David Enrich’s latest book, to be published in March, is about the campaign to limit press freedoms. Katie Robertson covers the media industry.
Reporters and editors at national newspapers are increasing their reliance on encrypted communications to help shield themselves and their sources from potential federal leak investigations and subpoenas.
Multiple media organizations are evaluating whether they have enough insurance coverage to absorb a potential wave of libel and other litigation from officials who have already shown an inclination to file such suits.
And a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet is preparing for the possibility that the government will investigate issues like whether its use of freelancers complies with labor regulations.
With President-elect Donald J. Trump returning to the White House, media outlets large and small are taking steps to prepare for what they fear could be a legal and political onslaught against them from the new administration and Mr. Trump’s allies inside and outside the government.
For nearly a decade, Mr. Trump has demonized and tried to delegitimize the media. He has attacked reporters as “the enemy of the people.” He has repeatedly sued news organizations. In his first administration, the White House at timesbarred out-of-favor journalists from attending events.
But the early indications are that his new administration could be more hostile to the press. For example, Mr. Trump’s choice to run the F.B.I., Kash Patel, said before the election that a new Trump administration would “come after the people in the media.” Brendan Carr, the expected chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, recently raised the prospect of revoking federal broadcast licenses for television stations that he perceived as biased against conservatives.
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Opposition to prospective nominees, along with time-consuming Senate rules, will slow floor action despite the Republican push for approval of some of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s picks as soon as Jan. 20.
The most high-profile and potentially contentious hearing is set for Tuesday, when the Senate Armed Services Committee is scheduled to consider the expected nomination of Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
The battle over President-elect Donald J. Trump’s cabinet choices will escalate this week with Senate confirmation hearings set for more than a dozen prospective nominees, who will face a barrage of questions from Democrats hoping to enlist Republicans in knocking at least a few out of contention.
The most high-profile and potentially contentious hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, when the Senate Armed Services Committee is scheduled to consider the expected nomination of Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News personality and combat veteran, for secretary of defense. Senate committees have also set public reviews for the choice for attorney general and those tapped to run the State, Treasury, Homeland Security, Energy, Interior, Transportation and Veterans Affairs Departments and the C.I.A., among others.
Despite criticism of the backgrounds and experience of some of his picks, Mr. Trump has urged Senate Republicans to stay united and quickly deliver the team he has selected in the opening days of the administration. How the G.O.P. responds will provide an early test in the relationship.
Mr. Trump and his Republican allies in the Senate would like to be have at least some officials in place within hours of his swearing-in next Monday, but while top Republicans say they are committed to rapidly advancing his picks, the chances of more than a few being ready for votes on Inauguration Day are low.
“The president ought to have his team in place early, especially his national security team,” Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said on Sunday. “If Democrats try to drag out the process, the Republican Conference is ready to work around the clock, including weekends and nights, to get them in place.”
Mr. Hegseth has faced intense scrutiny because of accusations of sexual misconduct and excessive drinking, as well as his acknowledgment of reaching a financial settlement with a woman who accused him of sexual assault at a conservative convention in 2017. He has also faced criticism for comments about limiting the role of women in the military and will be pressed about his handling of two veterans advocacy groups that ran into financial trouble.
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Carrie Underwood will sing “America the Beautiful” at the second inauguration of Donald J. Trump.
Carrie Underwood is scheduled to sing “America the Beautiful” just before Chief Justice John Roberts administers the oath of office to President-elect Donald J. Trump.Credit…Kent J. Edwards/Reuters
The singer Carrie Underwood said Monday that she would perform next week at President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inauguration.
“I love our country and am honored to have been asked to sing at the Inauguration and to be a small part of this historic event,” Ms. Underwood said in a statement on Monday. “I am humbled to answer the call at a time when we must all come together in the spirit of unity and looking to the future.”
Ms. Underwood, whose career was launched when she won “American Idol” in 2005, will sing “America the Beautiful” with an accompaniment from the Armed Forces Chorus and the United States Naval Academy Glee Club, according a copy of the inaugural program obtained by The New York Times.
After she sings, Chief Justice John Roberts will administer the oath of office to Mr. Trump.
Ms. Underwood’s agreement to perform will lend star power to the event. Eight years ago there were days of headlines of singers making it clear that they would not be performing at Mr. Trump’s first inauguration. The Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli and Elton John were among those who said that they would not appear, and after it was announced that the Rockettes would perform internal tensions within the dance troupe burst into public view.
A number of other events and parties, many featuring musical acts, will be held around the inauguration.
