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      in US Politics

      Ohio and Pennsylvania helped elect Trump. But he betrayed us again and again | Bertram de Souza

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      Ever since the 31 August 2019 demise of the (Youngstown) Vindicator, a daily newspaper where I spent 40 years as a reporter, columnist, editorial writer and editorial page editor, I’ve written numerous commentaries and editorials about the presidency of Donald J Trump – all in my head. Sadly, there isn’t an antidote for the death of the 150-year-old news institution, which blazed a journalistic trail in Ohio and western Pennsylvania.
      On 1 November 2016, the Vindicator published an editorial endorsing Hillary Clinton over Trump. While we weren’t enamored by Clinton’s presidential bid, the newspaper’s editorial board believed that on the singularly important issue of leadership, the former secretary of state and US senator from New York stood head and shoulders above Trump, the self-styled billionaire. The real-estate developer wore his racism, chauvinism, religious bigotry and anti-immigrant railings as badges of honor. We warned our readers that a Trump presidency would roll back the progress made toward creating a more perfect union.
      In our editorial endorsing Clinton, we wrote:
      “Trump is a self-absorbed rich man whose attitude toward women, minorities, the disabled and the press makes him clearly unqualified to be the leader of the greatest country on earth. He lacks the temperament, the vision and the understanding of the role the president plays in domestic and international affairs. He does not possess the steady hand of leadership that is demanded in times of upheaval and uncertainty.”
      On 9 November 2016, just days after the unfathomable outcome of the presidential election was announced, I wrote a column with the headline “With Trump victory, America falls for snake-oil salesman.”
      Actually, I slightly missed the mark: President Trump has not been peddling snake oil. Rather, he has been the purveyor of political poison that has undermined the American people’s trust in democracy and shattered America’s reputation around the world as a beacon of freedom, stability and racial pluralism.
      Similarly, Trump’s slash-and-burn politics and his virulent attack on the free legitimate press have served to remind us of his admiration for foreign dictators.
      If the Vindicator were still around today, my argument as the editorial page editor to the owners of the newspaper for endorsing Joe Biden would be this: America is at a crossroads. The re-election of Donald Trump will take this nation down a path of social and economic destruction that will exacerbate the racial and cultural divide he has fed over the last four years. Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus and his denigration of the medical and scientific communities – and his dismissive attitude toward the wearing of masks and social distancing, as evidenced by his “anything goes” campaign rallies – make him unworthy of a second term.
      I would contend that America is in desperate need of an adult and a steady hand at the helm, which it would get with Biden as president.
      Finally, I would argue that Trump lied to the people of the Mahoning Valley. In July 2017, Trump hosted a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, to show his appreciation to the multitude of former Democrats – mostly white, male, blue-collar workers who have fallen victim to the new technology-based globalized economy – who crossed party lines to vote for him.
      Trump promised to rebuild the huge steel-producing factories that once dotted the banks of the Mahoning River, and to bolster the American automobile industry that was a mainstay of the region’s economy for more than 50 years. He told those gathered not to sell their homes and not to move. He said the return of steel-making was imminent, and that he would ensure the expansion of General Motors’ massive car assembly plant in the region.
      Here’s what has actually happened: not one new steel mill has been built in the past four years. And, in March 2019, General Motors closed its compact car-making plant in Lordstown, eliminating 4,500 high-paying jobs. The giant automaker shrugged off the president’s threat of economic retaliation.
      Those are the arguments I am certain we would be making in an editorial endorsing Biden.
      Sadly, we can’t. The Vindicator’s presses have fallen silent.
      Bertram de Souza is a veteran journalist who served in various positions at the Vindicator newspaper in Youngstown, Ohio. His Sunday column was one of the most popular features in the Vindicator, which went out of business in 2019
      Legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward will discuss the Trump presidency at a Guardian Live online event on Tuesday 27 October, 7pm GMT. Book tickets here More

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      in US Politics

      Trump has made fracking an election issue. Has he misjudged Pennsylvania?

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      In early August, Ginny Kerslake’s lush green yard in a middle-class Pennsylvania suburb turned into a muddy river, thanks to another spill at the pipeline drilling site opposite her house. A couple of days later, 10,000 gallons of drilling mud, or bentonite clay, contaminated a popular recreational lake that also provides drinking water for residents of Chester county.The spills are down to construction of the Mariner East (ME) pipelines – a beleaguered multibillion-dollar project to transport highly volatile liquids extracted by fracking gas shale fields in western Pennsylvania to an export facility in Delaware county in the east, ready to ship to Europe to manufacture plastics.In Pennsylvania, four years after Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 44,292 votes to win the state, the controversial pipeline project has helped make fracking a political flashpoint in the debate over energy, the climate crisis, environmental inequalities and the influence of big business.Fracking was a hot topic in this week’s vice-presidential debate, and the Republican party has blanketed the state with ads falsely claiming a Biden administration would ban the practice. Kerslake was unimpressed by the debate, but like many local anti-fracking voters she is hopeful that a Democratic administration might, at least, be persuadable on the issue.“The direct impact in our township has opened our eyes to how elected officials and government agencies we expect to protect us but don’t … Without fracking, there are no pipelines and vice versa,” said Kerslake, speaking in front of the noisy, unsightly drilling site, which can operate from 7am to 7pm six days a week.The ME horizontal directional drilling (HDD) project – which is subject to multiple criminal and regulatory investigations – has caused major disruption to dozens of suburban and rural communities, contaminated surface and groundwater sources in hundreds of mud spills, and created countless sinkholes in parks, roads and yards since construction began in early 2017.At least 105,000 people live within a half-mile blast radius of the ME pipeline system, which carries highly flammable, odourless and colourlessgases in liquified form; many more Pennsylvanians attend schools, libraries and workplaces in close proximity.Pennsylvanians suffer the country’s second-worst air quality, thanks to greenhouse-gas-emitting industries, and according to one recent poll, 83% of voters in the state think climate change is a serious problem and 58% look unfavourably at lawmakers who oppose strong action to combat it. More

