Johnstown Never Believed Trump Would Help. They Still Love Him Anyway.
In a depressed former steel town, the president’s promises don’t matter as much as they once did.
By MICHAEL KRUSE
November 08, 2017
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JOHNSTOWN, Pa.—Pam Schilling is the reason Donald Trump is the president.
Schilling’s personal story is in poignant miniature the story of this area of western Pennsylvania as a whole—one of the long-forgotten, woebegone spots in the middle of the country that gave Trump his unexpected victory last fall. She grew up in nearby Nanty Glo, the daughter and granddaughter of coal miners. She once had a union job packing meat at a grocery store, and then had to settle for less money at Walmart. Now she’s 60 and retired, and last year, in April, as Trump’s shocking political ascent became impossible to ignore, Schilling’s 32-year-old son died of a heroin overdose. She found needles in the pockets of the clothes he wore to work in the mines before he got laid off.
Desperate for change, Schilling, like so many other once reliable Democrats in these parts, responded enthusiastically to what Trump was saying—building a wall on the Mexican border, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, bringing back jobs in steel and coal. That’s what Trump told them. At a raucous rally in late October, right downtown in their minor-league hockey arena, he vowed to restore the mines and the mills that had been the lifeblood of the region until they started closing some 40 years ago, triggering the “American carnage” Trump would talk about in his inaugural address: massive population loss, shrinking tax rolls, communal hopelessness and ultimately a raging opioid epidemic. When Trump won, people here were ecstatic. But they’d heard generations of politicians make big promises before, and they were also impatient for him to deliver.
“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 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.”
What I heard from Schilling is overwhelmingly what I heard in my follow-up conversations with people here that I talked to last year as well. Over the course of three rainy, dreary days last week, I revisited and shook hands with the president’s base—that thirtysomething percent of the electorate who resolutely approve of the job he is doing, the segment of voters who share his view that the Russia investigation is a “witch hunt” that “has nothing to do with him,” and who applaud his judicial nominees and his determination to gut the federal regulatory apparatus. But what I wasn’t prepared for was how readily these same people had abandoned the contract he had made with them. Their satisfaction with Trump now seems untethered to the things they once said mattered to them the most.
“I don’t know that he has done a lot to help,” Frear told me. Last year, she said she wouldn’t vote for him again if he didn’t do what he said he was going to do. Last week, she matter-of-factly stated that she would. “Support Trump? Sure,” she said. “I like him.”
When I asked Del Signore about the past year here, he said he “didn’t see any change because we got a new president.” He nonetheless remains an ardent proponent. “He’s our answer.”
I asked Schilling what would happen if the next three years go the way the last one has.
“I’m not going to blame him,” Schilling said. “Absolutely not.”
Is there anything that could change her mind about Trump?
“Nope,” she said.
The Cambria County Republican Headquarters in Johnstown. | Scott Goldsmith for Politico Magazine
All this, perhaps, is not so surprising, considering polling continues to show that—in spite of unprecedented unpopularity—nearly all people who voted for Trump would do it again. But as I compared this year’s answers to last year’s responses it seemed clear that the basis of people’s support had morphed. 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.
This reality ought to get the attention of anyone who thinks they will win in 2018 or 2020 by running against Trump’s record. His supporters here, it turns out, are energized by his bombast and his animus more than any actual accomplishments. For them, it’s evidently not what he’s doing so much as it is the people he’s fighting. Trump is simply and unceasingly angry on their behalf, battling the people who vex them the worst—“obstructionist” Democrats, uncooperative establishment Republicans, the media, Black Lives Matter protesters and NFL players (boy oh boy do they hate kneeling NFL players) whom they see as ungrateful, disrespectful millionaires.
And they love him for this.
“I think he’s doing a great job, and I just wish the hell they’d leave him alone and let him do it,” Schilling said. “He shouldn’t have to take any shyt from anybody.”
***
Del Signore is by his own admission not a person who’s focused on policy specifics. A short, stout genial man who wears gold chains around his neck and rings on both pinkies, he last year did something for Trump he had never done for any other political candidate. The 61-year-old Johnstown native proudly planted a Trump sign in the ground in front of his catering company. And nothing that’s happened in the last 12 months, he told me when we met for lunch on Italian buffet day at the Holiday Inn, has lessened his enthusiasm for the man who so energized him.
