Can Trump save desperate Americans?

Some maintain confidence, others fear depths of hopelessness

ABERDEEN, Washington, Aug 22, (AP): One-hundred-fifty baskets of pink petunias hang from the light posts all over this city, watered regularly by residents trying to make their community feel alive again. A local artist spends his afternoons high in a bucket truck, painting a block-long mural of a little girl blowing bubbles, each circle the scene of an imagined, hopeful future.

But in the present, vacant buildings dominate blocks. A van, stuffed so full of blankets and boxes they are spilling from the windows, pulls to the curb outside Stacie Blodgett’s antiques shop.

“Look inside of it,” she says. “I bet you he’s living in it.”

Around the corner, a crowded tent city of the desperate and addicted has taken over the riverbank, makeshift memorials to too many dead too young jutting up intermittently from the mud.

America, when viewed through the bars on Blodgett’s windows, looks a lot less great than it used to be. So she answered Donald Trump’s call to the country’s forgotten corners. Thousands of her neighbors did, too, and her county, once among the most reliably Democratic in the nation, swung Republican in a presidential election for the first time in 90 years.

“People were like, ‘This guy’s going to be it. He’s going to change everything, make it better again,’” she says.

Blodgett stands at the computer on her counter and scrolls through the headlines. Every day it’s something new: details in the Russia campaign investigation, shake-ups at the White House, turmoil over

Trump’s response to race-fueled riots.

His administration’s failed plans to remake the health care system may or may not cost millions their coverage, and there’s a lack of clarity over how exactly he intends to eradicate a spiraling drug crisis that now claims 142 American lives each day — a growing number of them here, in Grays Harbor County.

“Has he done anything good yet?” she asks. “Has he?”

Raised

Blodgett was born and raised in this county, where the logging economy collapsed decades ago, replaced by a simmering sense of injustice that outsiders took the lumber, built cities around the world and then left this place to decay when there was nothing more to take. The community sank into despair. Suicides increased, addiction took root. Blodgett is 59, and the rate at which people here die from drugs and alcohol has quadrupled in her lifetime.

She thought opening an antiques and pawn shop with her boyfriend on a downtown street bordered by petunias would be fun. Instead, she’s confronted every day with her neighbors’ suffering. They come to pawn their jewelry to pay for medication. They come looking for things stolen from them. They come to trade in odds and ends and tell her food stamps won’t cover the dog food. She keeps a bag of kibble behind the register. Now they come to discuss Trump, and their differing degrees of faith that he will make good on his promise to fix the rotting blue-collar economy that brought this despair to their doorstep.

Many here agree that the thrashing and churning in Washington looks trivial when viewed from this place 3,000 miles away that so many residents have been trying so hard to save. Some maintain confidence that Trump will rise above the chaos to deliver on his pledge to resurrect the American dream. Others fear new depths of hopelessness if he fails.

Blodgett just prays Trump understand the stakes — because in places like this, there is little room left for error from Washington, D.C.

There, he is tweeting insults about senators and CNN. Here, her neighbors have been reduced to living in cars.

Across the country, Trump disproportionately claimed these communities where lifetimes contracted as the working class crumbled.

Penn State sociologist Shannon Monnat spent last fall plotting places on a map experiencing a rise in “deaths of despair” — from drugs, alcohol and suicide wrought by the decimation of jobs that used to bring dignity. On Election Day, she glanced up at the television. The map of Trump’s victory looked eerily similar to hers documenting death, from New England through the Rust Belt all the way here, to the rural coast of Washington, a county of 71,000 so out-of-theway some say it feels like the end of the earth.

Boomtown

Aberdeen was built as a boomtown at the dawn of the 20th century. Its spectacular landscape — the Chehalis River carves through tree-topped hills to the harbor — offered ships easy access to the Pacific Ocean. Millionaire lumber barons built mansions on the hills. There were restaurants and theaters and traffic that backed up as the drawbridge into town seesawed up and down for ship after ship packed with timber. Now that drawbridge pretty much stays put.

The economy started to slip in the 1960s, slowly at first, as jobs were lost to globalization and automation. Then the federal government in 1990 limited the level of logging in an attempt to save an endangered owl.

Today, the riverbank hosts a homeless encampment where residents pull driftwood from the water to construct memorials to the dead. An 8-foot cross honors their latest loss: A 42-year-old man who had heart and lung ailments made worse by infrequent medical care and addiction. A generation ago, people like him worked in the mills, lived in tidy houses and could afford to see a doctor, says the Rev. Sarah Monroe, a street minister here. “But instead his life ended living in a tent on the riverbank.”

The county’s population is stagnating and aging, as many young and able move away. Just 15 percent of those left behind have college degrees. A quarter of children grow up poor. There is a critical shortage of doctors. All that gathered into what Karolyn Holden, director of the public health department, calls “a perfect storm” that put Grays Harbor near the top of the lists no place wants to be on: drugs, alcohol, early death, runaway rates of welfare.

“Things went from extremely good to not good to bad to worse, and we’ve got generations now where they don’t know anything else,” she says. “We have a lot of people without a lot of hope for themselves.”

Forrest Wood grew up here; his parents even picked his name in tribute to the local timber history. He watched drugs take hold of his relatives, and he swore to himself that he would get out, maybe become a park ranger. But he started taking opioid painkillers as a teenager, and before he knew it he was shooting heroin — a familiar first chapter in the story of American addiction.

He sits under a bridge next to a park named after Kurt Cobain, the city’s most famous son, the Nirvana frontman and a heroin addict, who shot himself in the head at 27 years old in 1994. Wood is 24. He plunges a syringe full of brown liquid into his vein, though he knows well how this might end.

Cluster

“My uncle died right over there in his truck,” he says, pointing to a cluster of battered houses and blinking back tears. “He was messing with drugs. He did too much.”

Wood’s mother got treatment at the county’s methadone clinic and has stayed clean for years, paid for by her coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

Holden was so happy on the day President Barack Obama signed the legislation, she cried. It’s an imperfect program with premiums and deductibles rising for some, she says. But thousands here received coverage; the uninsured dropped from 18 percent in 2012 to 9 in 2014 — one of the greatest gains in the state.

She reads about all the proposals Republicans have offered to topple it — repeal and replace, just repeal, do nothing and let it buckle on its own — and believes the consequences of an unstable system will be most painful in counties like hers, where residents die on average three years younger than those in the rest of the state. For two terrifying weeks this summer, no insurer filed to provide coverage for the county through the exchange next year, threatening to leave thousands without an option. Other initiatives seem to be on the administration’s chopping block, too, like family planning programs to combat the high rate of teen pregnancy.

The health department last year collected 750,000 needles at its syringe exchange designed to stem the tide of drug-related disease — an incredible number for a small community, but still down from more than 900,000 the year before. Holden attributes that improvement to the methadone clinic that helps Wood’s mother and nearly 500 more stay off drugs.

Molly Carney, the executive director of Evergreen Treatment Services, says each client costs $14.75 per day for a combination of counseling and medication that prevents the sickness that strangles so many addicts’ attempts to get clean. More than 95 percent of her patients are covered by Medicaid. If the nation’s health care system collapses and patients are left uninsured, Carney says her clinic and others won’t survive, and even more will end up homeless, in jail or dead.