Faith in president unshaken in Trump country
Until Donald Trump came along and 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,” Mr. Whitt said. “I still see it.”
Despite the president’s dismal approval ratings and lethargic legislative achievements, he remains profoundly popular here in these mountains, a region so badly battered by the collapse of the coal industry it became the symbolic heart of Mr. Trump’s white working-class base.
The frenetic churn of the national news, the ceaseless Twitter taunts, the daily declarations of outrage scroll soundlessly across the bottom of the diner’s television screen, rarely registering. When they do, Mr. Trump doesn’t shoulder the blame — because the allegiance of those here is as emotional as it is economic.
It means God, guns, patriotism, saying “Merry Christmas” and not Happy Holidays. It means validation of their indignation about a changing nation: gay marriage and immigration and factories moving overseas. It means tearing down the political system that neglected them again and again in favor of the big cities that feel a world away.
On those counts, they believe Mr. Trump has delivered, even if his promised blue-collar renaissance has not yet materialized. He’s punching at all the people who let them down for so long — the presidential embodiment of their own discontent.
“He’s already done enough to get my vote again, without a doubt, no question,” Wes Lewis, a retired pipefitter and one of Mr. Whitt’s regulars, declared, dealing the day’s first hand of cards.
He thinks the mines and the factories 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. What Mr. Lewis has now that he didn’t have before Mr. Trump is a belief that his president is pulling for people like him.
“One thing I hear in here a lot is that nobody’s gonna push him into a corner,” Mr. Whitt, 35, said. He plops down at an empty table next to the card game and begins flipping through a stack of mail.
“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 into a suit and tie because he also owns a local funeral home and he’s the county coroner, elected as a Democrat.
The Whitts, like many people here, cobble together a living with a couple of jobs each — sometimes working 12 or 15 hours a day — because there aren’t many options better than minimum wage. Mr. Whitt slides a medical bill across the table.
“Looks like this one is the new helmet,” he said, and his wife tears the envelope open and reports the debt: $3,995. They will add it to a growing pile that’s already surpassed $40,000 since their son was born nine months ago with a rare condition. His skull was shaped like an egg, the bones fused together in places they shouldn’t be. Tommy has now outgrown three of the helmets he’s been required to wear after surgery so his bones grow back together like they should.
They pay $800 a month for insurance. But when they took their baby to a surgeon in Cincinnati, they learned it was out of network. In-network hospitals offered only more invasive surgeries, so they opted to pay out of pocket. At the hospital they were told that if they’d been on an insurance program for the poor, it would have all been free.
This represents the cracks in America’s institutions that drove Mr. Whitt, a lifelong Democrat, from supporting President Barack Obama to buying a “Make America Great Again” cap. Many of their welfare-dependent neighbors, he believes, stay trapped in a cycle of handouts and poverty while hardworking taxpayers are stuck with the tab and can’t get ahead.
A third of the people here live in poverty. Just 9 percent of adults have a college degree, but they always made up for that with backbreaking labor that workers traveled dozens of miles to neighboring counties or states to do, and those jobs have gotten harder to find.
Many here blame global trade agreements and the “war on coal” — environmental regulations designed by the Obama administration to curb carbon emissions — for the decline of mining and manufacturing jobs. When Mr. Trump bemoans the “American carnage” of lost factories and lost faith, it feels like he’s talking to the people in these Appalachian hills. When he scraps dozens of regulations to the horror of environmentalists and says it means jobs are on the way, they embrace him.
Coal has ticked up since Mr. Trump took office; mining companies have added 1,200 jobs across the country since his inauguration, more than 180 of them in Kentucky. But industry analysts say that was tied largely to market forces and dismiss Mr. Trump’s repeated pledges to resuscitate the coal industry as pie in the sky. Coal has been on the decline for many decades for many reasons outside of regulation: far cheaper natural gas, mechanization, thinning Appalachian seams.
Mr. Whitt ponders whether his community has so far sensed any relief. “I don’t think we’re seeing anything yet,” he said.
The stock market is surging, one of his regulars at the next table said. The tax reform plan will help them, they hope. The unemployment rate here has dipped slightly to 7.6 percent, still higher than the state and national average but better than it had been.
“With the opposition he’s had, I think he’s pulling the plow pretty good,” Mr. Lewis said from the card table. A few months ago, he said, he saw four brand-new coal rigs going through town. “For the longest time, under Obama, all we saw were trucks being pulled on wreckers, because people turned belly up, they went broke.”
Mr. Lewis said he has heard about friends of friends being called back to work. He’s noticed new trucks in people’s driveways, too, which he takes as evidence that his neighbors are feeling confident about their futures. These tiny signs stack up to him as proof.
Mr. Lewis, a registered Democrat, trusts Mr. Trump because he trusts his values. And because of that, he trusts Mr. Trump’s other promises — so strongly he can’t think of anything that would shake that faith in him. If the factories and mines don’t come back, he’ll blame the opposition. If there isn’t a wall on the Mexico border, he said, it won’t be because Mr. Trump didn’t try. If investigators find his campaign colluded with Russians, it’s because so many people are so determined to bring him down.
He watches all the news stations, he said. He almost always sides with Fox News and anchors who dismiss allegations of Russian collusion as a “witch hunt” and tout the president’s declarations of accomplishments. The people against Mr. Trump are, by extension, against people like him, too, Mr. Lewis figures.
“They don’t care if we starve to death out here, because they don’t care the first thing about anybody other than their pockets being full,” he said. “Donald Trump doesn’t care about that because Donald Trump’s pockets are already full. That’s the reason I’ve stuck with him.”
Mr. Lewis leaves the diner like he does every day as the midmorning lull tapers into the lunch rush, and Ms. Whitt scurries from the kitchen to the register to the walkup window to the ringing phone.
Soup beans are on the menu today, like they are every Wednesday. The daily specials have been the same as long as anyone can remember, cooked by a woman they all call “Nanny” who has worked in the kitchen for 35 years. People here like tradition, said Gwenda Johnson, retired after nearly 40 years in community development.
That’s why the decades-old pinball machines are still in the back room of the Frosty Freeze and ashtrays sit on the tables, because smoking is still allowed.
But Ms. Johnson acknowledges one painful and irrevocable change in the region: Coal will never be what it once was, no matter what promises Mr. Trump makes to turn back time. Appalachia should be looking for a new path, she said, not the old one.
She rattles off all the things the community stands to lose under this administration: The region relies on programs like the Appalachian Regional Commission and Economic Development Administration that provide federal money for job-training, anti-poverty efforts and beautification initiatives aimed at transitioning to a tourism economy. Mr. Trump proposed a budget that wipes out those programs. Many depend on food stamps, disability coverage and health insurance through the Affordable Care Act — all of which could be upended.
“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 said.