Ben Bradlee Jr. is the author of The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America, which was published by Little, Brown on October 2. He was a reporter and editor for the Boston Globe for 25 years.



The following article is adapted from The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America, by Ben Bradlee Jr., which was published by Little, Brown on October 2.

T he day after the 2016 election, Lynette Villano, a 72-year-old widow and clerk for the Wyoming Valley Sanitary Authority in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, sent her grandson Connor Mulvey a text message:


“I guess you can probably figure out that I’m very happy today,” Lynnette began. “Donald Trump is to your generation what Ronald Reagan was to ours. I am so fortunate to have been part of both. … He defied conventional wisdom at every turn. … Hopefully, I will be going to the Inauguration.”

Connor, who was then starting his senior year as an undergraduate at Tulane, replied almost immediately.

“Donald Trump is a bigoted imbecile who tapped into the racism and ignorance in America,” he texted. “You’re right, he is like Ronald Reagan. He’s going to leave this country in ruins and completely ignore minorities’ problems. The fact that he ‘won’ this election is a blemish on the history of the United States. I will not be recognizing him as my President, because much like George W. Bush he failed to win the popular vote. The only difference is that I believe Bush was a good person who was manipulated by those around him. Donald is an arrogant asshole with a history of abuse, mistreatment, and greed. He and his supporters should be ashamed of themselves, but it’s evident they lack the self-reflective capabilities to do so. I want you to think long and hard about what you’ve aided in. My LGBT friends are scared. My Muslim friends are scared. My Hispanic friends are scared. My female friends are scared. I’m scared. The fact that you’ve gone along with his disgraceful rhetoric the entire way through disappoints me to no end. Congratulations, you’ve damaged America. I hope it was worth it.”

The fallout from this exchange, which continued over several more raw messages, still reverberates for Lynette. Despite the harsh texts, she sent her grandson Christmas presents in 2016. He returned them. She was also not invited to attend his graduation from Tulane in May 2017, or his 21st birthday the following day. When Connor took out a $10,000 loan after graduating and needed a co-signer, Lynette obliged him, but Connor still refuses to talk to her. She says she hasn’t seen him since the spring of 2016.

But as a die-hard supporter of the president, and one so enamored with him that during the 2016 campaign her co-workers called her “Mrs. Trump,” it’s the kind of rift Lynette has come to expect.

“I came out for Trump the day he came down that escalator in Trump Tower,” she recalls. “I went right online and got some pins. I did it to see what kind of reaction I’d get when I wore them in public. Most of the time it was positive. Sometimes it was relief—like, ‘Oh my God, here’s another Trump supporter I can talk to.’ People liked Trump because he had the answers to all our frustrations!” But there are many others, like Connor, who still can’t understand her decision.

I first met Lynette in December 2016 after traveling to Luzerne County in Northeast Pennsylvania for my book about why this traditionally Democratic area, a pivotal county in a crucial swing state, surged for Trump in 2016. Trump voters in Luzerne generally had a contempt for Washington and the powers that be, who they felt had mostly abandoned them and left them marginalized by flat or falling wages, rapid demographic change and a dominant liberal culture that mocked their faith and patriotism. They felt like everyone’s punching bag, and that their way of life was dying. They sensed a loss of dignity and stature. They felt like others were cutting in line, and that government is taking too much money from the employed and giving it to the able-bodied idle. They felt government regulations had become strangling to small and large businesses, and that the country was in danger of being inundated by immigrants, both legal and illegal.

For all these reasons, Luzerne is a good place to look if you want a window into the Democrats’ failure to hold the white working class. Over the course of the past 18 months, I spent five weeks in different parts of the county and interviewed about 100 Trump voters before selecting 12 whose stories I told in depth. The voices in the book are varied. They include a politician, a veteran, a lawyer, a union organizer, a retired state policeman, a landlord who owns dozens of apartments, a white nationalist, small business owners and a born-again nurse who believes Trump was sent by God to end America’s political dysfunction.

Lynette with Donald Trump Jr. | Photo courtesy of the author.

But one of the most fascinating people I encountered was Lynette Villano, whose support for Trump, like many others in Luzerne, is total, unconditional and unshakeable. These are the people Trump was talking about when he said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone without losing any voters. To them, Trump’s scandals are barely worth mentioning, and his failures to follow through on many of the economic promises he touted in the campaign are unimportant, mostly because, on his Twitter feed and at his ongoing campaign rallies, he has fed them a steady diet of entertaining, rhetorical red meat. They know all his lines, and still thrill to hear him deliver them.

