“It’s just ... bulls**t” offers James Dunn with a dark chuckle when asked about what he thinks of the tariff saga which has been gripping the entire world. It’s Saturday afternoon and he is waiting on the stoop of a townhouse in the residential fringes of East Market street in York, Pennsylvania.
“I don’t know,” Dunn shrugs when asked why he thinks Donald Trump is embarking on his tariffs war. He stands up to speak in short, animated bursts. He is from York, a handsome redbrick city of 44,000 with rich ties to the origins of the United States and still in the process of self-reinvention after its manufacturing heyday. He’s an army veteran.
“His ego is so small that he can’t even sit by himself. I’m a Democrat, but they are so f**ked up that I voted for Trump. Yeah. Seems like it is working itself out now – he is cutting it to 10 per cent, apart from China. But who knows what tomorrow will be? There is no stability. He’s winging everything. And the whole thing is: us consumers are going to pay. It is coming to us, as Americans.”
The weekend swept a veil of dispiriting weather across the entire state: low cast and freezing rain, with warning signs for slippery conditions and poor visibility flashing on the winding, secondary roads of York and Schuylkill counties.
Through the windows of the restaurants and bars, the clear skies of the Augusta Masters on the television look like another world. Pennsylvania offers a perfect snapshot of the US in microcosm, with the history and grandeur of Philly in the east, its storied coal and steel belts and gorgeous rolling farm lands.
But the sullen gloom has forced everyone indoors. In the Yorktowne hotel, Mike Curran is in the middle of his bartending shift. He’s a Bostonian by way of New Hampshire, but York is home. He’s easy-going and courteous. The bar is an occasional, weekend gig. He has worked for over a decade at a local steel plant in York, where he is a supervisor. The city has treated him well: he and his family have a lovely downtown apartment and, at 49, he has a clear retirement plan.
“Well, it’s taken its toll on the steel industry. I can tell you that. Steel prices have been dropping. We are at our slowest that we have been in the last 10 years. What we do is we take large coils of steel and level them, cut them to size into sheet metal, and people purchase them from us to make various objects. It’s a great company. I plan to retire with these guys. They take care of me and my family and I give good hard work back to them.
“But seeing it slow like this and potential lay-offs is frightening. Just the past couple of weeks ... the decline. Orders aren’t coming. People are scared to buy the metal – they aren’t ordering in the bulk they did before. And now customers are getting extremely picky about the metal they want because they are paying such a good price for it. They want perfection coming out of there.”
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Curran admits he couldn’t resist taking a peek at his pension portfolio online last week. The tariff mayhem had transformed what was a steady graph into a polygraph test reading, with wild dips and surges. “It’s down,” he says sincerely. “I just hope there’s time for it to come back up.”
Shrewsbury is a town of about 3,000 people right on the Mason-Dixon Line. One of the highlights is the Village Coffee and Cream, a cafe located in a stunning, immaculately preserved 19th century former bank: they have even transformed the vault, with its heavy, secured door, into a little alcove. Rachel Baikauskas is sitting by the fireplace. Her boys are taking guitar lessons next door. The family lives about 10 miles away, across the Maryland border.
“It’s a conservative area and mimics the politics here,” she explains.
‘It is getting scary. I voted for him for change. Now, they are saying it is going to go low before it goes up. But I would like to see some kind of uplift’
— Mike Curran, Pennsylvania resident, on voting for Donald Trump
“I am not fearful [of what is to come] yet because it seems like our checks and balances are at work. But the outlandish executive orders our president – and his best friend! – besides the tariff, things, the messing with voting, is really concerning.
“So, the congregation of power is terrifying. What we are doing to the stock market is terrifying because we are going to create an oligarchy. Only people with money are going to buy into the stock market. Once you have all of the money you have all of the power,” she adds.
Rachel and her husband are both teachers. She started at 23, so has only eight years of work left.
“Our savings are not in the stock market – and I don’t have savings because of our cost of living,” she laughs.
“And as a person, I live for today. I am doing the best I can today. But maybe I have the luxury of thinking that way because I have my pension. We are in a really good place financially - and the cost of living is still really hard. I don’t know how people have been able to buy a house in the last 10 years. We bought 12 years ago,” she says.
“And we moved into another tax bracket, and suddenly you owe another ten grand. I look at the 2025 tax chart and the group above me – which is 750,000-plus – are getting a cut. And that makes me worried about everyone else who might not be in as good a position.”
Drive north, across the Susquehanna river, and you will soon arrive at the heart of the once-thriving coal region of the state. Towns like Ashland, whose long sloping main street has both tired clapboard shacks and 19th century stone-and-turret splendour, were conceived as mining towns - although the anthracite mine in Ashland was done and dusted by the 1900s.
It is to regions like these that Donald Trump has bequeathed his vision to return the US to its lost glory as a manufacturing and raw material titan. “I do like that,” James Dunn told me when we chatted about that idea.
“But he needs to have people sit down and work out how you do it.”
And it’s easy to see why residents of this area would wish to believe in that vision. Because Pennsylvania is a swing state, it is under a bright election spotlight. For decades, the candidates jet in every four years, smile and garland the communities with flattery and promises.
But nothing changes. This is still a post-coal society. No obvious, tangible industry has replaced it. David de Kok lives in Harrisburg. He’s a Michigander originally and remembers that when he left school, in the early 1970s, he could have had his pick of jobs “in 18 or 19 different factories. But not any more.” He is incredulous as to how resurrecting those manufacturing heartlands might occur.
“It is the same with bringing back coal,” he says. “It is not going to happen. You might forestall the inevitable, but it is going away. There just isn’t the same manufacturing strength. There was this obsession with free trade for 30 years, and Nafta [North American Free Trade Agreement]. I think Ross Perot probably had it right when he said there’d be this giant sucking sound when Mexico and other countries pulled the factories.”
When Mike Curran thinks back to November and the heightened atmosphere of the election, he can easily rationalise why he decided to vote for Trump.
“We needed something different. I didn’t necessarily agree with all of his political views. But he struck on a few that intrigued me. I kind of fed into it. Now I’m looking at it and I am thinking, what are we doing as a country? It is getting scary. I voted for him for change. Now, they are saying it is going to go low before it goes up. But I would like to see some kind of uplift.”
He pauses for a moment when asked how much runway he thinks people around the city and county could afford to give the Trump administration before the anxiety and day-to-day stresses become acute.
“Oh, man. We would need to see something within another four months.”