Victor Willis, the last surviving founding member of the Village People, announced on Facebook on Monday that the group had accepted an invitation to participate in Mr. Trump’s inaugural activities. Mr. Trump had made the Village People song “Y.M.C.A.” a campaign anthem of sorts, playing it at his rallies and campaign events.
Charlie Kirk, the founder and chief of the pro-Trump, youth-focused group Turning Point USA, said on social media that the Village People would perform at the Turning Point Inaugural-eve Ball.
Mr. Willis wrote on Facebook that the decision would not make some fans happy however, “we believe that music is to be performed without regard to politics,” he said. “Our song ‘Y.M.C.A.’ is a global anthem that hopefully helps bring the country together after a tumultuous and divided campaign where our preferred candidate lost.”
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
Michael Gold is a political correspondent for The Times covering the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and other candidates in the 2024 presidential elections.More about Michael Gold
A member of the U.S. Army Herald Trumpets participates in a rehearsal for inauguration on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 12, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images
Donald Trump‘s presidential transition team on Monday released a schedule of official parties, gatherings and other events that will surround his inauguration as the 47th U.S. president next week.
The four-day schedule includes a fireworks show and three VIP events at Trump’s golf course outside Washington, D.C., as well as a celebratory MAGA rally on the eve of his swearing-in ceremony.
It also includes three inaugural balls, a relatively small number by recent presidential standards — and one that appears even more modest considering the record-shattering amount of money that Trump’s inaugural committee has at its disposal.
The Trump Vance Inaugural Committee has raised more than $170 million, and is on track to end up with more than $200 million to spend on inaugural events and operations, news outlets including NBC News have reported.
The nonprofit committee is tasked with planning and hosting much of the pageantry that traditionally accompanies transitions of presidential power.
That does not include Trump’s swearing-in at the Capitol or his inaugural address, both of which are paid for by a special joint congressional committee.
Outside of the balls, several of Trump’s events will be held at his Virginia golf course, a break from recent inaugurations that largely kept events within Washington, D.C.
Unlike in 2021, when President Joe Biden held a fireworks show over D.C.’s National Mall, the fireworks at Trump’s club will explode more than 20 miles from Capitol Hill, out of view for much of the general public.
Trump’s second inaugural committee, like his first in 2017, will once again be flush with far more cash than those of other recent presidents, while hosting fewer events.
Former President Barack Obama‘s 2009 inauguration, for example, featured 10 official balls alongside dozens of other unofficial events. His inaugural committee raised over $53 million, a record at the time.
Former President Bill Clinton attended a record 14 official balls during his second inauguration in 1997, which reportedly raised less than $24 million.
President Joe Biden did not host any balls in 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Read more CNBC politics coverage
Trump’s massive fundraising haul and relatively scant schedule mirror the circumstances of his 2017 inauguration, which raised $107 million and spent more than $97 million over just two days of events.
That unprecedented jump in spending came out to about $37,000 per minute, more than four times the $8,600 per minute spent during Obama’s first inauguration, OpenSecrets calculated in 2018.
The current Trump inaugural committee did not immediately respond to CNBC’s questions about its fundraising and spending plans.
As Trump vows to overhaul U.S. economic policies — including by imposing potentially sweeping tariffs while slashing all sorts of other taxes and regulations — some top CEOs and businesses seem eager to warm up their once-frosty relationships with him.
That extends to the inaugural committee, which has received million-dollar donations from a wave of companies, including many of the tech giants that declined to contribute to his 2017 inauguration.
Last week, departing Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan suggested to CNBC that Amazon and Facebook parent Meta may be working to get a “sweetheart deal” from the next Trump administration.
Possibly in response to the increased interest in currying Trump’s favor, the inaugural committee is reportedly asking top donors to give a minimum of $1 million — twice as much as it requested in 2017 — for the opportunity to get some direct face time with the president- or vice president-elect, the Guardian reported.
Here’s the latest schedule of events, provided by Trump’s inaugural committee:
Saturday, January 18, 2025
The President’s Reception and Fireworks at Trump Sterling
Cabinet Reception and Vice President’s Dinner
Sunday, January 19, 2025
Arlington National Cemetery Ceremony Wreath laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
Make America Great Again Victory Rally President Donald J. Trump Delivers Remarks
Candlelight Dinner President Donald J. Trump Delivers Remarks
Monday, January 20, 2025
St. John’s Church Service
Tea at the White House
Swearing-In Ceremony US Capitol
Farewell to the Former President and Vice President
US Capitol Departure Ceremony
The President’s Signing Room Ceremony
JCCIC Congressional Luncheon
The President’s Review of the Troops
Presidential Parade Pennsylvania Avenue
Oval Office Signing Ceremony at The White House
Commander in Chief Ball President Donald J. Trump Delivers Remarks
Liberty Inaugural Ball President Donald J. Trump Delivers Remarks
Starlight Ball President Donald J. Trump Delivers Remarks
Orla Joelsen wants to Make Greenland Great Again but is pretty sure ditching Denmark and allowing the Arctic territory to be annexed by a superpower is not the best way to go about it.
