The Cheesecake Factory says it has suspended workers involved in an incident in which a black customer reportedly was subjected to verbal abuse by restaurant staff over his “Make America Great Again” cap.
Eugenior Joseph, 22, was dining with his girlfriend’s family at a Cheesecake Factory restaurant in Miami on Sunday, when his red MAGA hat was spotted by a female staff member, according to the Daily Wire, which first reported the incident. After the woman encouraged her co-workers to confront Joseph, about a dozen Cheesecake employees surrounded his table, multiple witnesses told the conservative news site.
One employee tried to scare Joseph by standing behind him “balling his fists, smacking his fists,” Joseph told the Daily Wire. When he exited a restaurant bathroom, Joseph encountered employees “clapping and yelling, and just screaming things at me,” he told the site.
The casual-dining chain operates 214 locations throughout North America.
“Upon learning of this incident, we immediately apologized to the guests in person,” a Cheesecake Factory spokesperson stated in an email to CBS MoneyWatch. “The individuals involved in the incident have been suspended pending the results of our investigation.”
‘America First – The MAGA Manifesto’ is Released
New Book Delivers a Rallying Cry for the 2018 Midterms to Ensure the Continuation of the MAGA Movement
Only the front cover. (PRNewsfoto/Pat & Kate Scopelliti)
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., May 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — A transformative book outlining the next steps in President Trump’s vaunted MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement’s evolution has hit the internet today. Written by Pat and Kate Scopelliti, two full-time entrepreneurs with patriotic souls, “America First – The MAGA Manifesto” addresses today’s heightened fears, clarifies primary goals, and provides readers a clear, intellectually stimulating foundation of this historic and mounting crusade that has swept the nation and propelled the historic election in November 2016 of President Donald J. Trump. The key questions answered in the book which is directed at all Americans regardless of party affiliation include:
Why should we support this President?
What exactly is the MAGA agenda?
Why are so many Americans passionate about the MAGA movement?
What can we do to get MAGA candidates elected in the midterms?
“‘America First: The MAGA Manifesto’ elevates the conversation and empowers us to help others understand why we believe in the President and why we welcome everyone to join us in putting America First,” said Pat Scopelliti. Follow Pat @ThyConsigliori
“The steps to achieve #MAGAVictory2018 are not complex. If not taken, however, America is in jeopardy from those who place their power and greed above that which is best for our nation and her citizens. If taken, victory on Nov. 6, 2018, will ensure America’s return to her former greatness and fulfill her destiny,” said Kate Scopelliti. Follow Kate @KateScopelliti
“America First: the MAGA Manifesto” has also been endorsed with a Foreword from Lt. Gen (R) Michael T. Flynn, one of the earliest supporters of the MAGA Movement, a close adviser to the Trump’s Presidential Campaign and his first national security adviser.
“The midterm election is only a few months off. It’s time we put possible MAGA candidates through their paces, choose those we can strongly support and do whatever we can to get out the vote this November. Complacency is not an option. I urge you to read, absorb, embrace and share the contents of the following pages. It will empower you to take the actions required to especially fill the Halls of Congress, as well as other state and local offices, with MAGA-motivated men and women,” states Flynn.
CARLIN BECKER | MAY 15, 2018 | 1:34 PM
MAGA Sanctuary City
grindall61/YouTube
Voters who are African-American — one even proudly sporting a “Make America Great Again Hat” — are sick and tired of California’s sanctuary city policies, and they had no problem voicing their complaints to the Santa Clara city council.
Speaking out against the state’s Senate Bill 54, unofficially known as the “sanctuary state” bill, the residents spoke out about the negative impacts the law has had in their communities since it was signed by Governor Jerry Brown in October.
grindall61/YouTube
“Americans are dreamers too. We’re paying for welfare, for section 8, you costing us our jobs. We’re paying for you,” one woman said. “Respect Americans. This is America! This is our home and this is our country.”
The law blocks cooperation between state and local police and federal immigration authorities by barring local law enforcement from using resources to help with federal immigration enforcement.
Hear their concerns:
“The black community is most adversely affected by illegal alien activity,” another added. “When you come here illegally, they don’t get trucked into Brentwood, they don’t trucked into Beverly Hills. They get trucked into Watts, they get trucked into the streets of Crenshaw.”
After listening to their concerns, the Santa Clara city council voted 5-0 to oppose the SB 54 — making it the first city in Los Angeles County to officially oppose the legislation. The city joins a handful of other Southern California municipalities in opposition.
The city’s resolution cities provisions in SB 54 that conflict with federal law and directs the city attorney to file a brief in support of the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state of California “if and when appropriate.”
The measure, however, is expected to be largely symbolic as Santa Clara is bound by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s policies on immigration. Nonetheless, opponents of the law rejoiced at the outcome.
grindall61/YouTube
“This is an opportunity to mobilize the conservative base around the issue that most animates the conservative base, which is immigration,” Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles, said.
“It doesn’t mean that the City Council has the power to change anything right now,” he added. “But it elevates the issue and certainly Republicans see it as an issue that might bring people to the polls.”
President Trump: Congress should get spending bills done before break
Source: The Associated Press
US President Donald Trump delivers remarks on reducing drug costs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, DC, on May 11, 2018. / AFP PHOTO / NICHOLAS KAMMNICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is urging the Senate to get its work done on funding before the August break, “or NOT GO HOME.”
The president tweeted Saturday that “Wall and Border Security should be included.” He also said that he is “waiting for approval of almost 300 nominations, worst in history.”
Trump blamed Democrats for “doing everything possible to obstruct.”
The president’s push for speedy action on spending measures and nominations followed a recent letter from a group of Senate Republicans pressing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to cancel the August recess later this year. That effort was led by Sen. David Perdue of Georgia.
The Senate Republicans said that spending more time on their pending work is particularly critical when Congress is facing what they call “historic obstruction” by Democrats.
President Trump’s Plan to Lower Drug Prices Spares Pharma Industry
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump’s long-promised plan to bring down drug prices would mostly spare the pharmaceutical industry he previously accused of “getting away with murder.” Instead he focuses on private competition and more openness to reduce America’s prescription pain.
In Rose Garden remarks at the White House Friday, Trump called his plan the “most sweeping action in history to lower the price of prescription drugs for the American people.” But it does not include his campaign pledge to use the massive buying power of the government’s Medicare program to directly negotiate lower prices for seniors.
That idea has long been supported by Democrats but is a non-starter for drugmakers and most Republicans in Congress. Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas dismissed Trump’s plan as “a sugar-coated nothing pill.”
The administration will pursue a raft of old and new measures intended to improve competition and transparency in the notoriously complex drug pricing system. But most of the measures could take months or years to implement, and none would stop drugmakers from setting sky-high initial prices.
“There are some things in this set of proposals that can move us in the direction of lower prices for some people,” said David Mitchell, founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs. “At the same time, it is not clear at all how they are going to lower list prices.”