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      in Elections

      Pennsylvania politicians go topless to warn voters: don't mail in 'naked ballots'

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      Bethany Hallam thought the best way to dress up her message that votes are in danger of not being counted in the vital swing state of Pennsylvania was to strip it down to the basics, so she did – literally.“Do you want to get naked to save democracy?” fellow Allegheny county council member Olivia Bennett said Hallam asked her a few days ago.“I said: OK!” Bennett recalled, laughing.The two councilwomen recruited a third “badass”, state representative-elect Emily Kinkead, and posed for the camera, shedding their clothes and then posting the results on social media with their breasts hidden behind images of the “secrecy envelope” being sent out to Pennsylvanians along with their ballots for postal voting.If voters mail in their ballot without putting it first in the secrecy envelope and then putting that inside the outer, addressed envelope, the authorities will not count the vote and it will be discarded as a “naked ballot”. So Hallam and her allies wanted to warn voters of the threat.With Pennsylvania not normally allowing mass mail-in voting, and with the arcane rule about the extra envelope, officials warn that up to 100,000 votes mailed in the state during this coronavirus pandemic could end up being invalidated as naked ballots.As every ballot matters in a vital swing state with super-thin voting margins Hallam hit on the drastic idea of getting nude herself to highlight the issue.“Immediately when I heard the term naked ballots, and being a woman in the male-dominated environment of politics, where they are always trying to control our bodies, I thought, ‘Why not take some control back? And also get the voters’ attention,” Hallam told the Guardian.Hallam is the Democratic councilwoman at large for Allegheny county, which includes Pittsburgh. Obviously she wants Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump to the White House in November – and Trump won Pennsylvania by only around 44,000 votes in 2016 – but she said she’s keen to remind all voters that their vote should count, for the presidency and in a sheaf of down-ballot contests, too.“Races are sometimes decided by a handful of votes,” she said.Hallam said she had fun posing joyfully for her campaign to make every vote count.“It was empowering. And to stand alongside two other badass elected officials that I enjoy working with … we were having a blast and also helping voters,” she said.Hallam said some other Democrats have pledged to join in, some more elected women have planned to pose for similar pictures on Monday and, later in the week, some men. She’s extended the invitation to Republicans, but none has taken her up on it yet. And she wants the general public to join in.Since she, Bennett and Kinkead posted on a variety of social media platforms on Saturday more than a million people have viewed the posts.There have been many supportive comments but of course some backlash.Hallam said some guy called her parents’ home at 2am saying, “Your daughter’s tits are all over the internet”, which, technically, they aren’t.“And someone posted, ‘I hope you socialist sluts get raped’,” Hallam said.The women were neither surprised nor shaken.Some have commented on Bennett’s visible tattoo of Tinkerbell flying over the logo of the Pittsburgh Steelers.Bennett explained that she has always loved Disney and is a lifelong super fan of the Steelers, but added she’s been boycotting the NFL for four years since the league froze out Colin Kaepernick for his campaign to take a knee during the national anthem before games in order to highlight racism and police brutality.Meanwhile, she said she didn’t hesitate when Hallam asked her to disrobe for her no-naked-ballots drive.The two councilwomen often work together on their shared priority policies around criminal justice reform and police accountability, protecting the environment, promoting LGBTQ equality and protecting workers’ rights.Hallam beat out a 20-year council incumbent last year, running on a progressive platform, and also her experience as a millennial in recovery from drug dependency, which stemmed from being prescribed opioids for back-to-back sports injuries as a high schooler, and later spending time behind bars, including six months in county jail, for related offenses.Hallam said their naked ballots campaign is especially important right now because Pennsylvania primary races earlier this year allowed naked ballots to be counted, but then the state supreme court ruled that in November’s election, ballots not mailed in the additional secrecy envelope would not be counted.Hallam said: “It’s confusing unless you read the small print, and no-one does that. So I had an idea … ” More

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      in US Politics

      Will Trump’s ‘law-and-order’ pitch prevail in Pennsylvania?

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      The wave of rallies for racial justice that swept America this summer arrived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with dueling marches in support of Black Lives Matter and of law enforcement – and dueling online petitions to “defund the police” and “defend the police”.Then the local police chief, Mark DiLuzio, shared a racist post on Facebook – not realizing at the time, DiLuzio later said, that the image he shared had objectionable language attached. The post attacked LeBron James and other basketball players for striking to protest police violence against people of color, calling the players “anti-white” and “spoiled little brats”.In the outcry that followed, DiLuzio apologized and resigned. But the episode laid bare just the kind of local tensions that Donald Trump’s “law-and-order” re-election campaign seems determined to appeal to – and to exacerbate, the president’s critics say.In less than eight weeks, voters in the Bethlehem area will endorse or reject Trump’s message. And which option they choose could have national, even global, repercussions. The surrounding Northampton county is one of only three counties in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania to have voted for Trump in 2016 after voting twice for Barack Obama.If Northampton flips back to the Democratic column in November, the state of Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes could flip with it, putting Biden on the road to the White House. But if Trump’s law-and-order pitch lands here, Northampton could help deliver Trump four more years.“I think the majority of Northampton county voters are very smart and informed, and they can see right through” Trump’s law-and-order pitch, said city councilperson Paige Van Wirt, a Democrat. “They can see that peaceful protests are very different from looters and rioters. And we’ve been able to have both in Bethlehem because we are a peaceful place.”But that’s not the view along all of Main Street, where Joe D’Ambrosio has been cutting hair since the Kennedy era. More