Adam Wren is a contributing editor at Indianapolis Monthly.

INDIANAPOLIS — They arrived by the busload, four coaches in all, from around the state. Laborers, thousands of them, flooded the south side of the Indiana Statehouse, covering the green lawn with their blue and yellow United Steelworkers signs and t-shirts.

Mingled among them were Donald Trump’s new favorite campaign props, flesh and blood talking points.


They were workers from Carrier Corp., a United Technologies company, whose factory here announced one bleak day back in February that by 2017 it would outsource 1,400 jobs to a manufacturing plant in Monterrey, Mexico, leaving only 200 non-union research and development jobs behind. The video went viral, racking up more than 3.7 million views on YouTube—a readymade Make America Great Again speech anecdote for Trump. As the billionaire arenastorms Indiana, Trump routinely calls the Carrier workers out in rallies, and has talked up their plight since February.

At a Trump event in the Farmer’s Coliseum at the Indiana State Fairgrounds earlier in the week, for example, Trump engaged in a call-and-response with a handful of them.

“We love Carrier,” Trump said. “Do you love Trump?”

The audience cheered.

“How long have you worked for Carrier?” he asked someone in the sea of supporters.

“10 years,” a man, somewhere, shouted.

“10 years,” Trump said, before moving on to another member of the audience. “How about you?”

“17 years,” the man yelled.

“17 years,” Trump said. “Alright. Stick with me fellas. Don’t worry. … These Carrier guys are following me around!”

Someone else called out to Trump.

“How many years?” Trump asked again.

“18 years,” Trump said. “These are great people. These are great people. But someone had their cellphone camera on while this guy is viciously letting go of one-thousand four-hundred [people]. I’ve been talking about it for months, because I got to see it on television.”

Back at the Statehouse, days after the Trump event, hundreds of Carrier workers descended on the city’s downtown around noon for a March and Rally for Good Jobs in Indianapolis, and they were clamoring for their candidate, the man of the hour.

But their candidate wasn’t Trump. It was Bernie Sanders, whom their union had endorsed days earlier. They wore “Labor for Bernie” buttons.

“In all reality, I see Trump as an opportunist,” said Robert James, 57, a forklift driver at Carrier.

“He’s full of shit,” Tay Walker, 52, another Carrier worker, told me.

“I don’t think he’s for the people,” said Ron Terry, 60, who has worked in shipping and receiving at the plant for 17 years. “He’s for his pockets.”

“He’s a loudmouthed fraud,” said Frank Staples, 37, an-11-year veteran at Carrier.

In fact, in a dozen interviews with Carrier workers at the rally, members of United Steelworkers Local 1999, I couldn’t find a single Trump supporter, though workers told me they existed. “There are a few people out there that support him,” Staples said. But by and large, they see in Trump the same kind of corporate greed that led Carrier executives to outsource their own jobs.

“His own clothes come from China,” Staples said. “He’s talking about American workers. There’s 1,400 people losing their jobs at Carrier. He could employ 1,000 people making his clothes. Bring his company to Indiana. Bring something that’s not going to fail to Indiana. Everything he’s ever ran has [fallen]. His airline fell. He got kicked out of his own Miss America pageant. I mean, come on. The Apprentice fell. He’s a reality star.”

Trump loves Carrier. Turns out, many Carrier workers don’t love him back.

***



“Sit down,” Staples told his wife. “I’ve got some news for you.”

“What’s that?” his wife Dawn said, sitting on the bed in their westside Indianapolis home.

“I’m losing my job.”

“You’re joking,” she said.

“No.”

It was around 1 p.m. on February 10. Staples, a “vampire” who worked the nightshift at Carrier, was asleep. His mother had called minutes before, waking him up.

“When are you losing your job?” she asked.

“I was like, ‘What the hell?’” Staples said.

His mother had seen the news from a video that she saw on Facebook. Her son would lose his $22-an-hour-plus-overtime job by 2017.

Later, in the plant, he and his coworkers would gather together, and would hear a similar speech.

“It was demeaning, man,” said Staples. “They talked to us like kids.”

Earlier that day, around 10:30 a.m., Mark Smith, a 55-year assembly line worker, knew something was up. One by one, an announcer called assembly lines away from their work making 10,000 furnaces a day to the front desk. This had never happened in his 14 years there. Line 164. Line 129. Line 128. And then his, line 125. “There was whispering in the air that something was about to happen,” Smith said.

He thought of the company’s plant in Monterrey, Mexico. You know what, I think they are getting ready to tell us they are taking are jobs to Mexico.

“It became clear that the best way to stay competitive, and to protect the business for long term, is to move production from our facility in Indianapolis to Monterrey, Mexico,” the man told them. Later, representatives of the company explained that the move to Mexico will save them $65 million a year, paying workers there $3 an hour.

People booed. Some walked away.

“Listen, I’ve got information that’s important to share as a part of this transition. If we could go ahead. … If you don’t want to hear it, other people do. So let’s quiet down, thank you very much.”

Nelson went on. “Fuck you,” someone said.

Smith had an $800-a-month mortgage, which he had recently re-financed to prepare for retirement. He was planning to remodel his 1,200-square-foot ranch home. “I surely wasn’t planning on looking for a job at 55-years old,” Smith said. “It shook my world.”

He walked around the plant one last time before they left for the day. “It was like zombies,” Smith said.

***



Back at the union rally, Staples milled about for two hours, through speakers such as Richard Trumka and Senator Joe Donnelly and Indiana’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Gregg, who thumped Carrier for detonating the workers’ lives. All he wanted, though, was to see the man he met just days ago at a campaign stop in West Lafayette.

“Bernie, hell of a guy,” Staples said. “He came to me and he said, ‘You’re a steelworker.’”

“Yeah,” Staples said to Sanders on Wednesday.

“You have a rally on Friday,” Sanders told Staples. “I’ll be there.”

“That means something,” Staples said. “He’s not getting on T.V. like Trump is and speaking about Carrier. He’s doing this at all these little rallies.”

The Carrier employees I interviewed said that, in Bernie, they see an authentic and consistent advocate for workers like them. “I’ve known Bernie for the last 12 years,” Smith told me. “Bernie’s whole career he’s fought for the working class and the middle class. He’s voted on every one of these trade agreements that are stealing these jobs for the American workers. He’s fought against Wall Street and corporate America. He’s seen everything that’s happened to this country, American jobs and workers and how the wealth is being siphoned up to the top.” Even if Sanders cedes the nomination battle to Clinton, and Clinton faces Trump in the general, he won’t vote for Trump. “I will probably end up writing Bernie in,” he said. “I hope he runs as an independent if he doesn’t get the nomination.”

For workers like Smith and Staples and, they say, most of their colleagues, supporting Trump is anathema. They see Trump’s overtures as a campaign ploy without any real policy backing.

“You can’t have it both ways,” said Staples. “He has foreign interests himself, in China, and things of that nature. A few months ago, he made the statement that union workers make too much money. Then all of the sudden, you got an interest in Carrier?” But Staples also recognizes, like Trump himself, that there is no such thing as bad publicity. “Don’t get me wrong, the more they talk about it, the more this stays in the light, that’s what we want.”

Staples heard reports of Trump trotting out Carrier as a talking point again just last week. In a nearly hour-long speech at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, Trump railed on Carrier again. “I bought a lot of Carrier air conditioners over my life,” Trump told the crowd at one point. “I’m not buying any more.”

This line made Staples laugh.

“It’s funny because Trump says we make air conditioners. We don’t make air conditioners,” Staples said, explaining that a different team of Carrier workers make air conditioners in Collierville, Tennessee. “We make furnaces.”