A year after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president, the furnaces of Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania sat quiet, as they have since the plant closed in 1995.
On a frozen January morning, three former steelworkers – third- and fourth-generation employees who had literally shut the place down – gathered beneath the stacks to talk about the old days.
“We made the armored plating, we made the guns, we made the battleships,” said Frank Behum, 71. “We set records that will probably never be broken as far as building ships in world war two.”
At its apex, the plant had employed tens of thousands of people in difficult, dangerous jobs that paid well and fostered true pride.
“Us three guys right here, we lived the middle-class dream,” said Behum. “It’s gone. I don’t see it coming back. I think Jesus Christ himself would have to come down here and run the country.”
Though Behum voted for Hillary Clinton, enough of his former colleagues supported Trump to help flip Northampton county in 2016. It had voted twice for Barack Obama, but this time opted for the Republican candidate, the one promising to Make America Great Again.
Trump supporters here say the president is delivering on that promise, pointing to the booming stock market and bustling regional economy. But that’s not the view from the extinct blast furnaces.
“The audacity of the president saying everything that’s coming together now, he did – what a joke,” said Behum. “I’m almost ready to put a barf bag alongside my television when that guy comes on.”
“This was Donald Trump’s way he got over on people,” said Frank Hawkey, 71. “Because everybody was hoping for change – because things are not great. But there’s just too many impossibilities. You can’t resurrect the steel mill.”
The promise
Is Trump delivering on his promise to make America great again, in the eyes of the people who voted for him?
The question is especially potent in places like Northampton County, with its almost mythic history of industrial greatness, and where a few voters either way in 2020 could determine whether Trump serves a second term.
Over a year of repeated interviews with dozens of Trump voters in the area, it has become clear that Trump has lost a critical measure of support in the county, though his base remains strong.
Trump voters such as Bruce Haines, the managing partner of the Historic Hotel Bethlehem, credit the president with generating an optimism that has boosted local business.
Hotel revenue was up 7% year-on-year, Haines said; there are three new storefronts downtown; and attendance at the city’s annual Christmas crafts festival was up 28% to 89,000.
“I don’t know one Trump supporter that wouldn’t vote for Trump again, including Democrats,” Haines said. “There’s a lot of blue-collar Americans who like his message.”
But there are wavering Trump supporters who say some of the president’s rhetoric, especially his displays of perceived personal coarseness or pettiness, is hurting him.
“The biggest thing, if he’s gotta learn a lesson from all of this that he’s gone through, he should learn that he’s gotta act more presidential,” said Joe D’Ambrosio, 77, a barber in Bethlehem who switched parties in 2016 to back Trump and remains a strong supporter.
Locating regretful Trump voters in Northampton County willing to describe their second thoughts requires some legwork.
Walk into Miller’s Paints in Bangor, in the north of the county, and there are two examples: the owner, Duane Miller, 80, and the counterman, Dalton Tucker, 20.
Miller was a popular Democratic mayor of the small town for 16 years. Yet he voted for Trump “at the last minute”, “only I didn’t tell a lot of people”. But Trump’s “childishness” had put Miller off, he said.
“It’s surprising after some of the president’s verbiage that people will still say, ‘Well, that’s all right, but I still could vote for him’,” Miller said. “But that’s diminished a lot. It’s diminished from what it was before around here.”
Tucker, the counterman, said: “I did have a little bit more faith in him a year ago compared to what I do now.” He had hoped that Trump would show more bipartisan leadership.
Christopher Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, said that while a majority of Trump voters in the county still backed the president, there were significant defections among people who had voted for Trump out of impulse or protest.
“I think there is some exhaustion among a slice of Trump voters from 2016 that is constantly on the defensive,” said Borick in a kitchen counter interview in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. “For some others, it’s a bunker mentality: ‘It’s only strengthening my resolve why I like this guy.’
“In all, I think the Trump coalition that voted him into office in the fall of 2016 isn’t unified.”
Steely support
As weak as Trump’s coalition may be, the devotion of his core supporters is impressively strong. Lee Snover, 49, a state Republican party leader and an early Trump adopter, spoke with the Guardian as she wrapped up Friday payroll at her drywall business, which, she said, had “the largest gross sales in many years” in 2017.
“I think America’s moving in the right direction now,” she said. “People are just as strong [in their support for Trump]. I haven’t had anyone who’s complained or regretted, or who has contacted me saying ‘I can’t believe we did this’.”
Snover’s brother, Jerry Pritchard, 51, who runs drywall crews, said “a lot of people are seeing prosperity through this guy”.
Challenged on the question of whether prosperity is enough, given the painful divisiveness that for many people has defined the first year of the Trump presidency, Pritchard denied that the country is divided, dismissing the notion as a creation of the media machine.
“Trump answers stuff from a common approach that sets the whole media a-spin,” Pritchard said.
Examples, he said, included the president’s response to racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, for which Trump blamed “both sides”.
“He’s right, you had two parties fighting, you can’t pick a fight with someone that ain’t there,” said Pritchard. “You can do a little shadowboxing in front of the mirror, that’s you and yourself.”
“I think Obama was the race problem, it wasn’t Trump,” Snover agreed.
The conversation underscored the dramatically variable quality of the experiences Americans are having during the Trump presidency. One man’s hate speech is another man’s common sense. Trump critics think the country is foundering, while Trump supporters think it’s undergoing a renaissance.
“Tell me something that he did wrong this year,” said D’Ambrosio, the barber.
“It’s certainly been an eventful year anyway,” said Peg Ferraro, a Republican county councilwoman. “But I still stick with him, and I think there’s good things going to be happening, I really do.”
“Everything is positive,” said Larry Hallett, a paving company owner and a Republican. “I don’t have any contact with anybody that isn’t positive about what Trump’s doing. I really don’t.”
A lot of love
But some Trump voters, especially those who chose him in an attempt to defibrillate the national politics, shared growing concerns about the turn America has taken. “The country is in divorce mode,” said Miller, sitting in his paint store. “And that’s precisely what I feel from people coming in. It’s like a divorce. Who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s going to get custody of the kids?
“And if the country, in my opinion, is going to be great, great again, we have to resolve some of those problems.”
The steelworkers, reminiscing about what made their heyday great, described rewards beyond a big paycheck. “It was something you had to live to fully understand the way it was here,” said Behum.
“It was a lot of love here. Not like it is today, everybody hates everybody else, you know?”