Leaning over a table stacked with “Resist!” buttons and “Impeach Trump” stickers, Kathy Harrington pointed to the offending spot. “It’s probably still there somewhere,” she said. Harrington, 56, was inviting attendees of the annual Musikfest bash in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to sign up to support progressive causes – and to protest against Donald Trump.

Interactions with festival-goers over two busy weekends on Main Street in Bethlehem had been “about 75% positive, about 25% negative, and of that I would say maybe 10% more in-your-face negative,” said Harrington, who was wearing a pink “I stand with Planned Parenthood” T-shirt.

And then there was one guy who “just looked at us and spit”, said Sandra Davis, 58, a colleague of Harrington, who pointed out the evidence still evaporating from the pavement.

“They feel empowered,” Davis said of Trump supporters since the election. “They’re given voice. The louder and the more vulgar, the better.”

Images from the night before of white supremacists carrying torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, were deeply disturbing but not surprising, said another activist, Ginny Atwell.

“I think his core base are the true deplorables,” Atwell, 72, said of Trump. “The white supremacists. He’s delivering exactly what they wanted. White male supremacy.”

“No women and no minorities,” said Harrington.

“And keep everybody else out,” said Atwell.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kathy Harrington, 56, joins fellow political activists during Musikfest in Bethlehem. Photograph: Mark Makela/The Guardian

Whatever it is that might be changing about America under Donald Trump, it seems, an improvement in the quality of political discourse in reflexively moderate places like Northampton County, Pennsylvania, is not part of it.

Once the home of the country’s second-biggest steel manufacturer, Bethlehem is the Democratic heart of a region that may be turning more Republican – unless it isn’t. The county voted twice for Barack Obama before falling for Trump. The Guardian has been reporting from the area over the last eight months to test the political winds and to gauge whether voters here feel that the Trump presidency is living up to its promise.

The current national turbulence, and Trump’s role in it – with his reluctance to call out white supremacists in Charlottesville and his saber-rattling over North Korea – has laid bare local divisions. Trump supporters generally cheer the president’s attack-dog instincts, while critics say Trump’s character and style have emboldened violent expression and created flare-ups of racial and ideological tensions locally.

Down the street from Harrington’s table, Bill Kuzman, 65, who grew up in the area, was watching a youthful blues act perform. Wearing an NRA cap and a tropical shirt, Kuzman said he thought the president’s aggressive rhetoric on North Korea – “locked and loaded”, “fire and fury” – was “absolutely great.”

“I’m glad he’s in there right now,” Kuzman said. “Sometimes you got to smack the bully. Like in school. I don’t know how things are going to pan out, but if Korea does something to us, I don’t think he’s going to think twice about going in, and I support that.”

But Kuzman was not a foreign policy voter. “From my understanding and research on Trump, he does believe in Christian values,” Kuzman said. “And he does not believe in abortion, and he does not believe in gay marriages. To me those are the top three issues. I don’t care who is running.”

Harrington, the progressive activist, said she’d heard that kind of line from other Trump supporters.

“One person said, ‘I’m really religious and that’s why I voted for Trump’,” said Harrington. “Which doesn’t make any sense at all, because he’s like, the exact opposite of any Christian thing you could ever think of.”

‘He speaks to the common man’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Oliviamarie Staniec, nine, holds her eight-month-old sister, Pearl, at the Northampton County 4-H Fair. Photograph: Mark Makela/The Guardian

Oliviamarie Staniec guided her spring heifer to the middle of the show ring. The nine-year-old had a holster for her grooming brush, a show stick a foot taller than she was, and a side ponytail. She stopped her animal and hooked one of its shanks to line up its legs. Her careful eyes followed a judge with a cowboy hat and a belt buckle as he looked the calf over.

“She did a very nice job as far as clipping on this animal. Did a very nice job squaring those legs,” said the judge over a public address system. “Let’s give a hand to these young ladies out here. They’re doing a really nice job.”

The dozens of spectators at the Northampton county 4-H Round Up in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, on Saturday applauded as the contestants led their calves back to a shed where older participants were brushing, watering and bedding their animals. Later in the day, there would be judging for rabbits and baked goods and crafts.

Oliviamarie’s mother, Dominique Staniec, a sixth-generation farmer, said she had gotten her family involved in 4-H as a way of reinforcing the values of work, responsibility and fair competition.

“People don’t respect each other in America anymore,” said Staniec, 39. “Even kids, they’re running rampant, there’s no discipline. And there’s all these lazy freeloaders – I could go on. Look, we have our kids working. They are very proud. And not everybody gets a ribbon. They have to win a ribbon.”

For the first time in her life in November, Staniec had voted in a presidential election – for Trump. What was the appeal? “His whole thing,” Staniec said. “He was the one. I really believe this country needs to be run like a business, not like a donation center.”

If there had been any Democratic organizers at the Northampton 4-H event, they might have had to seek out the refrigerator full of prize-winning pies for solace. Many of the voters in the crowd said they could, in principle, back a candidate from either party, but most of them said they were sticking by Trump.

“I don’t vote party lines, I vote for the person,” said Joyce Ludwig, a consultant in the medical device industry who is “over 50 but under 60”. “The bottom line was, I could not ever vote for Hillary.”