Drugmakers generally can charge as much as the market will bear because the U.S. government doesn’t regulate medicine prices, unlike most other developed countries.
Trump’s list of 50 proposals, dubbed American Patients First, includes:
— A potential requirement for drugmakers to disclose the cost of their medicines in television advertisements.
— Banning a pharmacist “gag rule,” which prevents druggists from telling customers when they can save money by paying cash instead of using their insurance.
— Speeding up the approval process for over-the-counter medications so people can buy more drugs without prescriptions.
— Reconsidering how Medicare pays for some high-priced drugs administered at doctors’ offices.
Those ideas avoid a direct confrontation with the powerful pharmaceutical lobby, but they may also underwhelm Americans seeking relief from escalating prescription costs.
Democrats pounced on Trump for not pursuing direct Medicare negotiations, an idea he championed before reaching the White House.
“This weak plan abandons the millions of hard-working families struggling with the crisis of surging drug prices,” said Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, in a statement.
Pharmaceutical investors and analysts expressed relief after the announcement, and shares of most top drugmakers rose Friday afternoon, including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Eli Lilly.
“Trump had a choice today: to seek disruptive fundamental reform or to embrace more incremental steps,” wrote Terry Haines, a financial analyst, in an investment note. “Trump chose the incremental over the disruptive.”
Some parts of the plan were previously proposed in the president’s budget proposal sent to Congress, including providing free generic drugs to low-income seniors and sharing rebates from drugmakers with Medicare patients. Other parts could be implemented directly by the administration.
A majority of Americans say passing laws to bring down prescription drug prices should be a top priority for Trump and Congress, according to recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
As a candidate, Trump railed against the pharmaceutical industry. But as president, he has shied away from major changes and has staffed his administration with appointees who have deep ties to the industry. They include Health Secretary Alex Azar, a former top executive at Eli Lilly and Co., who joined Trump for Friday’s announcement.
Azar and other Trump officials have hinted for weeks that the plan would, in part, “dismantle” the convoluted system of rebates between drugmakers and the health care middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers, which negotiate price concessions for insurers, employers, and other large customers.
Trump called out those companies in his speech: “Our plan will end the dishonest double-dealing that allows the middleman to pocket rebates and discounts that should be passed to consumers and patients,” Trump said.
Azar later told reporters that the administration would “seek input” on doing away with drug rebates in the Medicare system to encourage more direct discounts. He gave no timeframe for more concrete steps.
“It took decades to erect this very complex, interwoven system,” Azar said in a briefing following the speech. “I don’t want to overpromise that somehow by Monday there’s going to be a radical change, but there’s a deep commitment to structural change.”
Public outrage over drug costs has been growing for years as Americans face pricing pressure from multiple sources: New medicines for life-threatening diseases often launch with prices exceeding $100,000 per year. And older drugs for common ailments like diabetes and asthma routinely see price hikes around 10 percent annually. Meanwhile, Americans are paying more at the pharmacy counter due to health insurance plans that require them to shoulder more of their prescription costs.
America has the highest drug prices in the world.
The U.S. spent $1,162 per person on prescription drugs in 2015, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s more than twice the $497 per person spent in the United Kingdom, which has a nationalized health care system.
Trump’s speech singled out foreign governments that “extort unreasonably low prices from U.S. drugmakers” using price controls and said U.S. trade representatives would prioritize the issue in trade deals.
But experts are skeptical the U.S. can pressure foreign governments to pay more for drugs.
“It’s hard to know why Germany or France or Australia would agree to something like that,” said Professor Jack Hoadley of Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute.
In the U.S., Medicare is the largest purchaser of prescription drugs, covering 60 million seniors and Americans with disabilities, but it is barred by law from directly negotiating lower prices with drugmakers.
Allowing Medicare to negotiate prices is unacceptable to the powerful drug lobby, which has spent tens of millions of dollars since Trump’s inauguration to influence the Washington conversation around drug prices, including a high-profile TV advertising campaign portraying its scientists as medical trailblazers.
The drug industry’s top lobbying arm, Pharmaceutical Research, and Manufacturers of America, spent nearly $26 million to sway federal decision-makers last year, according to records tallied by Center for Responsive Politics. The annual total was the group’s highest since the 2009 congressional fight that led to Obamacare.
The group’s chief executive, Stephen Ubl, said in a statement that some Trump proposals could help patients afford their medicines, but “others would disrupt coverage and limit patients’ access to innovative treatments.”
These Lifelong Democrats Voted for Trump and Aren’t Sorry
A baker, a mechanic, and a former union rep, all from the Rust Belt or Midwest, all Democrats, and all fed up with the status quo, say they voted for Trump and would do it again.
SALENA ZITO AND BRAD TODD
05.11.18 10:41 PM ET
Jefferson, Ashtabula County, Ohio
It is 1:45 in the morning and Bonnie Smith’s alarm has just gone off. That alarm is a reminder that, seven days a week, she is living her lifelong dream of owning a bakery.
“I come in at two-thirty in the morning. We start making doughnuts from scratch. After that, I go into the bread and pies or whatever I have gone out—like right now I need to do cupcakes, and I have a couple pies I have to put out, but I also have to check what orders are going out. Then we start soups, and by eleven o’clock we start lunch,” she explains.
At sixty-three, she is two years into her second career in the small town of Jefferson, running a Chestnut Street bakery that is a throwback to simpler times: pretty pink-and-green wallpaper decorated with cupcakes surrounds a fireplace and tables and chairs that fill the front of the bakery.
By 9 a.m., already half of her sugar cookies, tea cakes, cream wafers, brownies, mini tarts, and thumbprints are gone. With the help of her grandson, a fresh batch of sugary glazed doughnuts makes its way from the kitchen to a tray in the display case.
The aroma is irresistible and intoxicating and gently teases the senses.
A young mother enters with her three-year-old daughter, Evelyn, who immediately makes a beeline to the display case filled with colorful cookies and pastries and, with the willfulness and determination only a toddler possesses, plants her face against the case to get a closer look at the cupcake with rainbow sprinkles on top.
To the girl’s delight, Smith hands her the confection, and minutes later Evelyn’s face and fingers are covered in pink icing. The imprint of her little face on the display case—a smudged outline of a tiny nose and lips—makes Smith smile broadly.
As Smith started making soup for the anticipated lunch crowd, the diminutive brunette was sporting a white apron with Legally Sweet embroidered across the front, the name of her shop and a hat tip to her 30-plus years at the Ashtabula County Sheriff’s Office.
She started working as a cook in the sheriff’s department when the youngest of her three children was five years old. It was the same job her mother had.
But Smith wanted more.
So she went back to school for the criminal law while she worked as a cook in the courthouse. She then moved over to dispatch and up through the ranks in the sheriff’s department until she made deputy, all the while raising her three children with her husband, an electrician for Millennium Inorganic Chemicals—one of the last big blue-collar employers in the once-mighty manufacturing county of Ashtabula, wedged between the shore of Lake Erie and the Pennsylvania state line, northeast of Cleveland.