President-elect Donald Trump is not the first American leader to promote the idea of buying the U.S.’s strategically located northern neighbor, which is rich in minerals and oil, for security reasons. President Harry Truman offered $100 million − about $1.3 billion today − in gold bullion for the world’s largest island in the post-World War II era.
But Trump’s amplification this month of an idea he first floated in his first term, backed by his refusal to rule out using U.S. military power to achieve it, has left Greenlanders not only wondering if it’s a joke. It’s also left them worried, intrigued, excited, bewildered and everything in between.
“It’s shocked us,” Joelsen, a native Greenlander who works as a prison official in the island’s capital Nuuk, said by telephone. “We need to talk about the independence of Greenland from Denmark. But not like this.” Joelsen’s prisons job falls under the authority of Denmark’s justice department. He said he was speaking in a private capacity.
Funny and absurd. Then there was a big airplane with Trump’s name on it.
Christian Ulloriaq Jeppesen is a radio producer from Nuuk who lives in Denmark. He said when Trump initially proposed purchasing Greenland in 2019 it was something he, his friends and family found funny − even absurd.
“Then suddenly there was a big airplane with Trump’s name on it in Nuuk and people were walking around with MAGA hats on it and the whole thing got real,” he said by phone from Copenhagen. Trump’s eldest son landed in Nuuk on Tuesday and spent the day handing out red caps, filming a documentary and speaking to residents.
“I would say some Greenlanders are a bit concerned and scared about this,” Jeppesen said. “It’s also a little bit of a joke. It’s weird. I’m personally quite mad about the whole idea that someone thinks they can just buy a country.”
Trump wants Greenland. What to make of that?
So which is it? A staged joke or serious threat? Why does Trump appear to be so intent on taking control of a territory that’s been an established part of the Danish crown since 1830? And how rattled are Greenlanders and Danes about the possibility, real or remote, of Trump’s threats to acquire Greenland?
Aaja Chemnitz is one of two Greenlandic lawmakers who represents the 836,000-square-mile island’s 57,000 inhabitants in Denmark’s Folketing, its Parliament. As an autonomous territory of Denmark, Greenland has its own legislature, known as the Inatsisartut, with 31 seats. It’s a chamber that administers various internal affairs. Greenland’s defense, national security and financial policies remain the responsibility of Denmark and the Folketing.
On Thursday night, Chemnitz attended what she called an emergency “crisis meeting” in Copenhagen about Trump’s Greenland pitch with party leaders from across Denmark’s political spectrum. Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede flew in on Wednesday to meet with Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and King Frederik X.
“Some people in Greenland are a little startled by all the attention we’re getting globally,” Chemnitz said in a phone interview Friday. “A close dialogue between Greenland and Denmark is important right now. It’s also important to be very calm and think about how we can make a wise decision. It’s not a question of whether we should be Danish citizens or American citizens. It’s a question of how can we be Greenlanders and have a good Greenlandic future.”
The majority of Greenlanders are Inuit, an indigenous people who also live in Alaska and Canada. Greenlandic, the language they speak, is vastly different to Danish. Ulrik Pram Gad, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, said the culture and traditions in Greenland are also highly distinct from what’s found in Denmark and Western Europe more generally. But he said many Greenlanders today are related to Danes through marriage, partnership or blood and that many go to Denmark for schooling, work and vacation. Most, he said, prize the Scandinavian country’s welfare state which gives them access to free education and healthcare.
However, Gad also said polls over the last few decades have consistently shown the majority of Greenlanders want independence from Denmark for reasons connected to its dark, colonial past and persistent discrimination, though there is division over the timing of it and concern over what it could mean for living conditions.
An independence movement in Greenland has nevertheless gained traction amid revelations that Danish doctors in the 1960s and 1970s fitted thousands of Inuit women and girls, often without their knowledge, with contraceptive devices as part of an involuntary birth control campaign. In the 1950s, Danish authorities separated Inuit children from their families as part of a social experiment where they were “reeducated” as “model” Danes.
“Greenlanders still feel today that they are treated unequally and not on their own terms,” said Gad, who worked in Nuuk for Greenland’s government before moving full-time into academic research.
