There are a lot of bitter people here, I'm one of them': rust belt voters on why they backed Trump again despite his bro [View all]
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/11/there-are-a-lot-of-bitter-people-here-im-one-of-them-rust-belt-voters-on-why-they-backed-trump-again-despite-his-broken-promises
= new reply since forum marked as read