I’m from Pennsylvania.
We’re one of the swing states, and
At the beginning of Trump's presidency,
We visited several of these voters in they key swing state of Pennsylvania to find out what made them switch.
It was my protest to say, ‘People are suffering here.’
And what they were expecting.
If anybody can bring people together, it’s gonna be him.
In the middle of the term, we went back, to find out how they're feeling now.
We got a layoff.
We didn’t get called back.
None of us.
The whole department.
I’m very happy with where we’re going.
I just feel scared for the future.
We first visited our swingers in March 2017, near the beginning of the Trump presidency.
Obama was in office eight years and did nothing.
Oh, please!
Trump’s been in how many now?
100 days and he’s already done 400 billion things.
What has he done?
Remind me again?
What has he done?
We filmed them watching the news and reacting to issues they described as important to them.
That looks good.
I'm just gonna take a piece off of it.
It was just before sunrise in Palm Beach when the president took to Twitter to make one
of his most stunning accusations ever.
Oh, God.
I’m really tired of the tweets.
He needs to just be the president and just stop it.
Terrible!
Just found out that Obama had my wires tapped,’ followed by four more presidential outbursts,
taking on President Obama and misspelling ‘tapp’
You have to remember all these people were planted in the CIA and the FBI by the left,
so we’re not talking about people that are Americans, we’re talking about —
Yeah, but they weren’t just hired in the last year as plants.
So you’re brainwashed just like everybody else.
There are many ways to surveil each other, microwaves that turn into cameras, etc.
This TV’s probably watching us right now. [laughter]
I believe Donald Trump whenever he says he’s going to bring jobs back.
I live in a place where there’s four factories closed.
Tammy lives in Huntingdon County in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, where Trump won nearly
74% of the vote.
The county is 91% white.
Huntingdon's unemployment is higher than the national average.
And the median income is over 18% lower.
The White House is unveiling
President Trump's first budget proposal
slashing the State Department by 28%.
Good.
But major reductions to Health and Human Services.
I think they could cut Health and Human Services a little bit more than 18%.
The cuts would take away $3 billion from community development block grants.
Those grants help fund organizations like your local Meals on Wheels for the elderly.
When I didn’t have it, before I signed up for it, I wasn’t eating three meals a day.
Somebody like that, he should have had a retirement fund.
He should have had a retirement fund?
That’s their problem.
Like modern Darwinsim.
If they can’t fend for themselves, it’s their fault.
There’s a program called the SHINE that’s in rural counties of Pennsylvania that provides
after school educational programs — Avie, you have SHINE at your school, right?
Yes.
Children who need it most
will no longer be provided in those most needy of communities.
These people from low-income places shouldn’t be allowed to have kids.
So the only way these kids can get any —
How can you say —
Be quiet, just a minute.
that they shouldn't be able to have kids, that's ridiculous
I always voted for liberals. I voted for Obama.
But now, they are so, so out of it. I am ashamed that I was once a liberal.
Jay lives in Lancaster County in South Eastern PA.
It's a mix of urban and rural areas, that includes Amish and Mennonite communities.
It's 82% white, with a higher than average median income.
While the suburban area where Jay lives is largely democratic.
Record high voter turnout in rural areas helped Trump win the county by 20 points.
My wife Cathy, so she was going to vote for Hillary,
I don't know what she did because I told her I don't want to know.
Please do not tell me or I'll have to shoot you or something.
[laughter]
We will build the wall. Don't even think about it.
The wall is an incredibly brilliant symbol.
It's a symbol, I agree.
And we'll be able to see it from space which I like.
We need a wall.
It's why the drug addiction is so bad.
This is one of the things that it's important
to stop this continual flow of heroin and all this other stuff into our country.
You think it's coming over into people's pockets? That's not how it's getting in the country.
People are putting it in their butt cracks and bringing it in,
like, come on.
Yeah.
Do you know, that when these people overdose,
They end up on disability.
straight to the hospital and we pay for them to revive them.
It's sickening.
