Trump base’s faith holding almost year into presidency
SANDY HOOK, Ky. — The regulars amble in before dawn and claim their usual table, the one next to an old box television playing the news on mute.
Steven Whitt fires up the coffee pot and flips on the fluorescent sign in the window of the Frosty Freeze, his diner that looks about the same as it did when it opened a half-century ago.
People like it that way, he thinks. It reminds them of a time before the world seemed to stray, when coal was king and the values of the nation seemed the same as the values here, in God’s Country, in this small county isolated in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
Elliott County, a blue-collar union stronghold, voted for the Democrat in each and every presidential election for its 147-year existence — until Donald Trump promised to wind back the clock.
“He was the hope we were all waiting on, the guy riding up on the white horse. There was a new energy about everybody here,” Whitt says. “I still see it.”
Despite the president’s dismal approval ratings and lethargic legislative achievements, he remains popular here, a region so battered by the collapse of coal it became the symbolic heart of Trump’s white working-class base.
The frenetic churn of the national news scrolls soundlessly across the bottom of the diner’s television screen, rarely registering. When it does, Trump doesn’t shoulder the blame — because the allegiance to him among supporters here is as emotional as it is economic. It means God, guns, patriotism. It means tearing down the political system that neglected them in favor of cities that feel a world away. On those counts, they believe Trump has delivered; he’s punching at all the people who let them down.
“One thing I hear in here a lot is that nobody’s gonna push him into a corner,” Whitt, 35, says. “He’s a fighter.”
He plops down at an empty table, drops a stack of mail onto his lap and begins flipping through the envelopes.
“Bill, bill, bill,” he reports to his wife, Chesla, who has arrived to relieve him at the restaurant they run together. He needs to run home and change out of his Frosty Freeze uniform, the first of several work ensembles he wears each day, and put on his second, a suit and tie. He also owns a local funeral home and he’s the county coroner, elected as a Democrat.
Whitt and his wife, like many people here, cobble together a living with a couple jobs each because there aren’t many options better than minimum wage. Outside of town, roads wind past rolling farms that used to grow tobacco before that industry crumbled too, then up into the hills of Appalachia.
Whitt supported Trump because of his stand on issues like guns and religion, and also his promise to revive the workingclass economy. A third of people in Elliott County live in poverty. Just 9 percent of adults have a college degree. Once, they made up for that with backbreaking labor in neighboring counties or states, but those jobs are harder to find.
Whitt doesn’t blame Trump for failures like Republicans’ inability to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He blames the “brick wall” in Washington, all the politicians who have left places like this behind. And he and his neighbors cheer Trump for moves like scrapping regulations designed to curb carbon emissions, which they condemn for leading to mining’s decline.
Coal jobs have ticked up slightly since Trump took office, but industry analysts dismiss Trump’s pledges to resuscitate the industry as pie in the sky. Coal has been on the decline for decades for reasons outside of regulation: cheaper natural gas, mechanization, thinning Appalachian seams.
Still, retired pipefitter Wes Lewis thinks the mines will soon roar back to life, and if they don’t, he believes they would have if Democrats and Republicans and the media — all “crooked as a barrel of fishhooks” — had gotten out of the way. Likewise, if there isn’t a wall built on the Mexico border, it won’t be because Trump didn’t try, he says.
“He’s already done enough to get my vote again, without a doubt,” he says.
Others find Trump’s promises dangerous.
Gwenda Johnson, retired after nearly 40 years in community development, says it’s time to acknowledge that coal will never be what it was, no matter what Trump pledges.
“I fear that when they finally realize that Donald Trump is not the savior they thought he was — if they ever come to that realization — the morale in these rural areas will be so low that they will not ever put faith in anyone again,” she says.
But Lewis is sticking by him because he feels like he has no other choice.
“Here’s the big thing,” he says, “if Trump lies to us, it won’t be anything different than what the rest of them always did.”
“[President Donald Trump] was the hope we were all waiting on, the guy riding up on the white horse. There was a new energy about everybody here. I still see it.”
Steven Whitt, Trump supporter