Smith was raised a Democrat, her parents were Democrats, she is married to a Democrat, and she worked for elected Democratic sheriffs in a county that had not voted a Republican into the local office for as long as anyone you find can remember.
Until 2016, that is, when Ashtabula picked Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton and swept in a local ticket of Republicans underneath him.
Bonnie Smith was one of the unlikely participants in that unforeseen realignment that happened across the Great Lakes region in hundreds of communities like Ashtabula County, flipping Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Iowa into the Republican side of the electoral college after serving as what journalist Ron Brownstein dubbed the reliable industrial Democratic “Blue Wall” for decades.
How Democratic was Smith, and how recently? In March 2016, she voted for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the Ohio primary contest. Voting Republican wasn’t even on the table for her, until suddenly it was, just a few months later.
“I am not sure what happened, but I started to look around me, and my town and my county, and I thought, ‘You know what? I am just not in the mood anymore to just show up and vote for who my party tells me I have to vote for,’” she says.
She was not alone. Ashtabula County had given its votes to John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Michael Dukakis. It gave Barack Obama a 55 percent majority share of its vote twice—before turning 180 degrees to prefer Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of 57 percent to 38 percent, a 31-point swing from one election to the next.
At first look, the numerical magnitude of Ashtabula’s swing, in a nation presumed frozen in partisan polarization, is what seems notable. At second look, the remarkable aspect is just how common that kind of change was in 2016 in the states that make up the Rust Belt.
Thirty-five counties in Ohio, long the nation’s premier presidential bellwether, swung 25 or more points from 2012 to 2016. Twenty-three counties in Wisconsin, 32 counties in Iowa, and 12 counties in Michigan switched from Obama to Trump in the space of four years.
With few exceptions, these places are locales where most of America’s decision makers and opinion leaders have never been. Trump only carried 3 of the nation’s 44 “mega counties,” places with more than one million in population, and only 41 of the country’s 129 “extra large” counties with more than 400,000 but less than one million. Those 173 sizable counties are home to 54 percent of the U.S. population, and in 135 of them, Trump even lagged behind the net margin performance of losing 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Trump crawled out of that mathematical hole in the all-but-forgotten communities—thousands of them.
It took a lot of Bonnie Smiths, in a lot of places like Ashtabula County, to wreck political expectations—and if their political behavior in 2016 becomes an affiliation and not a dalliance, they have the potential to realign the American political construct and perhaps the country’s commercial and cultural presumptions as well.
For Smith, who lives with her husband, George, on a working farm in nearby Saybrook, the political tipping point—even more than the job losses and the decay of the area—was a result of her faith and her growing disconnect on cultural issues from the candidates she had previously supported.
“I had looked the other way for far too long, had accepted that I was supposed to be more modern in my views when I wasn’t comfortable with the views my party started to take,” Smith says, making clear that this was a difficult decision to have made and to discuss publicly. “And I took a stand for myself, my beliefs, for life, and for my country.”
She says she also took a stand for her community: “All of this decay has happened under their [the Democrats’] watch.”
The shopping district where Legally Sweet sits is struggling; a Family Dollar store is around the corner, and the majestic Ashtabula County courthouse, where she worked for years, is across the street. Shuttered businesses dot both sides of the street.
“The town closes up about three o’clock on the weekdays and, like, one o’clock on Saturday. There’s nothing here. The people come in and… you’re making it but you’re not. You know? You’ve got enough to skimp by for the next day, but that’s it,” she says.
The statistics on the area’s own economic development website paint a picture of an Ashtabula County stuck in transition and trying to creatively reinvent itself to get out of the Great Recession, from which the wealthier America on the East and West coasts recovered years ago. As of May 2016, the local economic partnership wrote that the county’s employed workforce level was still stuck under 42,000 people—nearly the same figure as at the bottom of the national recession in 2010, a fall from 46,000 in its pre-recession high.2 Nationally, the number of employed Americans had bounced back to pre-recession levels by 2014.
The physical reality of the county’s industrial footprint tells the same story. Empty, idle, hulking coal-fired power plants line the lakeshore, and the docks that once attracted waves of Italian and Scandinavian immigrants to unload coal and iron ore now see little activity. The county’s population, according to the Census Bureau’s 2016 estimates, is 98,231, almost exactly what it was after the 1970 census, a span that saw the country as a whole grow by 59 percent.
A Democrat for decades, Smith didn’t quite know what to expect when she went home one day and told George she was thinking about supporting Trump. He told her he was already there. “So there was that,” she says, laughing.
America’s political experts, from party leaders to political science professors to journalists to pundits, did not expect the Smiths, or enough people like them, to vote for Donald Trump. Virtually every political and media expert missed the potential of Trump because they based their electoral calculus on assumptions that they hadn’t bothered to check since the last presidential election. To recognize the potential of the Trump coalition, analysts would have had to visit places they had stopped visiting and listen to people they had stopped listening to.
“I am kind of that voter that was hiding in plain sight that no one saw coming. I was right here all along. I’ve seen the job losses here, the rise in crime, the meth and heroin problem, society essentially losing hope; something just gave in with me,” Bonnie Smith says.
Viroqua, Vernon County, Wisconsin
Joe Keenan looks like a guy who has spent his entire life working with his hands. They are callused and faintly smudged—not because they are unclean but because years of tinkering, plowing, and bailing have left their marks. And they are muscular, a sign of the constant use of them over a lifetime.
“Oh yeah, I grew up on a farm,” Keenan says, and subconsciously rubs his hands together.
At around five-eleven, he has a stocky build. His sandy brown hair and beard are sprinkled with gray, and while both are cropped short, the humidity from a fresh rain causes wiry curls to emerge.
He is wearing blue jeans and a royal blue pocket T-shirt with Joe’s Repair logo over his left breast pocket; he is a quick-witted, to-the-point, pure no-nonsense Midwesterner who loves to laugh at his own puns.
Keenan is sitting with a group of acquaintances at the VFW in Viroqua on a shiny red barstool; he is a stone’s throw from his home and the small business he owns.
This is the place to get a drink in this town of four thousand souls.
Located in the southwest corner of Wisconsin, surrounded by the lush Driftless region, with the Mississippi to the west and the Kickapoo River running through the center, Vernon County includes a latticework of throwback small farms in an era of large conglomerate-farming enterprises.
“The geography of the area helped us keep our farms smaller and family-owned,” says Keenan of the Driftless region, which is known for the hilly topography that is a hallmark of much of the Upper Mississippi River Valley, a quirk that happened when glaciers that formed ten thousand years ago never reached the area to flatten it.
“I grew up here. We moved into the Volk area when I was five. Before that, we were down on the rural edge of Vernon County in the De Soto area. My folks came from Iowa, basically followed their parents from Iowa to Wisconsin. I always like to say only one came across, but there’s a lot of us here now,” he says.