I voted for Donald Trump because he talked more about putting Americans first, and I think a lot
of us felt left behind as far as jobs and just rights, and I just didn’t feel the
democrats were behind what I believed.
Jamie and her family live in Luzerne County in northeast Pennsylvania,
the county is 83% white.
Zadie, that's not your water, that's Donna's water.
You want some of daddy's tea?
Yes.
Here you go.
Yes.
Jamie has reason to feel left behind.
The former coal region has higher unemployment and lower income than the national average.
And unlike most of the nation, it’s seen a rise in violent crime over the past two decades.
Barack Obama won this county both times.
But Donald Trump swept it by 20 points.
Obamacare is going to be repealed and replaced.
I go back and forth with this.
There are so many good things to Obamacare, like my family had Huntington’s disease,
a hereditary genetic disease, and up until Obamacare, I lived my life in fear of any
insurance company finding out because they would drop me.
The GOP plan would leave 14 million fewer people insured by next year.
It’s their problem, not mine.
Yeah, but you know you’re going to have to end up paying for it in the long run if
they end up having to overuse emergency rooms and more expensive avenues of health care.
And if the federal government tells you that by virtue of existing, you have to have health insurance,
that is overreach.
That one girl’s totally right because she’s very intelligent.
The rest of them are acting like idiots.
Oh, ok.
Just because she agrees with you, she’s intelligent?
Cathy, anybody that knows the picture is going to agree with me, believe me.
The only people that are not going to agree with me are people that are brainwashed,
like you.
In 2017, these swingers ranged from bold enthusiasm to cautious skepticism.
America is with him, the only people that are not with him are the left.
You just wait four years from now.
We’ll see what happens
with the next four years.
I really hope that he gets it together because it doesn’t seem he’s doing what he promised.
So how did they respond to what’s happening in their lives and the news 16 months later,
in the middle of Trump's term.
A year and a half ago, I was a case worker for the state of Pennsylvania,
and then we got a lay off, we didn't get called back.
None of us, the whole department did not get called back.
And we decided to sell the house and move over to our campground.
For right now, we're campin.'
We redid the kitchen here.
We had a baby a year ago, so now we’re a family of five.
My older son, who’s got an IQ of about 160, and he’s going to Penn State now,
doing computer science of all things.
So a friend of mine, which is Whey Jennings, Waylon Jenning’s grandson asked me to manage him
and we’re doing it.
I am feeling satisfied by what he’s gotten done so far.
He’s done things that nobody else has ever done.
I’m still hopeful that things will continue to get better.
It's like we shook 'em up,
you know, we might have a war with Russia.
We might have one with Korea.
We may have one with China.
We may have a trade war that’s gonna change everything around, so you don’t know,
so people have to actually pay attention now.
I love that.
As with our first visit, we asked our swingers to respond to several big stories that had been in the news.
Our country is doing great, you look at the economy, you look at what's happening.
We have never had an economy like we have right now.
We have employment again, people are working,
The market is way up.
We unleashed an economic miracle by signing the biggest tax cuts in American history.
Did you benefit from the tax cut?
I haven't seen anything.
I don't believe it.
We have all the crooks on Wall Street manipulating everything that's going on at all times.
So has Trump come down on Wall Street?
He's done the best he's could. He's even hired some of their people to find out ways to beat 'em.
I'm defending America's national security by placing tariffs on foreign imports of steel and aluminum.
That's gonna hurt us. Car prices are gonna go up.
Corn farmers, they're scared sh*tless.
Markets just tumbled 500 points on the back of a controversial announcement from the US president.
He's made them even more unstable then they usually are and I like that, that's a great thing.
We'll see where all that instability leads to.
In order for the economic system to work, somebody's gotta hurt. In order for this person to be a billionaire,
this person's gotta sleep in a box.
That's why I don't believe in the economy altogether really.
So how do you like the fact
they had people infiltrating our campaign?
Of course they were in his campaign. They were in everything.
Even if there was collusion, how much collusion could there be?
I think there’s been collusion for a long time. It's time to fix it.
There was collusion when Obama was hanging out.
