In a Michigan county that helped get Donald Trump elected, people are actively choosing to ignore news they don’t want to hear – or not receiving news at all

In one short week in the White House, Donald Trump has managed to shatter the tradition of the honeymoon period enjoyed by new presidents. While predecessors eased themselves into the role and were showered with national adulation, he has prompted widespread criticism with a stream of provocations.

Trump has proclaimed war on the media, was accused of serial lying, declared open season on environmentalists and undocumented immigrants, outraged the Mexican president, begun stripping millions of Americans of healthcare coverage, and revived the prospect of torturing terror suspects. The pugnacity of his pronouncements has left even Trump-hardened observers aghast, prompting speculation that such an adrenaline-charged opening to his term couldn’t possibly be sustained.

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Tell that to the people of Macomb County in Michigan.

“Thank the Lord for Donald Trump!” exclaimed the waitress in Angelo’s diner when asked how she thought he was doing. “He’s awesome, he’s great,” said the car worker. “I absolutely love him,” the window cleaner said. “I’m 100% for Trump,” the pawn shop owner said.

Even for a country as accustomed to division as the United States, the split perception of Trump’s first week in office could not be more worlds apart. On the one hand, there is Trump as seen through the lens of the coastal mainstream media that has called him out with historic bluntness, epitomized by the lead story of the New York Times: Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote.

Then there is how residents of Macomb County, an overwhelmingly white working-class suburb of Detroit, see their new commander-in-chief. It is as if all the raging controversy of the week had somehow washed off him on the 600-mile journey from Washington to Michigan, leaving a cleansed and beatific Trump committed to creating jobs and putting America first.

Niel Redmond, 54, a mechanic who in 2012 voted for Barack Obama but this time went for Trump, said: “I think he’s doing a phenomenal job.”

Redmond was unaware of the critical coverage that has saturated newspaper front pages and cable news reports since inauguration day. “Papers? I’ve no idea what they are talking about – I don’t see them. If it don’t put a dime in my pocket, I don’t worry about it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wallace Kotharz’s pawn shop has given him a vantage point on the decline of manufacturing in the rust belt. Photograph: Garrett MacLean/The Guardian

He has been out of work for the past two years and says he is so desperate for a job he would “sweep floors for $10 an hour if I had to”. So when Trump announced that he was reviving the Keystone XL oil pipeline, incurring the wrath of climate change activists and Native Americans, Redmond was overjoyed.

“I’ve had an application in with the Keystone pipeline for a mechanic’s job for two years, but every time they came close to hiring me Obama would say the project was dead.”

Wallace Kotharz, 74, has run Gold-n-Stones, a pawnshop in Mount Clemens that he calls a “poor man’s bank”, for the past 15 years. It’s given him a vantage point on the decline of manufacturing in the rust belt that is etched into the faces of his customers who bring him jewelry, watches, laptops and dolls in their desperation to make ends meet.

Kotharz has bought the line from Trump that he will be the “greatest president for jobs that God ever created”. He referred to the much-vaunted deal to stop the Carrier air-conditioner plant moving from Indianapolis to Mexico, and to Keystone which he said would create 28,000 new jobs. “I believe in the pipeline; I also believe in global warming but you can’t have everything,” he said.

I believe in the pipeline; I also believe in global warming but you can’t have everything Wallace Kotharz

The pawn shop owner did not dwell on the handsome tax sweeteners offered to Carrier, or to the US state department estimate that Keystone will create only 35 long-term jobs.

Instead, Kotharz blamed the media. He doesn’t consume news at all himself, he said, leaving it to his wife, an avid viewer of CNN and Fox News, to fill him in on what’s going on. “The media doesn’t tell it as it is, they only want to sell newspapers. They’ve caused a lot of trouble,” he said.

Jeff Payne knows all about the low esteem in which newspapers are held locally. He is managing editor of the Macomb Daily, and he has found that criticism of Trump’s falsehoods in the media tends to be far outweighed among his readers by distrust of the messenger.

“You can give readers 50 facts that show that Trump is wrong, but when he portrays us in the media industry as the bad guys, that seems to outweigh all those facts.”

If Michigan was the place that best captured the shock of election night – by swinging unexpectedly Republican after having been won comfortably by Obama in both his campaigns – then Macomb County was pivotal within the state. It too veered towards Trump having backed Obama twice, giving the Republican candidate 54% to Hillary Clinton’s 42% – a margin of 48,000 votes, more than enough to tip the entire state in his favor that he won by a mere 13,000.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Macomb County gave John F Kennedy a leg up into the White House in 1960. Photograph: Garrett MacLean/The Guardian

Historically, Macomb County, with its heavy dependence on auto and defense manufacturing plants and its staunchly pro-trade union, non-college-educated white demographic, was a Democratic stronghold. It gave John F Kennedy a leg up into the White House in 1960.