“The Danish system feels like an imported system, with Danish terms and conditions, for a different culture.”
Greenlanders don’t want to be Americans or Danes
In a New Year’s speech, Greenland’s leader Egede said it was “about time we ourselves take a step and shape our future, also with regard to who we will cooperate closely with, and who our trading partners will be.”
Greenland’s “history and current conditions,” he said “have shown that our cooperation with the Kingdom of Denmark has not succeeded in creating full equality. It is now time for our country to take the next step.”
Yet it’s far from clear that most Greenlanders view that next step as being in sync with Trump’s ambitions.
Kalaallit Nunaata Radioa is Greenland’s national public broadcaster. When it canvassed Nuuk’s residents this week about Trump’s stated desire to purchase Greenland it found a few local voices, such as those of Karen Kielsen and Imaakka Boassen, who seemed interested in the idea of becoming part of the U.S.
“The U.S. is more attractive. Everything just gets more and more expensive here,” Kielsen, described by KNR as a cleaning assistant, said. Boassen, a student, said he didn’t “fully trust Danes. Maybe I will have more trust in Trump.”
Boassen expressed some disaffection with job prospects. “There are so many Danes in leading positions in Greenland, but when we live in Greenland, it should be Greenlanders who lead,” he said.
Others described Trump as “dangerous” and “worrying” and questioned whether he really had Greenland’s best interests at heart. “We are so few inhabitants,” said Jens Danielsen. “I fear our language would disappear very quickly (under the U.S.), so I would prefer to stay with Denmark.” Danielsen added he thinks the only reason Trump may be interested in Greenland is because he wants to extract its uranium and other raw materials.
Still, Gad, the researcher, said that if part of Trump’s motivation for wanting to buy Greenland is because he wants to wrench minerals from its frozen tundra he doesn’t need to purchase it in order to do that. He said companies, not governments, extract these resources and that Greenland’s authorities have long been open to approaches to American, Canadian, Australian and even Chinese firms who may want to open or run a mine there but none have worked out. He said Chinese investors nearly got one off the ground about a decade ago before it fizzled out.
“All a company needs to do is apply for a license,” said Gad.
In a recent interview, John Bolton, a former national security adviser in Trump’s first term, said that controlling Greenland would enable Washington to better protect its interests in the region − including critically important shipping lanes − against expansionist efforts by Russia and, more recently, China.
But Rasmus Jarlov, a Danish opposition Conservative lawmaker, said the two reasons mentioned by Trump and the people around him for his interest in Greenland − resources and national security − don’t really make any sense.
“Trump needs to understand he has no legitimate claim to Greenland, and also the difference between ‘yours’ and ‘mine’ and respect that,” Jarlov, a former minister of business affairs, said in a phone interview.
“With regards to the military argument, well, there are no big military threats against Greenland. Russia and China don’t have any aspirations to take it over. The only real threat is the United States. Denmark has a defense agreement with the U.S. The U.S. used to have a bigger military presence in Greenland,” he added, referring to when about 10,000 U.S. troops were stationed at a dozen bases scattered around Greenland’s coast.
Now, Pituffik Space Base, formerly known as Thule Air Base, is one of the most remote U.S. military assignments in the world. Built on permafrost in Greenland’s far north, it hosts about 200 troops.
“The U.S. voluntarily downgraded its Greenland military presence − itself,” said Jarlov. “If the Americans change their minds, and want a bigger presence, then by all means we’re more than open to that.”
Speaking at a joint press conference in Copenhagen on Friday with Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister, Greenland’s leader Egede said that he had not been in contact with Trump and urged everyone to respect Greenland’s wish for independence. He said Greenlanders did not want to be Americans or Danes.
‘Buy us! Buy Greenland!’
In Nuuk, prisons official Joelsen said he favors an independent Greenland so that it can pursue partnerships, economic and diplomatic, with other countries without having to seek approval from policymakers in Denmark.
“Part of the USA? No, no, I don’t want that,” he said. “I don’t really know about the culture there.”
Jeppesen, the radio producer, said when he moved to Copenhagen from Greenland in 2017 he experienced a lot of discrimination and he often felt he was the butt of a racist joke usually involving Greenlanders who drink too much. He said he’s tried to educate Danes about this but it’s an uphill battle. Jeppesen is 28. He said he hopes to eventually move back to Greenland once he has established himself more with his career.
“There’s a lot problems between Greenland and Denmark but I don’t see any benefit in becoming part of the U.S.”
One person who said he does is Timmy Zeeb, a Greenlander who is widely known in Nuuk for all the wrong reasons, according to Jeppesen and multiple Danish media reports. Zeeb is a local drug dealer with a long list of convictions for that activity and other crimes, some of them violent, stretching back many years.
