Ben Bradlee Jr. - The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America

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 Obamas 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 wouldnt lose any voters, okay? Its, 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 raceor 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 bookwhat 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 1988and Wisconsin not since 1984.

But it was Pennsylvania that was the most important of the three because it had the most electoral votestwentyand 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 countyLuzernethat led the way. Trump routed Clinton there by 26,237 votesa 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 Luzernehome to economically depressed Wilkes-Barre, near Scrantonprovided 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 Pennsylvaniaand perhaps the presidency, to the extent that the states demographics and voting patterns were similar to Michigans and Wisconsins.

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 welcomingwilling 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-Barres two daily newspapers, and to his lead political reporter; four of Luzernes 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 countys 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 presidents 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 depthpeople who I thought collectively revealed much about Trumps 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 everyones 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 immigrantslegal and illegal.