After two years of tumult in the administration, which has put forth policies that arguably help the rich and hurt the working and middle classes, these hard-core Trump supporters are also the people whom another huge chunk of the country still cannot understand. Since the campaign, many of them—like Lynette—have found themselves cut off from friends and family for their support of the president.

But it is the steadfastness of people like Lynette that illustrates the resilience of his base. The question is: Are there enough Lynettes to sustain the GOP in 2018 and Trump in 2020?



***

Lynette was born and raised in Wilkes-Barre the eldest of three children. Her father left the family when she was about 4 years old, forcing her mother, who worked in a shoe factory, to pack the kids up and move in with her parents. Lynette’s grandfather was a Wilkes-Barre police detective, while her grandmother essentially raised her, along with her younger sister and brother.

Lynette grew up in a mostly German Wilkes-Barre neighborhood she describes as “like ‘Happy Days’,” the television program that depicted an idealized version of Middle America in the 1950s and ’60s. With the help of some adults, she and some friends started a neighborhood newspaper that they sold for 2 cents a copy.

She went to a Roman Catholic school for 12 years and the church was dominant in her life. It was Mass every Sunday, Holy Days, Confession every week, Stations of the Cross, First Friday Mass, Novenas, May Crowning, Processions on Holy Thursday.

“Anything Catholic, I was there,” she remembers. “When we were in 8th grade, it was a big deal that we would be allowed to help clean the altar and lay out the vestments for the priest for Sunday. After all, women were not allowed to even touch the chalice, so this was very meaningful and special. … Until I met my husband, I don’t think I knew anyone who wasn’t Catholic.”

In 1965, Lynette married Ronald Villano, an auto mechanic. They were married for more than 50 years and had two children: a daughter, who now works as a career counselor at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, and a son, who is a chef. Her husband died of a cerebral hemorrhage in August of 2016, three months before the election.

Lynette’s been involved in local politics for 30 years, starting out as a volunteer for Arlen Specter, the late Pennsylvania senator who was elected as a Republican but later became a Democrat. She’s been on the Luzerne County Republican Committee for over 25 years, and was the first woman to become County Chairman. She’s also a longtime member of the Republican State Committee. Lynette parlayed her political connections to get her job on the Sanitation Authority, which runs the wastewater treatment plant for Luzerne County.

Lynette poses with Eric Trump. | Photo courtesy of the author.

All this time, she was a dyed in the wool Republican, voting for many establishment types. But after Trump entered the GOP primary in June 2015, she threw her support behind him. The county is only a few hours drive from New York, and Lynette would visit the city regularly over the years. She knew all about Trump and liked him. She had long admired his business success and thought he could apply that to boost the economy. She wanted an outsider, a nonpolitician. And she was drawn to his signature campaign issue of curbing illegal immigration because it had special resonance in Luzerne, where Republican Congressman Lou Barletta had given national attention to the topic 10 years earlier as mayor of Hazleton. Lynette was a big fan of Lou’s. Because of a surge of Hispanic immigrants, Hazleton has become a minority-majority city within the last 10 years.

Trump’s roguishness also appealed to her. She liked his moxie, his feistiness. “He wasn’t afraid to say anything. The political correctness has gotten so bad that people were so intimidated. People felt like they were getting things shoved down their throat. They thought Trump was talking common sense, and that maybe he’d bring jobs back.”

She was not feeling good about the country under President Barack Obama. The economy was doing poorly, at least in Luzerne County. She thought he was apologizing for America too much, and she was disgusted with Obamacare.

Lynette thought electing Hillary Clinton would have meant an effective Obama third term. And besides, she says, “It was so insulting to women that we were made to feel we had to vote for Hillary just because she’s a woman.”

There was also a cultural dissonance that had developed in the Obama years, she thought. There was too much illegal immigration around and about, too much political correctness and not enough respect for traditional values. She is quick to clarify that her opposition to Obama had nothing to do with his being black, and she didn’t like it when people inferred that. She liked him as a person. She just didn’t like his policies, or the way he governed.

“In my era, you respected authority,” Lynette says. “Today, a lot of the standards we grew up with are gone—the church, the flag. And these police shootings. I’m extremely sensitive about that. I’m trying to understand this Black Lives Matter movement. But I’m not black, and I grew up in a Catholic girls’ school, so maybe I can’t.”

The Obama presidency reminded Lynette of the Jimmy Carter “malaise” years in the late 1970s, another time when people weren’t feeling good about the country, before the sunny arrival of Ronald Reagan. In fact, she felt Trump was Reaganesque. After all, Reagan was an actor who wasn’t taken seriously, just like Trump wasn’t. Both offered hope, she thought.