He was featured in a video shared by Trump when he posted on his Truth Social media platform that he was hearing from his son in Nuuk “that the people of Greenland are ‘MAGA’” and that “Greenland is an incredible place, and the people will benefit tremendously if, and when, it becomes part of our Nation.”
Zeeb has a big bushy beard and is heavy-set. He had just come out of a store when he ran into members of Donald Trump Jr.’s entourage in Nuuk. They put a MAGA cap on his head, stuck a camera in his face and pressed record.
“Buy us! Buy Greenland!” he says in the 30-second video, in which he directly addresses the president-elect.
Zeeb then said “he loves America but people are too fat over there,” before sticking his tongue out and bursting into laughter. He later told Denmark’s state broadcaster that even those with a criminal past are entitled to an opinion.
Appearing in court virtually from his Mar-a-Lago home Friday, President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced for his crimes in the New York “hush money” case and released with no restrictions.
Justice Juan Merchan followed through on a promise made one week ago to give Trump a sentence of unconditional discharge, which includes neither jail time nor any other restriction that might impede Trump after his inauguration on Jan. 20.
Merchan said during sentencing Friday that he was granting that sentence because he believed it was the only legal option, just 10 days before Trump assumes the presidency.
Merchan told the court that “this has been a truly extraordinary case,” even though once the courtroom doors closed, the trial itself had been in his estimation no more special or unique than any other.
However, he told Trump, the same could not be said about the circumstances surrounding the president-elect’s sentencing “because of the office you once occupied and will soon occupy again.” Merchan said that it was the legal protections afforded to the office of the president that were extraordinary, “not the occupant of the office.”
Those legal protections were a factor that overrode all others, Merchan said, but they were not a mitigating factor. He said they did not reduce the seriousness of the crimes or erase the jury’s verdict.
Merchan said he determined that the only lawful sentence he could give, without encroaching on the highest post in the land, was an unconditional discharge.
Donald Trump, the civilian, he said, might not have gotten so lenient a sentence.
President-elect Donald Trump, right, and Todd Blanche, attorney for Donald Trump, appear virtually at Manhattan criminal court in New York, US, on Friday, Jan. 10, 2025. Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In the courtroom, Trump and attorney Todd Blanche — who has also been tapped by the president-elect to serve as deputy attorney general — could be seen via video feed sitting next to each other, with two American flags visible behind them, in a room with dark wooden walls.
Trump was given the opportunity to address the court. He called the trial “a very terrible experience” and “a tremendous setback for New York.”
“With all the horrible things that are going on, I got indicted for calling a legal expense a legal expense,” Trump said, referring to the falsified reimbursements to a former lawyer, for a “hush money” payment at the core of the case.
“It’s been a political witch hunt,” Trump said on camera. “It was done to damage my reputation so that I’d lose the election, and obviously, that didn’t work.”
“The fact is I’m totally innocent,” Trump said. “I did nothing wrong.”
Ahead of sentencing, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said Trump’s actions in attacking the judicial system and prosecutors in this case “constitutes a direct attack on the rule of law itself.”
“Far from expressing any kind of remorse for his criminal conduct, the defendant has purposefully bred disdain for our judicial institutions and the rule of law, and he’s done this to serve his own ends, and to encourage others to reject the jury verdict that he finds so distasteful,” Steinglass said.
“Put simply, this defendant has caused enduring damage to public perception of the criminal justice system, and has placed officers of the court in harm’s way,” Steinglass said. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was in attendance, in the gallery, but did not address the court.
Blanche said that he strongly disagreed with Steinglass’ assessment of the case and Trump’s conduct. He claimed it was not just Trump and experts cited by Trump who felt the case should not have been brought, but the majority of the American people, referring to those who voted for the Republican in November.
At every turn, Trump and his lawyers have fought Manhattan prosecutors since the beginning of the “hush money” investigation in 2018. They challenged prosecutors’ subpoenas and rulings by Merchan, battling all the way to the Supreme Court multiple times, including an effort this week to stave off Friday’s hearing.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court said it would not intervene on Trump’s behalf, clearing the way for Merchan to issue his decision. Trump, soon after the high court’s decision, said he had read it and “thought it was a fair decision, actually,” noting the Supreme Court justices pointed out he could appeal and that there would be “really…no penalty.”
“But we’re going to appeal anyway,” he added in his remarks Thursday night.
“So, I’ll do my little thing tomorrow. They can have fun with their political opponent,” Trump said.
Although there are no cameras in the courtroom, an audio recording of the proceedings will be released after the hearing concludes.
