When people say they support a pol bc of promise he made, then still support when he breaks the promise, isn't it possible that's not why they liked him at all? https://t.co/cEQk7XmEM2
— Dara Lind (@DLind) November 8, 2017
the best description i have for this piece is it is a story of people who are addicted to white supremacy https://t.co/P8cb1achx8
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) November 8, 2017
… “Six months to a year,” catering company owner Joey Del Signore told me when we met days after the election. “A couple months,” retired nurse Maggie Frear said, before saying it might take a couple of years. “He’s just got to follow through with what he said he was going to do,” Schilling said last November. Back then, there was an all-but-audible “or else.”
A year later, the local unemployment rate has ticked down, and activity in a few coal mines has ticked up. Beyond that, though, not much has changed—at least not for the better. Johnstown and the surrounding region are struggling in the same ways and for the same reasons. The drug problem is just as bad. “There’s nothing good in the area,” Schilling said the other day in her living room. “I don’t have anything good to say about anything in this area. It’s sad.” Even so, her backing for Trump is utterly undiminished: “I’m a supporter of him, 100 percent.”…
Johnstown voters do not intend to hold the president accountable for the nonnegotiable pledges he made to them. It’s not that the people who made Trump president have generously moved the goalposts for him. It’s that they have eliminated the goalposts altogether…
Michael Kruse’s story is getting a lot of (well-deserved) attention. But the related story that really depressed me was by Matt Viser, for the Boston Globe — “A year after Trump’s election, York, Pa., is forever changed”:
… Barbara Estep kept texting her daughter, Nylaya Way, who was not responding. Donald Trump had stunned the nation by winning the presidency the night before, and now frightening things were happening at Nylaya’s vocational high school, York County School of Technology.
Racial tensions had been building in the school’s corridors, cafeteria, and parking lot throughout the historically divisive campaign. Then, hours after Trump claimed victory in the election, they boiled over as a group of white students held aloft Trump campaign signs and chanted in a hallway, “White power!’’
A brief video clip of the incident shot across the social media feeds of York Tech students and their parents.
“I just thought it was going to be this big race riot,” Barbara Estep said. “The country-fed boys, they’re hunters. I’m sorry, that’s what I thought. These city kids, they have guns. I thought it was going to be a big shootout.”…
Trump’s election a year ago profoundly altered the United States in ways that continue to reverberate, but perhaps most visibly and disturbingly in how we talk to one another, especially about the hardest things, like the nation’s racial divide. The volume is up; the edge is sharp. Old grievances feel new, and civility is being sorely tested.
Certainly, that’s how it went down in York County along the southern border of Pennsylvania. York went big for Trump in the election, with a 63 to 33 percent margin over Hillary Clinton that helped the billionaire reality TV star capture the state and vault into the White House. Yet, the morning after, Trump’s win seemed less like a victory for democracy — the kind celebrated in high school civics classes — than a trigger for tensions felt across York County and the rest of America…