The Forgotten

LIKE MANY OTHERS, I was captivated by the improbable political rise of Donald J. Trump and then, even more improbably, by his election as president of the United States.

Here was the best political story in generations: a crude, louche real estate magnate and reality TV star burst on the political scene and dared to say outrageous things that would have meant the end for any other candidate. But Trump, incredibly, seemed to gain strength with each scandalous affront: during his 2015 announcement speech, he accused Mexico of sending “rapists” to America; he shamelessly led the charge in questioning President Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship; just weeks before the election, he weathered the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which he boasted in a 2005 secret recording of using his celebrity as license to randomly kiss and grope women; and during the campaign, he fended off charges from eighteen named women that he sexually assaulted or harassed them over the years.

There were other scandales, but none of them seemed to hurt him or matter much. As Trump himself famously said during the campaign, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible!”

Trump steamrolled over his sixteen Republican primary opponents, assigning many of them cruel and demeaning nicknames as he warmed up to face “Crooked Hillary” Clinton in the general election. He was not afraid to touch, even linger on, political third rails like misogyny, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and race—or to press his signature issue linked to race: rolling back illegal immigration. His shrewd slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was a nostalgic paean to a simpler, whiter time in America, when the pace of social change produced little angst. It was a time when what can be seen today as tribalism based on politically incorrect notions of who is and is not an American could thrive unabated.

The Trump story was so rich on so many levels that for a writer, the main problem was where to begin a book—what approach to take.

The overriding questions seemed to be who, exactly, voted for Trump, and why? I began to look more closely at the three Rust Belt swing states where the election had been decided: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Surprisingly, Trump won those three states by a total of 77,689 votes out of the more than thirteen million cast. If Hillary Clinton had won them, she would have become president.

The three states are overwhelmingly white and had been historically Democratic. Neither Pennsylvania nor Michigan had voted for a Republican for president since 1988—and Wisconsin not since 1984.

But it was Pennsylvania that was the most important of the three because it had the most electoral votes—twenty—and because Clinton, who had family ties to the state, had put it firmly in her column and considered it perhaps her most critical fire wall.

A closer examination of the Pennsylvania vote revealed that Trump won largely on the strength of his showing in the northeast part of the state, and it was one county—Luzerne—that led the way. Trump routed Clinton there by 26,237 votes—a margin of nearly twenty points. His victory represented an abrupt shift in political sentiment, given that President Obama won the traditionally Democratic county by eight percentage points in 2008 and by five points in 2012.

Since Luzerne—home to economically depressed Wilkes-Barre, near Scranton—provided Trump with nearly 60 percent of his winning margin in the state, it is not a stretch to say that this single county won Trump Pennsylvania—and perhaps the presidency, to the extent that the state’s demographics and voting patterns were similar to Michigan’s and Wisconsin’s.

My curiosity piqued, I decided to visit Luzerne and talk to a range of Trump voters about the choices they made. I wanted to see if the county might be a prism through which to explore the underlying reasons for one of the most shocking election results in political history.

I made my first visit on December 6, 2016, less than a month after the election, and over the next fourteen months I would make four more trips lasting up to a week at a time. Initially, I did what reporters do: read as much as I could about the place to absorb its historical background, learned who the leading public officials and community leaders were so I could use them as guideposts, and then plunged in.

During that first visit, people were friendly and welcoming—willing to talk to an outsider, to offer insights about Luzerne County, and to provide the names of Trump voters that I should talk to. I talked to the editor of the Times Leader, one of Wilkes-Barre’s two daily newspapers, and to his lead political reporter; four of Luzerne’s representatives in the state legislature; a Wilkes-Barre city councilman and local historian; and a leading radio talk show host known for having her finger on the county’s political pulse.

These people and others helped lead me to a range of Trump voters across Luzerne who seemed to represent a solid cross section of the president’s constituency. After interviewing nearly a hundred people over the time that I was in the county, I decided to tell the stories of a dozen in depth—people who I thought collectively revealed much about Trump’s appeal, or who represented key portions of his following. To be sure, there was no scientific basis for choosing those I decided to feature. Mostly it was my subjective judgment about the degree to which they served as Trump voter exemplars, as well as the strength of their stories and how they told them.

Each one of these people is different, but their lives share common themes. They have a contempt for Washington and the powers that be, who they feel have mostly abandoned them and left them marginalized by flat or falling wages, rapid demographic change, and a dominant liberal culture that mocks their faith and patriotism. They feel like everyone’s punching bag, and that their way of life is dying. They sense a loss of dignity and stature. They feel as though others are cutting in line, and that government is taking too much money from the employed and giving it to the able-bodied idle. They feel that government regulations have become strangling to small and large businesses, and that the country is in danger of being inundated by immigrants—legal and illegal.

A recent surge in the Hispanic population of Luzerne County made Trump’s raw immigration pitch relevant and attractive to many voters. For them, the new arrivals sparked not just a yearning for a whiter yesteryear, but an inclination—implicitly encouraged by Trump—to make clear that they preferred to be among their own race and social group. They felt that the place they had lived their whole lives was changing in ways they didn’t like or fully understand.