While Trump’s trial and arraignment brought crowds and overnight lines, on Friday morning, the general public line was sparse and no onlookers in the park across the street were visible before dawn.
Trump was found guilty in May after a seven-week trial. A unanimous jury concluded he committed 34 felonies in authorizing a scheme in 2017 to falsify records, in order to cover up reimbursements for a “hush money” payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Daniels testified during the trial, as did Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen, who received the falsified reimbursements for his wire to Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen gave Daniels the $130,000 payment in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump years earlier.
Multiple witnesses testified that Trump was pleased voters did not learn of Daniels’ story before the 2016 election.
Merchan held Trump in contempt 10 times during the trial for violations of a gag order barring him from making public comments about witnesses, court staff and others. In issuing the 10th contempt citation, Merchan — who frequently acknowledged the unique circumstances of the trial and its famed, powerful defendant — foreshadowed Friday’s likely sentence.
“The last thing I want to do is to put you in jail,” Merchan said.
Merchan on Friday told Trump, “the only lawful sentence that permits entry of a judgment of conviction without encroaching on the highest office in the land, is an unconditional discharge.
“Godspeed as you assume your second term in office,” Merchan said.
Graham Kates is an investigative reporter covering criminal justice, privacy issues and information security for CBS News Digital. Contact Graham at KatesG@cbsnews.com or grahamkates@protonmail.com
The last time Donald Trump was president, he travelled to Youngstown, Ohio, among the most depressed of America’s rust belt cities, and promised voters the impossible.
The high-paying steel, railroad and car industry jobs that once made Youngstown a hard-living, hard-drinking blue collar boom town were coming back, he said. “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house,” he crowed to a rapturous crowd in 2017. “We’re going to fill up those factories – or rip ”em down and build brand new ones.”
None of that happened. Indeed, within 18 months, General Motors (GM) announced that it was suspending operations at its one remaining manufacturing plant outside Youngstown, throwing 5,000 jobs into jeopardy in a community with little else to cling to. Trump’s reaction was to say the closure didn’t matter, because the jobs would be replaced “in, like, two minutes”.
That, too, did not happen. People moved away, marriages broke down, depression soared and, locals say, a handful of people took their own lives.
Ordinarily, politicians who promise the moon and fail to deliver get punished at the ballot box. But that did not happen to Trump either. Instead, he has steadily built up his popularity in Youngstown, a city that was once a well-oiled Democratic party machine but has now turned into one of his most remarkable bases of working-class support.
“Does [Trump] understand at all what you’re going through?” Joe Biden asked Ohio voters during the 2020 presidential campaign, referring directly to the GM closure. “Does he see you where you are and where you want to be? Does he care?”
To which the answer, in Youngstown, has been an astonishing and vigorous “yes”.
Trump might have lost to Biden overall that year, but he became the first Republican presidential candidate in almost half a century to win in Youngstown and surrounding Mahoning County. This past November, he extended his margin there to a decisive 13 points, giving so much cover to local Republican party candidates that they won a majority of county-wide offices for the first time in 90 years.
Anyone seeking to understand the earthquake that has shaken US politics – to the point where a convicted felon, serial liar and twice-impeached former president can return to the White House in triumph, as Trump will do on 20 January – might learn a lot from the disillusioned working-class voters of northeast Ohio.
They tell blunt, profanity-laden stories of watching their city slump ever deeper into decline and express a real bleakness about the future. They see a political class corrupted by big-money donors who, they say, don’t care about communities like theirs. White voters point to conversations about justice – for racial minorities, for the children of immigrants, for women worried about losing their reproductive rights, for transgender teenagers – and question why nobody ever talks about justice for them.
Few expect Trump to fix everything or believe him when he says he will. What they do believe is that the system is broken and corrupt, just as Trump says it is, and that a candidate who promises to tear it down and start again might just be on to something.
“We just want a change, a change in the weather,” a retired aluminium worker wanting to go just by his first name, Paul, said as he sat with a group of friends in a cigarette shop in Struthers, a down-at-heel overwhelmingly white Youngstown suburb once known for its thick clusters of bars, pizza parlours, strip clubs and illegal gambling joints.
Paul and his friends come to the shop most days not to smoke – smoking is not allowed – but to scratch away at lottery tickets and reminisce about the old days, when a single factory salary could support a whole family and the main drag in Struthers was packed every Friday night with working men flush with their weekly pay packet.
West Federal Street in Youngstown, Ohio. Photograph: Justin Merriman/the Observer
Back then, a local mafia ran the gambling rackets, which were secreted away in the back rooms of laundries or in private clubs posing as something innocuous like a knitting circle.
