This is Trump country, as the reception shows.
"USA! USA! USA! USA!"
An adoring crowd greets the President
like a hero returned.
"Hello Iowa"
For the next eighty minutes Mr.Trump hits all his favourite lines.
"Our hearts bleed red, white and blue"
But above all, one theme stands out: Trade.
"With China over the last five, six years we've been losing 300 to 500 billion dollars a year. Billion!
"We have finalised a new fair trade deal for South Korea.
The European Union sounds
so nice, right? They are brutal they formed in order to take advantage of us on trade.
We will make America great again!"
The message is well received here
among the President's faithful, as the huge banner that hangs behind him
reads: 'Promises made, promises kept.'
and there is no doubt that Donald Trump
almost two years after taking office has delivered his pledge to shake things up on trade.
America is out of the trans-pacific partnership.
NAFTA has been renegotiated
and tariffs have been whacked on billions of dollars worth of
steel and aluminium imports.
Free trade is being challenged
but at what cost?
Other nations have hit back with tariffs of their own.
Many targeting the very supporters who got Mr.Trump into the White House.
Start driving northeast from
Council Bluffs and you soon get to the farming heart of Iowa.
This is a swing state.
Barack Obama won it in 2008 and 2012
bur Mr.Trump romped home to a 10-point victory in 2016.
It is also a state of soybean farms.
Some 40,000 jobs are tied
to the crop here.
Many, like Jeff Frank, supported Mr.Trump
"I'm the fourth generation on this farm,
You know, I grew up here.
The house was built when my mom was 2 years old.
This is actually my grandpa with the
corn sheller back when we used to pick corn on the ear and it would separate the corn
from the cob."
When harvest comes Jeff can spend up to 14 hours a day in this vast
combine harvester working back and forth across the fields
"It's peaceful here.
You don't have anybody bothering, you don't have anybody you're asking you questions.
You don't have anyone around. It's a great time to think."
In July, China responded to President Trump's trade war
with a tariff of their own on soybeans.
All US soybean imports were hit with a 25% tariff. Meaning they became a quarter more
extensive to Chinese businesses overnight.
The move sent demand for US
soybean spiraling and triggered a sink in price.
At the start of the year
farmers like Jeff could get around $10 a bushel, now it is more like eight.
"We can't be profitable if the price of what we sell doesn't cover our input
costs so you know it's an issue. That's how people go bankrupt."
Jeff fears 2019 could be worse than this year and accepts that Trump voters have indeed
been hit.
"He's probably hurting the people that supported him the most but you know
we're big people which we can overlook some
things you know we need to see the end result.
Hopefully this tariff gets resolved and we all turn out better.
And his trade strategy I think is good because in the long run they have to come to us
We are the supplier. They cannot survive without us completely."
Around a thousand miles east from Jeff's farm is Pennsylvania.
Another swing state that Mr.Trump won.
His victory here was even more impressive than Iowa.
No Republican had won this date since 1988
Understanding towns like Wilkes-Barre in
Luzerne County is at the core of working out what happened in the Trump revolution.
"Our rich and abundant soil provides more than a living. It provides a beautiful
way of life for a lot of people."
This is the heart of the Rust Belt,
a cluster of traditionally Democrat states whose industrial decline meant voters were
open to Mr.Trump's protectionist message.
"We will rebuild rural America"
Journalist Ben Bradlee Jr. wrote a book all about Trump's voters in this county
He understands why President Trump's message resonated.
"This is coal country,
it was, but the coal industry gradually died out in the 60s and was
replaced by manufacturing in this area.
Most of them either closed or went
abroad and so into that climate came Trump and he found a ripe audience here.
The Democrats felt that their party had left them behind.
Trump filled the void.
They say you fall in love with your therapist because you feel heard
and these people felt heard by Donald Trump."
Bradlee says that out of the 12
Trump supporters his book focuses on just a single one is wavering today
There is certainly no wavering from Lynette Villano.
"I never saw anything
like it before in my life and I've been working polls for thirty years. They were
coming to vote but they were coming with their Trump shirts on they were coming
with their hats on and it was just overwhelming."
It was the prospect of something different that appealed - a chance for change
"I think we were getting really disgusted with what was going on in
Washington, and for both sides because no matter who you sent there things weren't
changing and then along came Donald Trump who had this vision for America
that we could all reach out to.
So, Trump voters are showing few signs of buyers' remorse.
Steel factories may not have reappeared by the dozen.
The tariffs may be hurting his base as much as those abroad,
but the president feels his supporters pain or at least appears to and is banging the table to get
something done.
Lynette, like millions of others across America, is sticking by her man.
"He's the first president that made promises and it's promises made promises kept."