These fears had long been harbored yet usually went unmentioned. But Trump connected strongly to his aggrieved constituency, especially when he called them “the forgotten people.” That struck a chord, and then the floodgates seemed to open to him. Trump was able to activate, own, and even weaponize the resentments that Luzerne residents had over issues that were long-standing and hard to solve, if not intractable.

The phrase “the forgotten” implied that there were winners and losers. While other parts of the country have thrived in recent years under globalization and the dizzying pace of technological change, Trump voters in Luzerne and many similar places throughout the land felt dealt out of the prosperity pie, left behind, and generally unacknowledged and unappreciated. They felt relegated to the sidelines, as if their stories didn’t matter.

And by whom did they feel forgotten? By the government and the two major political parties. Less discussed was the extent to which those three institutions might have been relatively easy scapegoats, and how much the forgotten’s own personal decisions may have contributed to their frustrations in life.

So who, actually, are the people of Luzerne County who played such a pivotal role in Trump’s winning Pennsylvania and thus the presidency? There is value in listening to their stories, in considering the ground truths of their daily lives, in understanding what drives them and why they voted the way they did.

They are The Congressman. In 2006, Lou Barletta, as the mayor of Hazleton, Luzerne County’s second largest city, started a fierce debate about illegal immigration that played itself out nationally and served as a precursor to Trump’s candidacy based on the same issue ten years later. Now a congressman representing Luzerne who this year is running for the U.S. Senate against Democratic incumbent Bob Casey, Barletta was cochair of Trump’s Pennsylvania campaign and played a key role in Trump’s winning the state.

They are Trump Men like Vito DeLuca, a self-described Reagan Democrat and lawyer in Luzerne County; Marty Beccone, a registered Independent who owns a bar and restaurant in Hazleton; Ed Harry, a former labor organizer and lifelong Democrat who defied his Clinton-endorsing union leadership when he announced that he was supporting Trump; and Brian Langan, newly retired after working as a detective with the Pennsylvania State Police for more than twenty-five years.

They are Trump Women like Lynette Villano, a widow and clerk for a wastewater treatment plant who was enamored with Donald Trump from day one; Donna Kowalczyk, who owns a Wilkes-Barre hair salon and fights to save the street where she lives from further blight and decay; Kim Woodrosky—born into a family of Democrats, her father a teamster and her mother a line worker in a textile mill—who became a successful real estate investor; and Tiffany Cloud, a politically active housewife and former advertising executive who’s married to an ex–Army Special Operations officer who did three tours of combat duty.

They are The Veteran. Vets like Tiffany’s husband, Erik Olson—who did two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan—voted for Trump over Clinton by a margin of two to one nationally. Erik never considered Hillary Clinton an option and warmed to Trump gradually. He was turned off by some of his rhetorical excesses but liked his strong leadership and his vision for the country. The gauzy memories evoked by Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan appealed to Olson too.

They are The White Nationalist. Steve Smith, a strapping truck driver from Pittston, heads the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton chapter of Keystone United, a Pennsylvania “white rights” group. An avowed white supremacist, Smith received national attention in 2012 when he was elected as a write-in to the Luzerne County Republican Committee, and then got reelected by sixty-nine votes in 2016, thereby vaulting from the white extremist underground into the local political mainstream. In an era of identity politics, the phrase “white identity” has become more acceptable during the presidency of Donald Trump. Smith finds Pennsylvania—which now has the fifth highest number of hate groups in the country, along with a KKK presence in Wilkes-Barre—hospitable to his goal of getting whites to assert themselves more aggressively as America’s minority population increases. And he is thrilled by the election of Trump, who he says has been a godsend for the white nationalist message.

They are The Christian. Though Luzerne is predominantly Catholic, there is a significant and growing evangelical community. Nationwide, evangelicals went 80 percent for Trump in the election and made up nearly half of his total vote. One of Trump’s most ardent Christian followers is Jessica Harker, a registered nurse who works for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Wilkes-Barre. She calls herself “on fire” for the Lord, and freely mixes in scripture as she speaks while not shying away from saltier, earthly language. She believes that God chose Trump to be president.

All these people are white, as Trump’s voters overwhelmingly were. And they are older than forty-five—again, as were most of Trump’s voters.

And finally, there are The Democrats—minorities and white liberals left behind to navigate an uneasy coexistence with still-euphoric Trump supporters, who well recognize the key role they played in delivering Pennsylvania to the president, and who sometimes still can’t resist spiking the football about it.

With much of the country still stunned that a candidate as unusual as Trump got elected president, The Forgotten uses Luzerne County as a way to more closely examine the white working and middle class that served as the backbone of Trump’s support throughout the United States. These detailed portraits of a group of disillusioned voters, writ large, tell much of the story of the 2016 election, and offer important lessons—both for the upcoming midterm elections, which will largely be a referendum on the Trump presidency to date, and for the future of the country.

Ben Bradlee Jr., July 2, 2018