“I own a repair shop, farm machines and so forth,” he explains. He mostly makes house calls to repair the farm machinery, essential to local farmers to get their crops out of the ground and out the door in the most expedient way possible. “You break down and can’t move your crops, you don’t get paid; you don’t get paid, you can’t feed your family, your livestock, you are dead,” he explains of the vital work he does to keep area farmers’ businesses rolling when something breaks down.
There is a diversity among farmers here; the descendants of the Germans who migrated to the area over a century ago, a robust Amish settlement, and a new wave of organic farmers.
Keenan is one of 11 kids; his mother was one of 16, his father one of 8. He started doing serious farm chores at around 6 years old. “We milked the cows. I also was involved in loading hay bales off the wagon. In those days, we didn’t have a thrower and so everything was by hand. We backed the wagons into the haymow and unloaded them by hand and stacked everything. The time-consuming part of it taught you a lot about work. I came from a family that was all about pride in your work,” he says.
The social side of Keenan’s life followed true-to-form for a dairy farm kid in western Wisconsin. “When I graduated from high school I married my high school sweetheart.” True to his working-class Catholic roots, Keenan grew up in a Democrat family. “Although I always thought my mom may have been a closet Republican,” he says, laughing.
Keenan is not afraid to say who he voted for in 2016; he is also not afraid to say who he voted for in 2008 and 2012.
“I voted Obama, Obama, Trump,” he says.
Why did he vote for Obama? “Well, in political change is a potent message and he had a potent delivery. I thought the country needed something different, he was poised, confident, and had a good message and I bought it the first time,” he says.
Keenan’s support for Obama was not unusual in Vernon County. The Democrat won 60 percent of the local vote in 2008, beating Senator John McCain by 23 points in this rural rectangle that is home to 30,814 people—a wider margin than he scored statewide.
Joe Keenan’s vote the second time for Obama was more personal; he did not care for Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee.
“I have a sister who married into the Mormon religion and I find the religion too secretive and controlling for me. I was concerned that might influence how he governed, and so Obama got my vote again,” he says. And again in 2012, Keenan’s vote mirrored the total vote of his rural county on the Mississippi River, which picked the incumbent Democrat over Romney by 15 points.
By 2016, Vernon County had flipped to support Donald Trump— both in the presidential primary and in the general election—one of 23 counties in the Badger State to swing from Obama to Trump. Only Iowa saw more localities change hands, as both states moved hard to the GOP. Wisconsin hadn’t been painted red in the electoral college since 1984.
Hillary Clinton’s inability to repeat Obama’s victories in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan alone denied her the electoral college majority she needed to become president. She needed only 38,875 voters across those three states to choose her instead of Trump—and she left plenty on the table, getting 598,012 fewer votes in those three states that Obama had, including almost 2,000 fewer in Vernon County alone.
Vernon’s history of voting for Democrats is not just a past-tense assessment. In 2016, even as Trump carried it by 5 points, incumbent Republican senator Ron Johnson lost the county to Democrat Russ Feingold, despite carrying the state. Johnson lost Vernon County in his 2010 race too, as did Republican governor Scott Walker in 2014.
Keenan finds it comical that some people are embarrassed to admit they voted for the Manhattan businessman, and he uses it to needle them.
“Trust me, I am the only person in my family who is not afraid to say I voted for Trump.”
He and his relatives are devout Catholics. “It is an important part of who we are, who I am.” They were also devout Democrats.
Viroqua is an interesting mix of rural and hipster, or perhaps the better word is “hippie.”
On one hand, there are the descendants of farmers who have worked the rich soil for over a century; on the other, there is an evident counterculture on the county seat’s Main Street that seems more Vermont than Vernon County.
During the 2016 Democratic Party primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, Viroqua was plastered with Sanders signs everywhere.
The hippie lifestyle here is legit. The local farmers’ market on a warm spring Saturday has tie-dyed shirts, pottery, and organic everything from honey to beets to chocolate. Kickapoo Coffee, an austere shop just across the street with pour-over coffee and organic pastries, has two young men in flannel shirts and full beards playing the fiddle as young people line up for the organic coffee.
La Farge, a tiny Vernon County town located along the Kickapoo River, is home to the second-biggest employer in the county behind the medical center: the Coulee Region Organic Produce Pool (CROPP), the farming co-op that makes Organic Valley brand dairy products, and claims to produce four in every ten gallons of organic milk sold in the United States.
Organic Valley was born when the small farmers of Vernon County recognized there was power in numbers and formed CROPP. It began as just a seven-farm collective, but today it includes more than a thousand farmers nationwide.
Downtown Viroqua is sprinkled with antique stores, trendy shops such as the art gallery that specializes in local artists, and a fair share of closed businesses as well. And the city has received a modicum of national recognition for its “food scene,” with local restaurants serving farm-to-table dishes to draw in customers.
An elderly woman outside of the art cooperative sits on a bench watching the crowd of younger families file past her with their organic vegetables, honey, and Amish jams and fruits, and remarks forlornly, “By 3 p.m. no one is on this street; not that way when I was a young woman.”
Her reflection expresses part of the complexity of Viroqua—the past of a downtown Main Street filled with shoppers frequenting local stores now struggles to reemerge. The new movement has had some successes, but there are still gaps in the Main Street storefronts. Vernon County’s population after the 2000 census was essentially no different from its headcount in the 1900 census—but the decade and a half since 2000 has seen modest growth and, more significantly, the county is now younger than either the state or nation as a whole, the holy grail of statistics for localities in the graying upper Midwest. Twenty-six percent of Vernon Countians are now under the age of 18, increasing the chances that the county can replace its population sustainably.
Keenan’s extended family has done its part in that; he grew up with lots of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins living all around him.
“Yeah, we spent quite a bit of time together. It was always looking forward to the big family gatherings. There was never a shortage of food. Regardless of how many people you had, there was never a shortage of food. You know, it’s funny because when they would do that, it wasn’t just family showing up, it was always the neighbors too,” he says.
After high school and a youthful marriage, “I went into the repair business. Farm repair started at an implement dealer. I always sort of had that knack, of course, I followed an older brother who only could break things. So, naturally, I learned how to fix the things he broke on the farm,” he says.
His wife has a similar background. “We both were basically five miles from each other. It was funny because we’d taken over both family farms; and when we were dating, ten miles back and forth wasn’t that far, but when you’re hauling feed, ten miles is a long way,” he says.
Keenan raised a family on the farm repair work over the decades. “I made house calls, raised three boys from that business,” he says.
His middle son now lives in Japan, teaching English to Japanese students; his youngest son is a nurse and lives in La Crosse. “And my oldest son is 31 and lives with his wife on the family farm. He is really good at breeding cattle.”