“I feel like the parties have changed over the years,” said Dennis Koehler, 39, a farmer and a registered Democrat whose parents were likewise Democrats but who said he had always voted Republican.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dennis Koehler: ‘I feel like the parties have changed over the years.’ Photograph: Mark Makela/The Guardian

“The Republicans were the rich ones and your Democrats were the hard-working man. Now it seems like the Democrats are the ones looking for the free handouts and the Republicans are the ones doing the work.”

As he spoke, Koehler, a mild-mannered mile from the caricature that sometimes circulates of the angry Trump supporter, held Pearl, his eight-month-old daughter, with Staniec, his fiancee. He listed his top issues of concern as commodity prices, fertilizer prices, fuel costs, health insurance, liability insurance and environmental regulations.

“My brother and I are the ninth generation in our family to be on that farm, and we really don’t have any plans to change,” he said. “It’s a piece of history. Our family was there before this country was a country.”

Koehler said he thought Trump was doing fine so far. “It’s going to take time before you’re really going to see real improvements in anything,” he said. “Whether you’re talking about imports, exports, the general economy. It takes time. But I think there’s progress being made.”

That kind of patience is not uncommon among Trump supporters, whose experience of the political moment can seem placid, in a world of headlines that have for many people induced a feeling closer to panic.

“I think it’s all about personality and character,” said Ludwig, explaining Trump’s appeal. “He says what he means. It’s not like you hear all these flowery words and then you’re going: ‘Now, what did he say?’ He speaks to the common man.”

‘Democrats need a stronger sense of mission’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Attendees listen during Musikfest. Photograph: Mark Makela/The Guardian

Sixty years ago, John P Miller was in the US army and stationed on the Korean peninsula when a company of North Koreans crossed the border under cover of a typhoon.

“They got 75 miles before we caught up with them,” said Miller, 82. “They just surrendered. They were surrounded, totally. It was only one company. But it scared the living daylights out of us.”

In retirement from a career in accounting, Miller runs a sheep and chicken farm in Bethlehem township with his wife, Jacquie, 79. After some initial misgivings about Trump, the couple had voted for him and remain supportive, blaming Congress for the non-fulfillment so far of large chunks of the president’s agenda.

But the army veteran called Trump’s burly rhetoric in the confrontation with Kim Jong-un “questionable”. Miller wondered whether Trump might do something to project military force without increasing the risks of a cataclysmic escalation.

“The question is whether he should just keep quiet,” Miller said. “Think the things he’s saying, but not say it.”

That was out of the question for Cheech Wagner, 59, Staniec’s mother. “We need to kick his ass,” she said, referring to Kim. “It’s about time. It’s about time. Because sooner or later – the guy is a nut. Some people think Trump is, but let me tell you, he’s putting his foot down.

“We need somebody with a strong backbone.”

Back at her table at Musikfest, Harrington, the activist, was also talking about the need for political backbone – not in the White House, but in the ranks of the local and national Democratic leadership, if the party hopes to turn the political tide in places like Northampton.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A residence displays an anti-Trump sign on the front lawn during Musikfest. Photograph: Mark Makela/The Guardian

“They need to be more organized, they need to have a stronger sense of mission,” Harrington said. “We don’t want to say we’re Democrats, we want to say we’re progressives. And there’s a lot of old-school people in there, and they’re saying that’s treasonous, and that we should stick to the old-school values. But none of that stuff’s working the way it used to.

“We’ve got to revamp how we think about politics now. And there’s a lot of Democrats who don’t want to do that.”

Standing by Trump

In the days following the violence in Charlottesville, the president gave a series of statements culminating in a news conference on Tuesday in which he defended people who took part in the far-right rally and seemed to draw a moral equivalence between white supremacist marchers and the protesters who confronted them.

“You had some very bad people in that group,” Trump said of the white supremacists, “but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.” He added: “I think there’s blame on both sides,.”



The president’s comments, which came at the end of three days of White House statements of various temperatures, prompted military generals, elected Republicans, and the former presidents Bush to issue strongly worded statements of condemnation of the KKK and other white supremacist groups.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children dance to the Minx, a Kinks tribute band, during Musikfest. Photograph: Mark Makela/The Guardian

“Mr President ... Your words are dividing Americans, not healing them,” said the South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham.

But a prominent grassroots Trump supporter in Northampton county refused all criticism of the president on the issue. The media was twisting Trump’s words, said Tom Carroll, a criminal defense lawyer and a vice-chairman of the local Tea Party who traces his ancestry to a member of the Union army and said he did not mind Confederate monuments coming down around the country.

“I think he said it pretty powerfully,” Carroll said of Trump’s criticism of neo-Nazis. “No matter what he does, you people are going to say he’s not doing enough. You people with these questions are going to destroy our nation. You are bringing us to revolution and civil war, because of the absurdity where you are saying that no matter what he does, it isn’t good enough.”

Carroll said Republicans who put out statements tacitly criticizing the president were part of a “political establishment” bent on destroying Trump, who he said had been better on the issue of race and racism than Obama, who Carroll said had not done enough to condemn the killer of five police officers in Dallas, Texas, last year.

“This is the establishment from both parties who don’t like the fact that their apple cart is being turned over, and the truth about their corruption is being let out all over the world,” said Carroll. “And they don’t like it, and they’re going to do anything they can to destroy the man who is shedding the light of truth on their corruption.”

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