Now that same drag, the Youngstown-Poland Road, is reduced to a handful of pawn shops, dollar stores and auto repair shops in half-deserted mini-malls. The high-paying factory jobs started disappearing in the late 1970s with the closure of Youngstown Sheet & Tube, based in Struthers, and the bars and other businesses followed soon after. The mob was broken up in the late 1990s, ceding its turf to small-time street gangs who now run the drug rackets and make the locals a lot more nervous.
“We feel left behind,” said another cigarette shop patron, a former railroad worker who wanted to be known just as Joe. “People who’ve lived here all their lives are working two or three jobs just to pay their bills.”
Cigarettes 4 Less owner Brian Acierno behind the counter at the shop in Struthers, Ohio. Photograph: Justin Merriman/the Observer
Insecurity is woven into the fabric of Youngstown now. Part of the reason Paul, Joe and their friends come to the cigarette shop each morning is to make a show of strength in the front room and deter would-be burglars. “There’s a corner gang on every street,” the owner of Cigarettes 4 Less, Brian Acierno, said. “There’s no organisation. People get shot and killed wherever.”
When Youngstown first sank into decline in the 1980s, voters turned to a populist congressman named Jim Traficant, a Democrat who had a Trump-like disregard for the ordinary rules of political decorum and was widely adored because he would stand up for his constituents in Washington and yell at his colleagues to stop ignoring them.
Traficant was also a crook, with long-standing ties to the Youngstown mob and a pattern of taking bribes and falsifying his taxes that eventually sent him to prison for seven years – but most of his working-class voters didn’t care. In their view, politics was corrupt and government authority fundamentally untrustworthy, but he at least was on their side. “We got the best politicians money can buy,” Joe the former railroad worker joked.
Now they see the same virtues – and the same flaws – in Trump. As Acierno explained: “The Democrats and the Republicans are all a den of crooks. Only one side lies about being crooks, and one doesn’t. If you’re going to be a crook, I’d rather know it than be lied to.”
Trump, in other words, comes across as someone who doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what he is, and that perceived authenticity counts for more with many Youngstown voters than his character flaws or even his policy positions. They’d rather have his gut instincts, ugly as they often are, over the carefully scripted messaging of a Democrat like Kamala Harris or even a mainstream Republican.
Tex Fischer, a Republican state representative who cut his teeth working on Mitt Romney’s doomed 2012 presidential campaign, said Trump had done the party a huge favour by ripping the old order apart because it chimed with voters’ anti-establishment instincts and gave them real hope for the change they thirst for.
“When Romney came to Youngstown,” Fischer recalled, “he wore blue jeans and rolled up his sleeves, and nobody bought it. Trump doesn’t pretend – here he comes in his suit and tie and gold jewellery, and people respect that.”
Local Democrats don’t necessarily disagree. “American voters have a unique ability to smell bullshit, and they smell bullshit with the Democrats,” said Dave Betras, a former Democratic party county chair who believes his party’s brand has to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Betras said Trump’s success was a symptom of the Democrats’ failure to address the catastrophic impact of international trade agreements on manufacturing jobs in the US – a failure he pins on Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – and its further failure, under Obama, to take any meaningful action against Wall Street or the big banks after the housing collapse of 2007-08.
“Most Americans think the system is rigged. And Trump shuffled the deck on us,” Betras said. “Not only does Trump say this thing is rigged, but he says: ‘I know, because I rigged it. I was part of the rigging.’”
Trump, in other words, has exposed the Democrats as hollow and ineffectual as much as he has proposed any viable alternative. Few issues illustrate that better than a catastrophic 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, 15 miles south of Youngstown, that filled the air and local creeks with a toxic brew of burning chemicals that have severely compromised local residents’ health.
President Biden did not visit for a year, whereas Trump showed up the same month and distributed Trump-branded water off a truck. His future vice presidential pick, Ohio senator JD Vance, wrote letters to the White House to demand a more vigorous response. That was enough to sway local residents like Jami Wallace, a lifelong Democrat who now campaigns full-time to publicise the impact of the disaster.
“[The Biden administration] abandoned us for money,” she said after listing the physical symptoms she has suffered: hypothyroidism, asthma and a periodontal disease that has cost her three teeth. “That’s what people need to stand up and realise. It’s what they do to communities they think won’t stand up for themselves.”
Wallace agreed that distributing water was not much of a response either, but it earned Trump her vote all the same. “It was more than we got from the Biden administration,” she said. “We never got one bottle of water from them.”
