At the counter of the Yankee Kitchen in Youngstown, Ohio, Todd Franko, the affable editor of the local newspaper, the Vindicator, peers over his oatmeal at me and attempts to put the city’s history into a simple proverb of sorts. “Youngstown is eager for something good,” he tells me, “but accustomed to something bad.”

Today, the former steel town seems to be enjoying a momentary respite from the insatiable economic forces that have transformed Youngstown from a bustling Midwestern metropolis into a convenient metaphor for Donald Trump’s America. The front page of the Vindy, as the paper is universally known, prominently features the possibility that HomeGoods may bring 1,100 new jobs to the area and, later in the day, I sit with Scott Seitz, who presses titanium at the Arconic plant in Niles, just north of Youngstown. I first met Seitz early last year, after he had been hired 17 years after he lost his last mill job. Since his hiring, Seitz has worked almost nonstop, missing only six days in all. For a man who works at a physically challenging job seven days a week, he seems rather happy. He is just off an early morning shift, and has a series of family and union obligations ahead of him, but he smiles and says, “I’d rather be tired with money in my pocket,” which neatly sums up his take on his situation. He is not alone in his exhaustion. Arconic, which provides materials for airliners and military planes, is running at full speed, and is looking locally for another 1,500 mill workers—good union jobs, as Seitz reports to me with more than a little satisfaction.

I had visited Youngstown several times before, the last time nearly a year ago, curious to see how its residents viewed the president in whom they had bestowed so much hope. Despite various letdowns on the border wall, the repeal of Obamacare, and other hot campaign issues, I found back then that many still held out optimism that the man in office had their interests in mind—had their backs, really. I visited again last week to see if the picture had been clarified. At least in certain quarters, the president gets the lion’s share of the credit for the relative economic vitality in the area, and in the country as a whole. Tax cuts play well here and, in an area in which talking up NAFTA is the equivalent of giving someone the middle finger, his recent trade sanctions are almost uniformly seen as a long overdue defense of American manufacturing. There are, of course, fanboys (and fangirls) who will trace a direct line between Trump and anything good happening in the world, but Trump voters in the area are mostly realistic, understanding that the good times are the product of multiple factors, of which presidential policies are only one. But they don’t care: the common refrain is that presidents get credit when things are good, and blame when the economy is bad, regardless of actual responsibility, and so Trump should be no different. In anticipation of our meeting, Seitz poses that very question on his Facebook account and reports to me that the feedback on the president is overwhelmingly positive.

If Democrats and Republicans in Youngstown agree on anything, it is that few minds have changed since November 8, 2016. Dave Betras, the local Democratic Party chair, remarks to me that people have dug in since the election, and Tracey Winbush, the vice chair of the Mahoning County Republican Party and a local radio host, says virtually the same thing: “There may be people who have changed their minds, but I haven’t met them yet.” (Mahoning County itself went for Hillary Clinton by three points, though many surrounding towns flipped from blue to red.) The other evident consensus is that the national media has not dealt with Trump fairly—or at least usefully. Every Trump supporter I speak to quickly dismisses critical media reports of the president, arguing in lockstep that the media has never given Trump a chance. The fact that the media has criticized Trump so constantly and so uniformly from day one is perceived as a fundamental unfairness, a nullification of what so many see as their victory. Even Betras, the Democrat, tells me that he loves Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews, but few in Youngstown will credit them because they chase Trump down “every rabbit hole” and criticize everything, regardless of whether the same action would have drawn fire under previous presidents or not. Only the media, determined to bring Trump down, could turn him into a sympathetic figure of sorts, an “underdog billionaire,” in Betras’s phrasing. The media may be helping to drive Democratic enthusiasm, which is evident in the greater Youngstown area, but it is otherwise only helping to harden the lines of division.