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INSIDE his ramshackle Union 76 gas station, Ed Shepard, 92, was reading a book and staring out the window at a mural across the street.
A panoramic view, by local artist Tom Acosta, showed what life used to be in Welch, West Virginia. A United Cigars store on one side of the street, a Western Union sign on the other. Rows of cars stretching into the distance. Even Shepard himself, a small man with soft wrinkles and rheumatic eyes, is on the mural, with the blue cap he was wearing as we spoke, perched on his head.
Ed hadn’t had a client in years. He recalled, with bittersweet nostalgia, the days of the coal boom, when Welch thrived as one of the richest cities in the state. That was until the furnaces stopped burning and the coal mining industry went into free fall. Ed lived in a small apartment across the street from his beloved gas station.
“I live alone,” he said. “I spend my days coming from there to here, to there, to here. Nothing changes. Nothing happens.”
It was the day before the 2016 presidential election and my 10-day reporting tour of Central America was coming to an end. For nearly 1,500 miles, I traveled through municipalities and counties in Ohio, crossed the Pennsylvania state line, and into the mountainous West Virginia territory.
Back then, Ed expected Trump to be the next president. His was a simple choice. Hillary said she would close the coal mines. Trump promised to bring them back. “Trump is probably lying,” Ed said. “But he’s given people here hope.”
In trying to understand how Donald Trump became president of the United States, there are few better places to visit than McDowell County, the poorest county in West Virginia. For more than half a century, this corner of the severely depressed Carboniferous country of Appalachia has been emblematic of American poverty in trance. John F Kennedy campaigned here in 1960 and was so dismayed that he promised to send aid if he was elected president. His first executive order created the modern food stamp program, the first beneficiaries of which were McDowell County residents. In 1964, with federal programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and free school lunches, things began to look up, at least for a time.
“This was the richest city in the state of West Virginia at one point,” Ed said in 2016. “We had the mines, men in the mines, not machines. It was booming. The coal companies came and brought continuous mining machines. The miners were not necessary. Many people left. The young people left ”.
In a place where unemployment had been above 50 percent for several years, unemployed coal workers, their skins still blackened by dust, spoke out angrily about the disintegration of their livelihoods. For the few business owners who remained in the mostly abandoned city, life varied precariously between surviving and simply existing.
Beyond Welch I met various incarnations of the Trump voter. Not all were registered Republican voters. Some had never voted before, others had voted for Barack Obama. They were men and women, young and old.
Despite these subtle differences, they had a lot in common. They lived in places that were in decline and had been for some time. They lacked a strong attachment to either side and, above all, they had deep contempt for a privileged class in Washington that they considered completely removed from their lives.
Don Skowran, a retired police officer and former steel worker who spent 12 hours a day making ‘Drain the Swamp’ signs for the local Trump campaign, ticked all of these boxes.
Don lived in Youngstown, a place that looked desperately over the cliff. Once upon a time, when American steel was booming, so was Youngstown’s economy. The manufacturers saw that the area along the Mahoning River was rich in iron ore and turned the municipality into one of the largest steel producing regions in the world. When the mills that once pumped day and night closed, Youngstown became the epitome of a Rust Belt town.
Some 50,000 workers were displaced from steel-related jobs in the Mahoning Valley between 1977 and the late 1980s, and the community has never recovered from the loss of jobs, population, its tax base, or its identity as steel city.
Like many other white blue-collar men in Youngstown, economic decline, foreign competition, crime, and abandoned factories had caused Don to turn to the isolationist, right-wing politics of a billionaire reality show star.
Ahead, along the southbound interstate, urban blight associated with industrial decline seemed to have taken hold with terrifying force. In East Liverpool, a heroin epidemic was wiping out the few that were left behind when big business left.
East Liverpool, like Youngstown, had the appearance of a standing dead place. Locals spoke of being “wiped” from the national map by Washington politicians and mocked by their neighbors on the east and west coasts. Ashen-faced and hopeless, they praised the ‘chance to heal’ under a Trump-led administration.
From East Liverpool I traveled south, through Pittsburgh and beyond. At a rest stop across Amish country, a woman named Chanelle spoke about her ‘admiration for Trump as a’ businessman. Chanelle was in her early 30s and had never voted in her life. Her husband used to work for General Motors and was struggling to pay the bills.
The road soon turned further into the coal, high up in hilly, winding terrain, where radio stations played country songs and religious programming intermittently stopped by broadcasts of political parties.
Several hours later he was in Welch, a place overlooked in most campaigns, but which illustrates the deep divisions that have divided America into a mosaic of stark ideals.
It was here, somewhere between the Chanelles and Dons of Trump’s new America, that I found Ed.
A former US Marine, had received two violet hearts, one for receiving six gunshot wounds from the explosion of a Japanese machine gun during the Battle of Guadalcanal. Upon his return to Welch after victory in the Pacific, he purchased Union 76 Station. He worked there six days a week for 65 years, making a living filling trucks and cars with gasoline in a town that prospered and prospered.
This week, as the 2020 presidential election entered its final days, I thought of Ed Shepard, a man who, in 2016, knew he had only a few years left.
I learned that he died last year, at the age of 95.
After Trump came to power, Ed still had no clients. He still had nothing to do, few people to talk to, and he spent his last days pacing back and forth, back and forth from his lonely apartment overlooking the Coal Mountains of the Appalachians, to his Union 76 gas station.
Ed gave up a long time ago. He knew that no one would come to save him or the people of Welch, not even Donald Trump.
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