Going back to his vote for Obama, he repeats: “You know, in politics ‘change’ is a very good line, but I don’t think any of it really meant anything. My vote ended up going for a guy who went back and apologized for everything we have done in our history, that is something that I know I can’t do because I don’t look back on anything that I’ve done. Because if you know that you’re doing right, you can’t go back and apologize,” Keenan says.
“So here’s what I haven’t told you: my firstborn was a stillborn child, and she was the little girl. And I know that everything that we go through in our lives makes us who we are today. And that’s for the whole nation. And I can’t imagine going back and apologizing for everything in our lives, because it makes us become stronger for everything that we go through. And the bad things actually make us better, if you aren’t bitter.”
They strengthen your character, he adds. “The biggest disappointment with Obama was the direction of the country, it just tanked and I don’t mean the recession, I mean where he took the country in the face of that. I kept hoping he’d get it right, I kept hoping he was going to change, the simple fact is he did want to change the country, but not in the right direction.
“Why I liked Trump was because he is going to clean out Washington,” Keenan says. “You know, when I was little I remember going to visit my grandpa and grandma, I got to stay down there for a week. They had just taken this farm property over, which that eventually became the family farm. They were clearing rats out of a building, and I’ll never forget how they got the rats out of the building. It’s the same concept—they have to want to leave. Trump is the kind of guy who is going to make the rats in Washington want to leave, he is going to be so disruptive, so outside the norm, that the swamp will drain because the swamp can’t stand him and how he is running things.
“That is how you really change things. You make it so offensive for the swamp rats to be there, so unlike anything they had experienced, rip their power out from under them, and that is what he is doing. But that, that gets the country going in the right direction.
“In 2015, when they first walked out on the stage, I truly wanted Ohio’s governor,” Keenan says of eventual third-place finisher John Kasich. A friend sitting three barstools away spits his beer out: “You got to be shitting me!” he says, then apologizes for the mess.
“Not when they first walked out, now come on now, think at the moment,” Keenan replies, trying to explain his motives as they both break out into laughter. The Kasich moment, he says, lasted a week; then he went to Trump. By the following spring, when the Wisconsin primary rolled around, Keenan and Vernon County gave Trump a big 11-point margin over his nearest competitor. That support happened even as Trump was losing the state overall by double digits to Senator Ted Cruz, in his biggest stumble on the way to the GOP nomination.
“The one thing you saw with Trump is he didn’t pretend to be anything else but himself. Nothing stuck to him. To me, you know, if you aren’t afraid of the skeletons in your closet, you can do a lot of things,” he explains.
Since Trump has been in office, Keenan has not regretted his vote, taking the president’s side in his ongoing battles. He has been disappointed in the press and other elected officials, both Democrats and Republicans, in their reactions to Trump. “Well, I think they’re more concerned about destroying him and they have no concern about the country,” he says.
“Look, I am never going to blindly support someone again, but I will tell you this: I do like how he is taking on the establishment since becoming president. I like that he doesn’t back down, no matter how exhausting it is; if he is standing up for us, I will stand up for him. It really is just that simple. He is a reflection of our frustrations, but he is also a force that makes people want to be part of, like working together and you accomplish something, part of a thing.
“It is like when I finish a job and fix something that no one said could be fixed, or if we are all working together on the farm and accomplishing something, it is being part of that, is what it is like to support Trump, because honestly, you are supporting yourself and your country.”
Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania
Within moments of meeting Ed Harry, you understand he is the kind of guy you want on your side.
His impression is blunt and immediate; you also understand that if he were to become an adversary, he would be a relentless opponent.
Harry sits in the last booth of D’s Diner, a Plains Township eatery just over the border of Wilkes-Barre’s city limits. He is leaning against the tiled wall facing the dining room and the broad rectangular windows that look out onto the parking lot; white eyelet lace curtains and red-white-and-blue stars in the windows add to the charm of the diner.
Up front, the place is filled with customers at a chrome lunch counter as waitresses busily fill coffee cups, take orders, and greet regulars with a warm hello and the universal diner question that implies familiarity: “The usual?”
“The usual” repeatedly is, of course, the answer.
A double-layered white cake with whipped white icing and toasted coconut sits on the counter covered in a glass cake dome. It is 7:30 in the morning and already two pieces have been served.
For 29 years D’s Diner had been Eddie’s Place; when the owner fell ill in late 2016, it closed. But unlike most businesses that close in this county, this one reopened with a new owner and a remodel.
But the menu, the hospitality, and the servers remained, as did the loyal customers. The waitress explains there is a line to get a seat at the counter or in a booth on most days; that was certainly the case on this day.
Outside on Fox Hill Road, some businesses are gone or vacated; there is a Ford dealership, a pet cemetery, and a smattering of homes.
Overlooking the diner on a hillside less than half a mile away is Pennsylvania’s first casino, the Mohegan Sun Pocono.
For generations, the Wyoming Valley—where Luzerne sits along the banks of the mighty Susquehanna River—has been the home of the quintessential blue-collar worker, the sons, and daughters of the sons and daughters of immigrant coal miners and factory hands.
Today, Luzerne County is one of the sweet spots for finding the kind of Trump voter who has received the most public attention— the Red-Blooded and Blue-Collared voter.
Harry, like so many others in Pennsylvania with a lifetime of loyalty to the Democrats now disrupted by globalism and Donald Trump, fits the bill—and he’s quick to spot others who do too.
On this day, seven men under the age of thirty, dressed in utility uniforms and hard hats, take seats across from Harry in an oversized booth. They squeeze a chair in on the end. He nods and smiles; they nod and smile.
“You see all of those young men,” he says, loud enough for them to hear, “they probably all voted for Trump. They were all Democrats and they all voted for Trump,” Harry says.
Harry orders the ham-and-cheese omelet with white toast; he doesn’t notice that they heard him.
As Harry makes his way toward the restroom, one of the young men grins sheepishly, leans over, and says, “Shhhhhhhh, you know we can’t talk politics when we have our company uniforms on,” pauses, and then pulls out the familiar red Make America Great Again ball cap from his back pocket.
His friends laugh, as he hurriedly stuffs the ball cap safely back into its hiding place.
For most of his life, Harry was a Democrat. He still is. “I wasn’t just a guy who voted straight Democrat up and down the ballot, it was a religion to me, it was my identity, and it was also an essential part of my job,” he says.
Harry’s father worked the coal mines here in Luzerne County for 33 years, as did his father before him and his father before that, four generations to be exact, part of the great Welsh migration that came to this part of the country in the mid-19th century.
When Harry was a senior in high school, his father almost died in a mining accident. “I don’t know how he didn’t die, but his belt got caught on his buddy’s there in a shaft hanging from a 60-degree angle. At that time, he weighed like 260 pounds, so my dad’s weight brought him against the side of the shaft, saved his life,” Harry says.
“He came home and walked in the house when he wasn’t supposed to be there. He was working the afternoons, so I wouldn’t expect him home until after 11. He was there like 7, 7:30. I’m doing homework. He comes in and gets a glass and fills it up with whiskey and drinks it straight down, which was quite unusual since he normally drank beer. He filled another glass up and drank half of it and then sat down and started crying.