Joey Del Signore still loves Trump. “Everybody I talk to,” he says, “realizes it’s not Trump who’s dragging his feet.” | Scott Goldsmith for Politico Magazine
“Everybody I talk to,” he said, “realizes it’s not Trump who’s dragging his feet. Trump’s probably the most diligent, hardest-working president we’ve ever had in our lifetimes. It’s not like he sleeps in till noon and goes golfing every weekend, like the last president did.”
I stopped him, informing him that, yes, Barack Obama liked to golf, but Trump in fact does golf a lot, too—more, in fact.
Del Signore was surprised to hear this.
“Does he?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
He did not linger on this topic, smiling and changing the subject with a quip. “If I was married to his wife,” Del Signore said, “I don’t think I’d go anywhere.”
He added: “Some of these things are like that thing he said to Billy, Billy Bob, Billy Bud”—searching, unsuccessfully, for the name Billy Bush—“on the bus, that comment he made.” Del Signore shrugged. “He’s a human male. I’m glad he wasn’t saying, ‘Hey, I like little boys.’ You know? So he’s not perfect.”
Del Signore said he’s been following politics far more than before because of Trump. Trump, he said, is just “more interesting.” So now he likes watching the news. “Ninety-nine percent of the time I watch Fox,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll be sitting there listening to all this Fox stuff, and I’ll say, ‘Maybe they aren’t right, maybe I’ll flip to CNN’—but every time I’ve found that Fox has been correct, and CNN is definitely fake news.”
A Catholic whose wife goes to church every Sunday whereas he, “shame on me,” does not, Del Signore told me toward the end of our lunch that some people at church told his wife that Obama is the antichrist. “She comes home and tells me these things that they tell you in church,” he said. I asked him if that’s what he thinks. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some people say that.”
If Obama, I asked, is the antichrist—whose arrival is said to precede the second coming of Christ—what would that make Trump?
“The savior?” Del Signore suggested.
Not even Trump, though, can stop what’s coming, he added. “Just looking around, and putting two and two together, a little bit of business savvy, a little bit of street savvy, a little common sense, a little bit of education, you kind of deduct different things,” he told me. “I think we’re going to see the end of the world in our generation.”
***
It’s maybe understandable why somebody here might think this. A little more than a month after last year’s election, a five-month-old baby starved to death in her bassinet after both her parents overdosed on fentanyl, a frighteningly potent sort of synthetic heroin. It was shocking even to a community that’s become all too familiar with the unremitting ravages of opioids.
One morning last week, Arch Liston, Johnstown’s city manager, drove me to the neighborhood where it happened. It’s called Kernville. From the cab of his silver Chevy pickup truck, he pointed out one decrepit, vacant house after another.
Top: A condemned home in the Kernville area of downtown Johnstown. Kernville’s average real estate price and rental price are both in the bottom two percent of Pennsylvania neighborhoods. | Scott Goldsmith for Politico Magazine
“Old factory houses that people have just abandoned,” he said. “Abandoned. Abandoned. Abandoned.”
He sighed heavily.
Many houses I saw from inside Liston’s pickup bore a big X painted on a board nailed to the front, marking them as dangerously structurally unsound. If nothing else, Liston told me, it’s an instruction to the fire department: If it catches fire, let it burn. There are approximately 1,400 houses with an X, Liston said, and he would tear them all down if he could. But each demolition costs roughly $7,000, and it is money the city does not have.
Last year here, the Trump signs were everywhere. This year, my eye settled on different sorts of signs. CONDEMNED. NO TRESPASSING. BEWARE OF DOG. Empty storefronts saying FOR RENT and FOR SALE. The shuttered Hey Day Diner—not far from Coney Island Lunch, a greasy-spoon staple since 1916, once a go-to for round-the-clock shifts of steelworkers, closed this past summer. The sign in the window read: THANK YOU ALL OF OUR CUSTOMERS FOR MANY YEARS OF PATRONAGE.
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This dude in this story said he watches nothing but Fox News 99% of the time. shyt is bad. 
I really hate the white working class.