In contrast to other parts of the country, where political disagreements over Trump have ended lifelong friendships and split families apart, Youngstown is remarkable for the consensus between people of opposing views about the underlying problems and the frustrations that stem from them. They disagree only on the remedy.
Some Trump supporters are actually alarmed by parts of his platform – one cigarette shop patron said he was worried the future administration might make his kidney dialysis unaffordable – but their anger at the Democrats outweighs those concerns.
Some anti-Trump voters, conversely, agree that the Democrats have abandoned the working class but believe that backing Trump is the worst possible answer. “I never liked Trump even when he was only a builder in New York … because he stiffed union workers and he generally seemed like a douche bag,” said Tim O’Hara, a former president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union at Lordstown. “One thing I wasn’t then and I’m not now is a racist, misogynistic, uninformed dipshit who enjoys supporting a rapist, felon, traitor … These people have no clue yet what they’ve done, but they will find out.”
Sonja Woods, a former General Motors worker, pictured in Warren, Ohio. Photograph: Justin Merriman/the Observer
Then there is a third group of voters who loathed both presidential candidates and wished they’d had some other choice. “We were screwed either way,” said Sonja Woods, one of the GM workers forced out in 2018 who is also an official with the UAW. “We’ve been lied to, let down. It’s disappointing.”
Woods’ personal story expresses much of the heartache and frustration felt across the community. After the closure of GM’s Lordstown plant – presented not as a closure at first, but as something more temporary – she was forced to commute to a GM job in Kentucky. Between the cost of renting an apartment and driving back and forth, she lost money over the next six years and had to rely on her husband’s salary to make ends meet. When she returned to Youngstown to work for a car battery company called Ultium, a new joint venture between GM and a South Korean firm, she was devastated to see that the old Lordstown plant, once a symbol of US industry, now belonged to Foxconn, a Chinese company. The job losses had gutted the community, including a number of schools and businesses that had shuttered in her absence.
“It was desolate, eerie,” she said.
Woods, like many in Youngstown, sympathises with Trump’s zero-sum view of the world – that if one group is benefitting, it is usually at the expense of another. Seeing Afghan refugees move into government-subsidised housing when she had to finance her move to Kentucky infuriated her. Reading about Biden’s plans to forgive student debt when she paid off her daughter’s student loans in full struck her as deeply unfair.
She was unwilling to give the Biden administration much credit for spurring clean-energy businesses like her current employer, and she was too angry at GM to place much, if any, blame on Trump for allowing the old plant to close. What she saw, rather, was a general indifference from the political class, especially now that Ohio is no longer regarded as a swing state. “Nobody showed up in Youngstown this time, not Trump or Kamala,” she observed. “There are a lot of bitter people, and I’m one of them.”
Conversation at the Struthers cigarette shop reflected many of these complex, contradictory feelings. The retired blue-collar workers offered hints of the misogyny O’Hara mentioned – they said they didn’t like Harris’s “Hollywood girlboss” energy – and clearly responded to the Trump campaign’s aggressive but unsubstantiated charge that the Democrats were more interested in subsidising gender reassignment surgery than in helping working people.
None, though, were Trump ideologues. They spoke with contempt of two Maga true believers who came into the cigarette shop and started swinging fists at anyone who disagreed with them. Their worries were about the cost of living and taking care of friends they’ve loved for decades and what it means to be working class in an era that has either outsourced or mechanised the work they used to do.
“They are waiting for us older white guys to just die and get out of the way,” Paul the retired aluminium worker said. He did not say it forlornly, though. He and his friends are tough people, and nobody in Youngstown is going down without a fight.
The U.S. saw inflation cool in 2024, but economists warn that President-elect Donald Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants could greatly affect prices.
“Certainly the economic impacts are going to be felt,” said David J. Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. “There’s going to be supply chain issues. There’s going to be increases in prices, decreases in services.”
Experts are concerned that deporting such a large number of undocumented immigrants at once could leave a hole in the labor force. A 2023 study in the Journal of Labor Economics found that 44,000 U.S.-born workers could lose their jobs for every 500,000 immigrants removed from the labor force.
“Immigrants, especially unauthorized immigrants, are much more likely to work in the types of jobs that create the goods and services where we’re seeing the prices go up,” said Chloe East, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research who was also one of the researchers behind the 2023 study.
“We can’t say for sure what the effects will be,” she said. “But based on what we know from past mass deportation efforts, it seems like goods and services where unauthorized immigrants are super concentrated like construction and agriculture, the prices are likely going to go up as a result of a mass deportation effort rather than down.”
Watch the video above to find out what other economic effects the mass deportation could impose on the U.S.
