cheap prices. And then he turned around and passed NAFTA and all these trade deals that killed us, Mannarino said. How could anybody trust a Clinton after that?
Trump, he said, was hardly the perfect candidate, but he was the only person who seemed to speak to and care about people like him. On the trail, Trump vividly spoke of reviving the steel industry in order to rebuild the nations infrastructure and the inner cities. We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports and airports that our country deserves, Trump declared in a line in his stump speech. American steel will send new skyscrapers soaring. We will put new American metal into the spine of this nation.
Now that Trump is soon to be in the White House, Mannarino said he expects him to deliver on those promises to rebuild the country with American steel, as well as his pledge to renegotiate trade deals like NAFTA on more favorable terms to the United States. Can Trump actually follow through on all those promises? Mannarino said with a shrug. Im hopeful, he said. Im more hopeful than Ive been for a while.
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'I'm more hopeful than I've been for awhile' - Yahoo News