“First time I ever saw my dad cry, and he told me what happened. His biggest concern was, ‘How am I going to support my family now when I can’t go back in the mines because I’m afraid?’”
His father eventually took a Republican patronage job at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT). His son called that moment the time his father “sold his soul.”
Harry’s mother was first-generation American, and his maternal grandfather was Russian: “He worked on the railroads, spoke broken English up until the day he died,” he explains.
After high school, Harry went to college “mostly to satisfy my parents,” but then the Vietnam War got in the way. Harry spent four years in the U.S. Air Force, two years rotating between Thailand and Vietnam and two years working for the NSA.
Harry says his unit’s primary function in Southeast Asia was to cancel attack flights. “If the pilots gave out their strike coordinates in the clear and they get canceled, chances are they’re going to get shot out of the sky because the Vietnamese had a very sophisticated communications-intercept system. They knew exactly where they were going to come in.
“I rotated back just after we broke the whole Laotian war. Our commander was given 12 hours to get to the Philippines to tell them how and where we got that information because it was top, top, top, top secret. When he came back he said that they had every intelligence organization that existed [in] 1968 and ’69; from the White House intelligence to the Defense Department to the CIA, the NSA, all of them there.”
In the end, he wound up on a different assignment. “I had been scheduled to go to train the CIA operatives in Laos on how to use the equipment they never used before. Me, a kid from Allentown.
“The funny thing is, when I rotated out, they rotated another kid from Allentown in to do the training. He ended up getting shot, but he survived okay. That’s a long time ago,” Harry says.
When Harry came home, the experience left him with the ability to do only two things for an entire year. “I went to night school and I drank. I drank a lot.”
But college didn’t really stick, “and drinking has no good end-game,” he says.
So he got a job locally, working for a supermarket service, but lasted only a year before he got laid off. “Then I took a job in a state facility, in a mental institution, as a custodian, and honestly, I loved it.”
It was there he discovered his calling: persuasion.
Harry became part of the organizing force during the explosive rise of public-sector unions in the United States in the early ’70s, which was very similar to the previous rise of industrial-based unions during the Great Depression.
Teachers, firefighters, sanitation workers, police officers, as well as secretaries and custodians, beefed up the union membership rolls in record-breaking numbers in the early ’70s.
Harry’s job was part of an extensive campaign to turn public-sector facilities in Florida into union facilities.
“I would go to mental health centers at five in the morning, stand outside that gate, and pass out notices of a meeting for maybe that night or the next to test the interest of the workers,” he says.
Beforehand, he would go in and meet with the management to find out where he should be, or shouldn’t be. “Usually nobody showed up in the beginning, so it’s a process.”
He was there for a six-month assignment that turned out to take two years, ending up at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “I was there to win over the custodians, all the maintenance people, all of the assistants to the deans, etc.
“It turns out I was very good at winning over the trust and confidence of people. It wasn’t an easy job, you know, these guys understand that if the shop they work in doesn’t become unionized they might be risking their jobs. But I was taught at a young age your work ethic was your word, and whatever you did in your life you were only as good as your word,” he says.
After two years he left Florida and brought his skills to work in his hometown. “My job switched to being someone who did contract negotiations, and I also handled arbitration cases and labor board stuff,” he says.
When he returned home he found that his father’s patronage job was gone, the Republican governor had termed out of office, and a new Democratic governor, with Democratic patronage hires, was now in charge of PennDOT.
“So I am registered as Democrat, which pissed everybody off; I was sort of disowned. To make a long story short, I ended up helping Dad get a job back with PennDOT because of all the Democratic friends I had. I did not participate in my sister’s wedding. I wouldn’t be an usher because we had words over politics.”
Eventually, they made peace.
Politics for him became part of the job; he always voted Democrat; so did his friends. As he rose up in the ranks he became deeply involved in national politics, eventually serving as a delegate at the national convention for Bill Clinton in 1992.
From 1980 until he retired he was in charge of the eight or nine northeastern counties in Pennsylvania for the Democrats. “I coordinated all the phone banks, the door-to-door knocks, anything that was related to any election, from gubernatorial elections, to presidential, to local.”
Harry also spent much of his time as a union arbitrator, representing members of his union—a position that earned him their trust, a critical relationship to have to convince voters which candidate for office would have your back.
Harry adjusts his navy blue Penn State ball cap. At 70, he looks 15 years younger despite his bushy gray hair; his eyes are dark and piercing, his beard trimmed neatly, his voice deep and commanding. If anyone went to central casting looking for a blue-collar union boss type and Harry was in line, he would be the first man picked.
The job eventually started to take its toll.
“I can remember one arbitration case I had, a PennDOT driver, drunk. Didn’t think anything of it. I go to the arbitration case, he comes in drunk. In our position, you can’t say no to anybody. You have to represent the people—which a lot of people thought, ‘How could you?’”
He pauses, rubs his deep-set eyes, then continues. “I represented pedophiles, rapists, bookies. I had to. I don’t have any other choice. When you are an arbitrator, that is no different than being an attorney. You have to fulfill that requirement. You’re taking their money, so you have to defend them; good, bad, and the ugly.
“I’ve been in the middle of an arbitration case when I find out the evidence that gets presented by the other side and I’m not aware of it, and I should be because my people should be telling me, so I’d call a time-out and say, ‘Let’s go talk’ to the person I am defending.
“And I ask them: ‘Did you know about this? Why didn’t you tell me? Well, just so you know, we’re going back in there and the case is over.’ Boom, so I’ve done that, gone back in and said, ‘My apologies for wasting everybody’s time.’ Then I withdraw my grievance and leave. Because that is the right thing to do.”
In 2003, he retired after 25 years. “I didn’t want to work any longer. I was burned out. I ended up protecting people who shouldn’t have been protected. They should have been fired. The whole workforce changed from people who looked forward to going to work, to people who make excuses not to,” he says.
Even after his retirement, he served as the president of the Greater Wilkes-Barre Labor Council, serving as the powerful business agent for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). He was still the face of the labor movement in Luzerne County, he was still the guy who met with the local politicians, negotiated events, helped folks find jobs, and led protests when Washington stopped listening.
But when the establishment Democrats stopped caring about his people, he stopped caring about them.
Harry’s fracture from the Democratic Party started with the trade agreements that he says are structured in such a way that they incentivize corporations to base themselves overseas. “Outside of our country they don’t have to worry about paying decent benefits, living wages, and providing salaries as a worker moves up the ladder,” he says.
“My party, the party that was supposed to be the party of the working guy, the guy I stood up for and worked for all of my careers, was no longer part of this new ascending Democratic coalition. Blue-collar America essentially had the door shut in its face,” he says.