Lynette decided to run to be a Trump delegate to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. She won on a slate with two other women that they called “Women for Trump”—a name they chose because their candidate had been deluged with criticism for having called women “dogs” and “fat pigs” in the past. Lynette thought that was much ado about nothing, and it was important to show that Trump had plenty of supporters who were women.

“The three of us running for delegate would stand out at the mall in Wilkes-Barre with our signs and we’d spend the afternoon there, people beeping their horns as they passed by,” Lynette remembers. “You couldn’t believe the energy! Sometimes, Hillary supporters would drive by and give us the finger.”

As she talked politics daily with people she met, Lynette kept having to douse other Trump brush fires, such as when the “Access Hollywood” tape came out a month before the election. Lynette gave Trump a pass on that: “I did not approve of what he said on the tape. But something he said 30 years ago did not really bother me. They used it to make him look bad. Men in locker rooms do say things. Women too!” Lynette was prone to exaggerating the age of the tape to lessen its significance. When the tape was revealed in 2016, it was 11 years old, not 30.

She took the same line when a string of women came forward during the campaign to claim that Trump had sexually abused them years ago. Why hadn’t they come forward at the time the incidents supposedly happened? Lynette asked. And she complained that the Trump accusers were given credibility by the media, while the women who had accused Bill Clinton of similar offenses were largely dismissed as white trash.

Along with other women of a certain age, Lynette would also come to think that the emerging #MeToo movement was going too far. “I had things done to me when I was a young woman, but it was dealt with at the time, not years later. When you come out years later and ruin a guy’s reputation, I have trouble with that.”

Lynette also found herself playing defense against a steady stream of Trump’s shocking statements—such as when he questioned the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, said John McCain was not a war hero, or that Mexicans coming to the United States were rapists—statements so outrageous they would have destroyed any other candidacy, but which came to be regarded as par for the Trump course.

“Yes, he said these things,” Lynette conceded, but, pointing to the announcement speech, she added: “He did not say all Mexicans. Some things were picked out and used over and over again. We say some Mexicans. It’s the word illegal. We don’t want the illegals to come. All our ancestors came her legally, and people think that’s not what’s happening today. Then you look at these refugees. It’s a complicated world.”

Lynette with Kellyanne Conway. | Photo courtesy of the author.

Lynette learned to spin, like an amateur Kellyanne Conway, when talking to Trump detractors or to journalists who would come to town and interview her as a leading, gung-ho Trump supporter. She’d say you had to learn how to decode Trump, to know what he meant and what he didn’t. She thought Trump’s insults were mostly amusing, and didn’t take them literally, or seriously. It bothered her when the media would blow up Trump’s provocative statements when she and his other supporters knew he didn’t really mean what he said. They just thought he was a different candidate who was speaking his mind in a refreshing way.

“Unlike Hillary, Trump didn’t talk down to people and we liked that,” Lynette says. “And the Russians didn’t make us vote for him!”

Now, even with scandals engulfing the administration, she is no less defensive. I asked her about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who was convicted of financial fraud and pled guilty to conspiracy against the U.S., among other charges. I mentioned, too, the revelations in Bob Woodward’s book Fear, including that senior members of the administration have little respect for the president—and the New York Times op-ed written by an anonymous Trump administration official claiming that some in the administration are working against the president to thwart his “more misguided impulses.”

“The Manafort thing was so long ago that it’s got nothing to do with Trump and collusion,” says Lynette in one typical response to the recent wave of bad news. “Even the Woodward book, the people who like Donald Trump don’t care. People say things and they lie all the time. It’s not going to be on my list of things to read. As for the New York Times op-ed, the fact that it was anonymous, I never give credibility to someone who won’t identify themselves. We just need to focus on the things that are affecting our lives and so far, everything he’s doing is affecting our lives in a positive way.”



***

Still, sometimes it has been hard to be a Trump supporter.

“When people put Trump down all the time, it was hard not to think they were putting you down too,” Lynette says. “We were constantly being made to feel uneducated if we supported Trump. We felt like elitists were laughing at us. That hurt me.”

And there were personal costs as well. “It wasn’t easy to be with Trump. I went against people in my own party, I lost friends, and it caused a break within my family.”

The family rift was especially painful to Lynette, as it has cut her off from her daughter, Lisa, and Lisa’s son, Connor, who is now a student at Tulane Law School.