But then, 20 years later, Ronald Reagan made a racially charged power grab for white voters in the north and succeeded, to the astonishment of pundits, in turning Macomb County Republican. The stunning switch gave rise to the phrase Reagan Democrats.

Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg coined the expression Reagan Democrat based on the focus groups he conducted in Macomb County. He now watches the ascendancy of Trump in the same locality with a mixture of awe and deja vu.

“As bad as the last few days have been for Trump – and they will ultimately haunt him – that’s not going to hold for the working-class voters of Macomb County,” Greenberg said. “They’ve been waiting to hear this for a long time: that the political class recognize their importance and will stand up for them.”

As bad as the last few days have been for Trump, that’s not going to hold for the working-class voters of Macomb County Stan Greenberg, Democratic pollster

There has been much debate in recent months about the phenomenon of social media “echo chambers” in which people consume only news that conforms to their prior beliefs, thus separating Americans into increasingly partisan camps. On the right, the proliferation of ideological websites such as Breitbart and fake news outlets on Facebook have allowed millions of voters to bypass mainstream media entirely, gaining their information in forms that merely reinforce their prejudices.

“The easy thing is to find the outlet you like and repeat what they say. If you like Breitbart then everything they say is the truth, if you like Drudge or InfoWars then everything they say is the truth,” said Ben Shapiro, former editor-at-large of Breitbart, who now runs his own conservative site the Daily Wire.

In Macomb County, though, a slightly different narrative appears to be unfolding. It’s not that people are living in their own media bubbles so much as they are actively choosing to ignore news that they do not want to hear, or even more alarmingly, receiving no news at all.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Doreen McVay: ‘I don’t know what’s going on, I have no idea.’ Photograph: Garrett MacLean/The Guardian

“I don’t know what’s going on, I have no idea,” said Doreen McVay, 47, a waitress in Angelo’s diner in Sterling Heights, a city within Macomb County that Trump visited two days before the election and where he predicted – accurately, as it turned out – that he would enjoy a Brexit-like victory. She spends her days serving fried pierogies to car workers, and the only time she gets to take in current affairs is out of the corner of her eye on the diner TV or in rare moments spent on Facebook.

That doesn’t stop her from feeling passionate about Trump in the White House. “The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and from what I’ve seen he’s going to fix it. Sure, he’s blunt and says what he thinks, but he doesn’t take any shit.”

One of the issues that has preoccupied the media in the first week of the new presidency has been Trump’s commitment to falsehoods. He repeated several times the conspiracy theory that up to 5 million non-citizens voted illegally in the election, and he bragged that 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration – a claim that was conclusively debunked by aerial photography.

But several Macomb County residents told the Guardian that though they did pay attention to the news, they were utterly uninterested in the subject of presidential disinformation. “That stuff on the crowd size – who cares? It’s garbage. It’s rubbish,” said Geoff Kowalczyk, 55.

Kowalczyk, who works at the General Motors Tech Center putting together 2019 prototypes, has a strongly selective ear. He hears, and approves of, news about Trump’s efforts to generate jobs, such as his meeting this week with the CEOs of the Big Three auto companies and his protectionist withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership; but he weeds out most of the rest.

“If I complained about Obama the way people are complaining about Trump, they’d say I was a racist. And I’m not white, I’m Euro-American of Polish descent,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Steve Ferdig: ‘I’m prepared to give him his shot out of respect for the office.’ Photograph: Garrett MacLean/The Guardian

The sharpest criticism of Trump that could be found on the streets of Macomb County was that all his tweeting and expostulating about illegal voting and crowd sizes is distracting him from the task at hand. “He says things I wish he wouldn’t, he should get to the business of creating jobs and let the other stuff go,” said Megan, who owns a music shop in Mount Clemens.

Even those who did not vote for Trump last November now think he should be given a chance. “I’m prepared to give him his shot out of respect for the office,” said Steve Ferdig, 66, owner of a head shop selling bongs and vaporizers called Heads Up Boutique.

“Donald’s lack of craft is very scary to me,” he went on. “He just blasts out whatever he thinks. But I support him because he’s the president, and if he fails that’s going to hurt all of us.”