For the past month, since President Donald Trump announced Liberation Day with a flurry of tariffs and then paused to negotiate trade deals, the Democrats and even some Republicans have cited polls that show Americans think this policy will hurt them economically, and so surely they must be souring on Trump.
The past few days I have traveled around West Virginia, Indiana and Kentucky, and I could not find a single Trump voter who regretted their choice over tariffs. Not one.
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I met Terry and his wife Cassandra, both in their late 60s, in Jeffersonville, Indiana. They live in Arizona and run a small business in which Terry flies horse trainers to events, in this case the Kentucky Derby.
“We need change, and that can hurt at first,” Terry told me. “Trump needs time to make that change.”
I pressed the couple a bit, asking if part of the deal was that it has to be a meaningful and lasting change, not just words. They both nodded emphatically.
“That’s what I voted for,” Cassandra told me.
As simple and clear as my new friends made it to me, this logical position, that might be summed up as “no pain, no gain,” seems to have left all the experts in New York City and Washington, D.C. completely baffled.
Last week, pollster Frank Luntz expressed his surprise this way: “I’ve never seen this before,” he said. “Because usually, when you’re hurt economically, that changes your perspective and your politics. Not with these people. They’re staying firm.”
Luntz is good at his job, and he’s accurate here. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise. It is a quite predictable result of just how fed up Trump’s voters are with the status quo.
Those in power or with loud voices in DC and Gotham still haven’t fully come to terms with the Trump phenomenon.
Look at it this way: The American people elected Donald Trump president of the United States. DONALD TRUMP! Twice! There is no rational way to look at that and conclude that voters wanted a steady hand to fix things on the margins but not break anything.
Trump’s supporters are not going to run to the hills because the stock market gets bouncy or Barbie dolls get a few bucks pricier, because they clearly see Trump’s upside.
Doug and Danny are both in their fifties, Doug is Danny’s boss, and Danny runs the steel cleaning crew at the Voss Clark plant in Indiana. Chatting with them, I was talking to both management and labor, and also two good friends.
Both guys are still all in on Trump. “In a heartbeat,” Danny told me when asked if he would still vote for Trump. And it wasn’t tariffs they wanted to talk about, it was the president’s promise to end taxes on overtime.
Doug told me that this policy would “encourage [younger workers] to give up their time, away from loved ones and produce for customers that we have, that need steel, that they want that we did not produce Monday through Friday and get it done.”
I got to see some of this in action at the steel cleaning facility just down the road, and even though it was 10 p.m., the workers were cleaning their giant rolls of steel, and would be overnight.
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These guys like what they do more than anyone I’ve ever met who works in a cubicle, and they’d like it even more if their sacrifice of overtime was rewarded with a tax break.
Over half of the employees at Voss Clark make more than $100,000 a year. In southern Indiana, where the cost of living is low, that’s buy-a-house-and-raise-a-family kinda money. Don’t tell me these are jobs native-born Americans don’t want.
It may be remarkable that despite the entirety of the liberal media and even a decent chunk of the conservative media railing against tariffs, Trump’s voters still trust him on the issue. But it should not come as a surprise.
For the first time in decades in places like Jeffersonville, the working man and woman feel they have a president who is on their side, who will put their needs before those of the stock market and the intelligentsia.
Do these working Americans know that Trump’s policies might fail? Sure, they aren’t stupid. They get the risk. But they didn’t vote to spruce up the status quo, they voted to destroy it, and that is why some economic discomfort will not scare them away from Donald Trump.