Traditionally, Luzerne County has been emblematic of the heart and soul of the working-class wing of the Democratic Party. Its residents personified the character traits of the New Dealers; they supported government social programs that served as a safety net for the residents, they were pro-life, pro-gun, they joined unions and churches alike, they were multidenominational but were likely found in someone’s pew most Sundays.
Drive through Wilkes-Barre, or Hazelton, or the dozens of coal-patch towns that make up this Wyoming Valley county, and you will see churches of all denominations clustered in every corner. Each one was built to accommodate the wave of immigrants that flooded this region a hundred years ago, and each represented a different ethnic group that established footholds in tight-knit city blocks.
Today, those ethnic churches stand like stone sentinels guarding parishioners who have long been gone; most have closed. In the past decade, dozens of churches have been shuttered, some demolished or left vacant. The once glorious stained-glass windows have been sold or vandalized, their prized artifacts spread to other parishes across the country.
The small groceries, movie houses, diners, taverns, and schools that surrounded them are also gone. Many of the homes are worn away by decay, neglect, or abandonment. When the jobs left, the people left.
This area thrived during the country’s first industrial revolution. It is sputtering during the technological revolution. Automation and technology are its enemies.
“Economically, we have been struggling for a generation, probably two; the mills, factories, and coal mines are essentially all closed, the labor unions have weakened, we don’t have the members or the power to persuade or punish big corporations if they cut jobs or benefits or threaten to pack up and leave if we don’t concede,” he says.
Even when the unions did concede, the final humiliation was that those companies left Luzerne County anyway, according to Harry.
When this region was nothing more than a frontier settlement, a new form of coal, anthracite, was found along the riverbanks of the Susquehanna all throughout the valley. But that discovery presented a problem: anthracite was so hard and dense, it could not sustain a fire. Tradesmen could use it for forging, and they did during the Revolutionary War, but little else; and no one had yet figured out how it could be used for commerce. It wasn’t until a couple of decades into the 19th century when Judge Jesse Fell invented an iron grate capable of maintaining a fire using anthracite, that the Wyoming Valley found its way into the center of the Industrial Revolution.
That invention changed the course of the Wyoming Valley in the final decades of the 19th century; it brought commerce, great wealth, and a massive migration of European immigrants to the county. Coal-patch towns, unincorporated towns, and company towns began to dot the valley at a rapid pace.
The coal brought the canals, the canals brought the railroads, and the railroads brought the rapid transportation of commerce that lured the immigrants, hundreds of thousands of them, including Harry’s ancestors.
At the turn of the 20th century, it is estimated that as many as 100,000 immigrants ended up in the coalfields and coal towns of Luzerne County. The first wave came from Wales and England, like Ed Harry’s family; then came the Germans, Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Russians, and Ukrainians. By 1930, immigration had taken Luzerne County to its peak population of 445,109 souls. Today, with only 316,383 people in residence, evidence of the immigrant influence is everywhere, from the architecture to the old ethnic clubs, to the current heritage festivals that dot the county’s calendar.
“They were mostly poor people, peasants from the Old Country who came here to make a better life, to become this great thing called ‘an American,’ and to work. Oh, did they work,” says Harry.
One hundred years ago, miners here produced nearly 100 million tons of coal—ten years ago that number had tumbled to 1.7 million tons. But even though for decades coal has had barely an echo of its former impact, the people of Luzerne still identified with the life.
“It was that promise of a better life that became their identity, and that identity has been passed down generation after generation; even if you never stepped in the same coal mine your father or your grandfather did, you still identified as that being part of who you are,” he says.
In an irony only nature could produce, the same high-heat geological forces that made Luzerne’s coal eons ago ensured it would not cash in on the region’s economic boom of the 21st century— fracking. The Marcellus Shale formation that has revitalized much of northern Pennsylvania with oil and gas production ends before it reaches the Luzerne County border, along what one prominent geologist called a “line of death.”
The same heat that made the coal “cooked out” whatever gas existed in prior millennia. So while counties just north or west move on to a new fossil-fueled economic era, Luzerne must stare at its past.
The enduring self-identity of the mining life is part of the mystery of Luzerne that reporters and pundits and national Democrats missed when calculating who a Luzerne County voter is, according to Harry. They made the same mistake in places like this around the country.
Throughout and after the 2016 campaign, national news outlets were full of derision for this easy-to-spot hard-core type of Trump voter. “Trump owes his victory to the uninformed,” screamed a piece in Foreign Policy magazine two days after the election, under the unnuanced headline “Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant, Literally.” It became formulaic for analysts who did not understand the Trump voter to ascribe their motivations to either economic desperation or a lack of intelligence or both. “Why are white, uneducated voters willing to vote for Trump? Job unhappiness to be sure, but I would posit that it is also because they have not been adequately educated to understand just how dangerous a President Trump would be to the Constitution,” wrote one Newsweek pundit.
Those insults say more about their writers than the Luzerne County voters who too many journalists, sitting an easy drive away in their New York bureaus, did not come to meet. The common analytical inaccuracy of describing Trump supporters as unthoughtful rubes are driven as much by the lifestyles of the analysts as the intellect of those analyzed.
Luzerne County might be just 135 miles from the heart of New York City, but it is light-years away from many of America’s cultural influencers who live there, and that disconnect made it difficult for most of those analysts to crack the code on the Red-Blooded and Blue-Collared voters.
“They were not able to understand that you didn’t have to work in a factory or a coal mine to identify with the sentiments of that worker, it was part of your legacy, your heritage if you grew up here. So you would see someone who spent their whole life in a factory and a young person who was college-educated and doing okay sharing the same sentiments about how the system needed an overhaul,” Harry says.
In 2008, Barack Obama beat Republican nominee Senator John McCain of Arizona by 9 percentage points in this county; he beat Mitt Romney in 2012 by 5 points.
Four years later, Trump crushed former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in Luzerne by a whopping 20-point margin. Not since Ronald Reagan had Luzerne County voted for a Republican for president by any margin, much less a runaway. More important, Trump’s 26,237-vote edge in Luzerne alone accounted for nearly 60 percent of his margin statewide in the Keystone State. He had similar rock-star status in the Pennsylvania primary in Luzerne County, racking up 77 percent of the local vote over Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich, compared to 57 percent statewide.
The state and federal governments are the top two employers here now. The third largest is perhaps the best metaphor for the new economy in which Luzerne County struggles to find its place. It’s the Internet giant Amazon.com, which has a monstrous fulfillment center in Pittston Township, where the average annual salary for warehouse work is $27,040, well below the standard of living paid by the smokestack jobs it replaced.
“That salary makes it difficult to support a family, people start losing hope, especially people who aren’t book-smart but excel at working with their hands. We just don’t have room for them anymore,” Harry says. “We have cut them out.”
Harry saw the rise of discontent years ago. “This did not happen overnight, people just didn’t wake up on election night and say, ‘I am going to do something different,’ ” he says.
