How can the Coal Region vote for Trump?
By Michael J. Carroll
POSTED: October 16, 2016
(Press Enterprise)
If you want to know the place where someone feels the strongest connection, find out where the person wants to be buried. So says “Transatlantic,” a great book by the Irish writer Colum McCann that stretches beautifully between the Americas and Ireland, telling stories of characters imaginary and real. One was former Sen. George Mitchell, who negotiated a peace for a centuries-old Irish conflict. He was living in Manhattan with his wife and child and traveling the world, but knew he wanted to be buried in Maine where he was born and grew up.
I’ve decided I want to be buried — many years from now — in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region. You have a powerful connection to the place where you spend your first years. It may be positive or negative. Often it is both. But it is formative and forever.
I also decided that although I have been away a long time, my connection allows me to ask questions about the presidential election and the support that Donald Trump may have in the Coal Region.
I don’t know many Trump supporters. I suspect they don’t know many people who will vote for Hillary Clinton. We often travel in small, separate circles in this country.
Here are some of my questions:
There are all kinds of rich guys, but isn’t Trump the kind who cares about no one but himself? We grew up in the Coal Region with love/hate feelings about the rich. Most of our families did not have much money. What passed for rich in the Coal Region were doctors, lawyers, and business owners. The real rich who owned the factories, mills, and mines lived far away, and rarely if ever set foot in the Coal Region. Some people with money acted fine. They sent their kids to school with the rest of us, were part of the community, and gave back something. Other rich people never did anything for anybody but themselves. Isn’t Trump one of them?
Clinton made lots of money when she had the chance. It was not always pretty. But didn’t she spend a chunk of it for people other than herself? Can you say the same about Trump? When he claimed to do something for charity and you blew the smoke away, was there anything there other than Donald lining his pockets, sometimes by shortchanging people who worked for or with him? Did that make him smart or something else?
Do you believe Trump is not a bigot? I know that in recent years it may seem like the rules have changed, and you’ve not been given an updated copy. It’s sometimes hard to understand what you can say in public and what you should not, even if what you have in your heart and head is good. But doesn’t Trump’s talk about women, the disabled, and ethnic groups go against everything you learned as a kid in church and in school?
OK, politicians lie. But if Clinton sometimes stretches the truth and even occasionally breaks it, doesn’t she stay in the ballpark of reality? When called out on something inaccurate, doesn’t she try to correct and explain instead of doubling down on the lie and piling one more lie on top of the last to make people too weary to catch up and keep up?
Should a Coal Region person support someone whose famous favorite money-making TV line is: “You’re Fired”? A job was always one of the most important things growing up, for yourself and your family. Can you support a guy who treats it as a joke and milks it for entertainment value?
Does not paying federal income tax that supports the country really make him smart, like he said, when ordinary people get hammered every year? Tax money is sometimes spent badly, but it is also spent well for highways, defense, help for disaster victims.
At rock bottom is Donald Trump a good and decent man who would make a good president? It may be hard to love Hillary, but isn’t she competent, experienced, not crazy, and not a bigot? Can’t you push her in the right direction, like Warren and Sanders did?
This is not a question so much as a feeling: Hillary Clinton’s father chose to be buried in the Coal Region. It meant something to him.
I agree with her father on where to be buried, but I just might spin in my grave if the Coal Region helps elect Trump president.
Mike Carroll is a graduate of Mount Carmel Area High School and Bloomsburg University. He has practiced public interest law for 38 years in West Virginia, New Jersey, and for the last 29 years in Philadelphia.
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