It even goes back to John F. Kennedy.
Yeah.
I mean, there were conspiracies back then.
Marilyn Monroe.
And even the assassination.
They think it's Russia.
I have president Putin.
He just said it's not Russia.
Of course he's gonna deny it.
It's all someone said this, and someone said that. I don't know what to believe.
Senator McCain says today's press conference in Helsinki
was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.
I wonder if that's the liberal news.
I don’t watch any of the news, the ‘liberal media.’
You watch Fox News.
I really get my news from a lot of internet stuff, reddit and things like that.
And there's nothing on the internet that's not true.
I get all my news online.
You take it all in, and you make your own mind.
That’s exactly what I do, Dan.
I have to see it all, the two extremes.
I gotta watch Fox and CNN.
I have put in place a zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry.
If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you,
and that child may be separated from you.
Sounds good to me.
It’s a little harsh, but hey, I’m not going over there without any paperwork.
You can't take away their kids and take them away from them and sh*t. I mean it's just a huge mess.
A lot of the women were fleeing from domestic violence, from drugs,
and from gangs.
Jesse and I, when we lived in Wilkes-Barre, we saw drugs, we saw shootings.
I don’t see anybody cutting me a check to get out of there.
This is a big yelling point by the liberals that we’re being so mean to these poor Mexicans
that want to come across illegally and bring drugs.
Here's how I have to look at this.
I'm at my house with kids, and outside's a whole bunch of dogs.
Cute, sweet dogs, but one of them's sick,
and could bite one of my children.
Do I hold on for a second and find out which one it is that's sick?
Or do I just bring them in anyway and take a chance on the kid getting bit and killed.
America is not a lifeboat.
And if it is, how many people before the whole thing sinks?
The other factor is the companies that rely on that labor for keeping their costs down, too.
So are people going to be able to pay $3 for a pepper?
So you think that illegal aliens should be allowed to come in just ‘cause they’re cheap labor.
No, I don’t.
You know, who is paying these people to hop on a train in central America and ride the whole way up?
Somebody is behind this.
What about people that actually come in, and once they’re here they try to change who we are?
Do you realize, we're totally going to be a Mexican or Latin American country?
Under the globalist mantra.
They want to bring in everybody and dilute what our country is.
That's kind of what our country was to begin with, man.
I mean, we're a country of multi nationalities.
Every country in the world, we have citizens from there.
People are people.
We've been hearing about the disaster of Obamacare for so long.
Obamacare set us about ten years behind on being able to do anything about this stuff.
No, that’s not true no.
Oh yes it is.
No, it’s not true.
Since President Trump has been elected, multiple insurance executives have said
that the uncertainty he's injected in the market has caused them to raise prices.
Insurance companies are the biggest financial rapers that you will ever find.
Holy moly!
They're still working on her bill from when she was born.
The insurance company -- yeah you.
This administration has said we are going to side with the state of Texas to undo the protections for people
with pre-existing conditions.
What should government do about it?
They should say that you cannot do that, you can't take that away.
It should be one set plan that everybody should have availability to.
Two years into the Trump presidency, the swingers who felt most optimistic, haven't lost their enthusiasm.
I'm thrilled with the direction our country is going.
if you have chaos, then you will get change.
And I'm loving where we are going with America.
Trump is coming in and saying 'woah I don't know what has happened in the past 8 years here but,
I gotta get sh*t out. I gotta straighten things up.'
And the ones with the biggest doubts, haven't had them set at ease.
I don't trust him 100%.
And you shouldn't.
So I'm like, where's he gonna go today?
Everything that Trump does isn't, you know, wonderful, exciting, gospel to me.
You pick what you like and you leave what you don't.
We're only half way through this administration.
So we'll see where it all ends up.
The whole presidency has been a TV show.
I mean it's a soap opera.
It is a soap opera.
It's a soap opera.
It's a reality TV show.
It does actually get you fired up, you know, it really does.
Knowing what you know now, would you or would you not have voted for him back in 2016?
Yes.
[laughter] I'm a swinger.