“And this did not end on election night either. I would argue that the election of Donald Trump wasn’t about him, but about those of us who want something more from Washington. Maybe we just wanted to shake things up. Maybe we wanted to send a message. Maybe it was a lot of both,” he says.
Unlike the 3,832 Democrats in Luzerne County who changed their party registration to Republican, ostensibly so they could vote in the closed 2016 Republican primary, Harry did not. He didn’t formally leave his party at the beginning of the election—but his eye did wonder.
At the diner, Harry dusts the crumbs from his white toast off of his deep-navy Penn State sweatshirt and switches from coffee to pop. As the young utility workers at the next table leave, he tips his hat, and they return the gesture.
“I made a promise to myself, four years out, after Obama won his second term, that I would never vote for a Bush or a Clinton. That was absolute. Nothing would ever change that. I thought they were both corrupt,” he says of the former Democratic nominee and Jeb Bush, son, and brother of a former U.S. president.
“When Trump first announced, I laughed. I just couldn’t believe that he even had a chance,” he says, but Harry was dead set on someone outside of the establishment so he started to look at the other choices.
“The only other nonpolitician was Dr. Ben Carson. Everybody else, outside of [Kentucky Senator] Rand Paul, I didn’t really have any use for. Put them in a bag and shake them and they all come out the same.”
As the campaign went on he wasn’t committed to anybody. “The one I liked the best was Jim Webb,” Harry says of the Democratic ex-senator from Virginia and former secretary of the navy, “and I thought he was probably the best candidate out of everybody, but he didn’t last except for a couple of months.”
The more he listened as the campaign went on, he explains, the better he understood that the Democrats definitely hated Trump, and the Republican establishment hated Trump. All the lobbyists on K Street hated Trump. The Chinese came out against him. India came out against him. Mexico came out against him.
“I figured I must have a candidate because everybody who’s coming out against him is all corrupt, and he’s an outsider. So, I said, ‘I think I found my candidate,’” says Harry.
Then he made the announcement. “I had decided to go to the rally he held here in Wilkes-Barre and I ran into a local radio reporter who knew me as a Democrat union official. She said, ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I guess I saw the light. I’m going to support Trump.’ She said, ‘You want to get interviewed?’”
He told her bluntly, “Actually, I don’t care.”
During the course of the interview, she asked him if he was involved in the labor community in the area.
“I said, ‘I just happen to be president of the labor council.’ When we got done, I said, ‘Well, that should get me a resignation tomorrow.’ Sure enough, I got a phone call from them the next day,” he says. He voluntarily resigned, and he did it in person, in front of the entire council.
Harry has lost trust in everything big in this country. “Big banks, big Wall Street, big corporations, the establishment of both parties and their lobbyists, and the big media corporations; gone are the days of the network news just delivering the news,” he says.
“This Russian shit day-in and day-out is just absolute nonsense, as far as him being in cahoots. I watched ABC last Thursday; the first ten minutes dealt with nothing but the allegations that he was in bed with the Russians. The big storms that hit the Midwest got a minute. Nothing else got any time. It was just all this bullshit.”
Harry is optimistic about Trump. “But it is going to be a hard slog, he has to work against the Democrats and the Republicans.
“In his heart I know he wants to do well. But Washington’s culture is so embedded that it may be a year before he gets a handle, or 18 months before he gets a handle on everything,” he says.
And no, he does not care about what Trump tweets. “We knew exactly who he was when we voted for him, tweet and all.”
Harry is looking forward to watching Trump negotiate and spar with Washington. He’d like to see him bring them to their knees, but is realistic. “I used to hate to negotiate labor contracts,” Harry admits. “Absolutely worst job in the world. Time-consuming, petty, you had to play games, it’s a tough thing to do, and you’ve got a responsibility for everybody you represent to do the best you could, and you got to be good to the employers because you don’t want them to go out of business,” he says.
“It’s a fine line that you walk, and you had to be conscious of all of that. I think he’s learning that right now, because what he was used to doing as a CEO, and he can’t do that now.
“What I liked about Trump was that it was more than about Trump, it was about people, it was about being part of something bigger than just me, I felt as though I was part of something important and worthy of accomplishing something better than what we have had,” Harry says.
As long as Trump stays away from becoming a Bush or a Clinton and stays tough, Harry is in for the long haul with this new alliance. “If he becomes one of them, then I think this movement continues, without him.”
State Sen. Michael Williams had his ‘deportation bus tour’ video yanked from YouTube Wednesday. (Facebook.)
A Republican candidate’s video announcing his “deportation bus tour” in the Georgia governor’s race was briefly pulled from YouTube Wednesday after the site initially deemed it in violation of internal “hate speech” policies.
The candidate, Michael Williams, accused YouTube of being “the latest liberal California company stifling conservative free speech to appease the hard-left.”
Williams, a state senator and former Georgia co-chair for the Trump campaign, had announced the tour through the state’s sanctuary cities on Tuesday as a way to highlight the dangers of illegal immigration.
“If you’re as tired as I am of politicians who do nothing but talk, and you want to see this bus filled with illegals, vote Michael Williams on May 22,” he said in the video.
According to a press release accompanying the video, he intends to use the tour to “expose how dangerous illegal aliens ruin local economies, cost American jobs, increase healthcare costs, and lower education standards.”
In the video, the bus can be seen with slogans on the back such as “Follow Me to Mexico” and “Danger! Murderers, Rapists, Kidnappers, Child Molestors, and Other Criminals on Board.” It is the latest move by Republican candidates to take a hard line on illegal immigration, using rhetoric similar to President Trump’s.
“We’re not just going to track them, or watch them roam around our state. We’re going to put them on this bus, and send them home,” Williams says in the ad.
A screengrab showing the image where the ‘deportation bus tour’ video used to be. (YouTube)
But on Wednesday, the video was pulled from YouTube and replaced by a message: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech.”
Williams blasted the move in a statement: “Perhaps YouTube’s executives would like to move their families into an area that has been destroyed by illegals. It might give them perspective.”
But by Wednesday afternoon, the video was back up. A YouTube spokesperson told Fox News that “with the massive volume of videos on our platform, sometimes we make the wrong call on content that is flagged by our community.”
“When this is brought to our attention, we review the content and take appropriate action, including restoring videos or channels that were mistakenly removed,” the spokesperson said.
“Conservatives have been blasting YouTube for their policies,” William’s campaign said in a statement. “This shows that when Fearless Conservatives stand up and refuse to back down, we can win!”
Williams is not the only candidate in the race to take a hard line on illegal immigration. Current Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp last week promised to “round up criminal illegals” in his truck.
“I got a big truck, just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take them home myself,” he said. Kemp’s video has not been removed as of Wednesday morning.
Kemp and Williams will face off against other Republicans looking to replace outgoing Republican Gov. Nathan Deal, including frontrunner Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, former state Sen. Hunter Hill, and businessman Clay Tippins.
Adam Shaw is a Politics Reporter and occasional Opinion writer for FoxNews.com. He can be reached here or on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.
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