After Connor replied to Lynette’s initial message after Election Day, in a manner, she says, that was not respectful or appropriate when addressing his grandmother, Lynette did not back down. “I’ve saved America and I am very proud,” she wrote in reply. “It is your future that kept me strong and made me work even harder. BTW, I also have LGBT and women friends and legal Hispanics that support Donald Trump. 80% of the country feels we are headed in the wrong direction and that is the poll that mattered. Us uneducated deplorables are a lot smarter than you think. We are tired of the corruption and we aren’t going to take it anymore. Just look at the protesters in the streets - that is why Donald Trump won. Every four/eight years, we have an orderly transfer of power. It is what makes our country great. So, calm down and be proud you live in the greatest country in the world. Learn how to be grateful for all the opportunity you have and especially a family that cares about you. All I know is my mother would be very happy and proud of me.”

Lynette poses with former Fox anchor Kimberly Guilfoyle and Bradlee’s book. | Photo courtesy of the author.

To which Connor replied, “You didn’t save America, you damned it. Trump goes against core American values and you bought into his race baiting. You can keep lying to yourself and think that people want Trump, but he lost the popular vote. … You don’t have to deal with the repercussions of his presidency. I do. My entire generation does. You’re completely brainwashed and incapable of seeing a rational truth. … The U.S. is not the greatest country in the world anymore. Last night confirmed that. We aren’t going to be for a long time. Get a grip on reality. If you deplorables are as smart as you think you are, maybe you would realize how dangerous Republican economic plans are. Now I’ll be entering the job market under one. Thanks for that. But that’s nothing compared to what my marginalized friends will have to go through. Thanks to you and your kind, hatred and bigotry have been normalized and legitimized. I hope you’re proud of that.”

Perhaps dejectedly, Lynette responded: “Till the day I die I will stand by my decision to work and help elect Donald Trump. You can describe it in any twisted way you want, but I know I did the right thing. You may have a college education, but you need life experience with it to really learn about life. I have very good friends and we totally disagreed on this election, but we respected each other’s opinion. You know better than anyone the popular vote doesn’t matter at all. It’s the Electoral College, and when finished he will have over 300 votes. Massive government failure and the average working person feeling left out is why he won. It’s a shame that fancy college doesn’t teach you common courtesy and tolerance for others’ opinions. I still love you and am proud of you, even though I do not agree with any of your views.”

But Connor had the last word. “This college has taught me more than you’ll ever know about politics. I respected you voting for McCain and Romney, but absolutely not Trump. I am truly ashamed. You’re too far gone at this point, and I haven’t seen an original thought come from you in years regarding politics. I guarantee you would be in an uproar if Hillary won the electoral but lost the popular. The government hasn’t failed, Republicans have. Your party has become the party of the KKK and neo-Nazis, and if you’re too blind to see that I feel sorry for you. Maybe if you went to college you would realize that Trump is the worst candidate in modern history, and that he’s up there with George Wallace and David Duke. Maybe you would also realize your party wants to totally infringe on basic civil rights of women, the LGBT community, and minorities. If you had more interaction with them you might be able to sympathize.”

There were other political divides in Lynette’s family. Her sister, a Democrat, unfriended Lynette on Facebook over her pro-Trump posts, though they remain in touch in other ways. And when her uncle in Michigan died recently and she drove out for the funeral, Lynette discovered other splits there. She stayed with a cousin who had a sign in her yard that read: “We support refugees and our Muslim neighbors.” On the other hand, because she was wearing her Trump pin, others in the family came up to tell her that they too had voted for the president.

“I’m sure I’m not the only one who has had to deal with estrangement from family members because of the election,” Lynette says. “Does it hurt? More than I can put into words. … This is the reality of how divided we are in this country—friendships lost, and in my case the relationship I had with my daughter and her family. Politics has been part of my life for years, but this is the first time I have had to deal with this reaction. People so dislike our president, there is no tolerance for anyone who supports him. Sadly, this is the world we live in today.”

But this, too, she says, you can’t blame on Trump—even though he pledged in his acceptance speech on election night to try and unify the country.

While Lynette concedes Trump made the unifying pledge, she now thinks that he has too many enemies to follow through on it. “There is just as much responsibility from the Never Trump people, the Hollywood Left, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the swamp in D.C., late night TV, Black Lives Matter—I could go on and on,” she says. “Half of the country hates the president. Do you really think there is anything he can say or do that that will bring us together? I’m all for promoting civility, but we are so divided and people are so dug in, it’s hard to have a conversation.”