One year on since Donald Trump was elected, we talk to his voters and take a look at his future
THIS time last year Donald Trump became President, and it’s been a year of scandal. From controversial staff exits, to an FBI probe and an insightful book — but his supporters tell us why they’d vote for him all over again.
World
Don't miss out on the headlines from World. Followed categories will be added to My News.
IT has been a year since Donald Trump stood before a rain-soaked crowd at the National Mall and promised to restore power from Washington’s elite to the American people in a blistering and unconventional inauguration speech.
While he depicted an “American carnage” of urban decay, joblessness and crime infested streets, President Trump also pledged to unite the country by putting America first in every decision from overhauling the tax code to trade, national security to immigration reform.
As was emblazoned on the red trucker caps he regularly donned in his barnstorming election campaign and quickly became the catchcry of his supporters, in short, the 45th president would make America great again.
MORE: Best front pages of Trump’s first year in office
“Do not allow anyone to tell you that it cannot be done. No challenge can match the heart and fight and spirit of America,” he said to cheers towards the end of his 16 minute speech.
As he wound down, the president declared “a new national pride will stir ourselves, lift our sights and heal our divisions”.
Healing the ugly divisions that sear the United States has so far proven a pipe dream for Mr Trump. At the one-year anniversary of his swearing in, pollsters have repeatedly found the Trump administration to be one of the most divisive and unpopular in America’s history.
But ask Trump supporters — that army of “forgotten men and women” who he said “came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement” to vote for him — if they have buyers’ regret, and the answer is a resounding no.
Sex scandals, questions about mental fitness, frightening nuclear-fuelled sabre-rattling with a North Korean madman, and a demonstrable looseness with the truth?
Many of the men and women who make up the roughly 80 per cent of Republican voters who (according to most polls) say they would vote for him again, just don’t care, calling such matters a distraction or “fake news” from an “obsessed” liberal media and the lefties who run Hollywood.
Much of the Trump base welcomes his bracing language, up-ending of norms and the fact he’s like no other politician, because another smooth-talking politician is the very last thing they wanted. And they point to his achievements, including the tax overhaul he successfully pushed through in the final days of 2017, which has been roundly welcomed by businesses embracing a lower corporate rate, and spurred America’s biggest retailer, Walmart, to increase its minimum wage and offer new staff bonuses.
His supporters also cite as successes Mr Trump’s travel ban from several Muslim majority countries and the broad defeat of Islamic State in Iraq, as well as his
withdrawing from the trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and a start to renegotiating trade deals Mexico, Canada and South Korea to improve terms for America.
The economy is soaring with Wall St setting a new record this week, businesses have welcomed broadscale deregulation and joblessness is down to 4.1 per cent after the addition of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
“It’s unfair and very childish the things that they try to say against the president,” says Alabama retiree Joyce Carter of his loud and vocal critics.
“I will tell you I have been very pleased with my president and how things are going,” she said last week, adding life in her farming community of Paint Rock Valley had improved in the past year.
“The majority of people we know are happier. I know there are people who are still suffering, but this is a great country, a fantastic country — I mean why else would all these people be wanting to come here other than it’s the best country in the world?
“And with the Trump administration, he is making it better.
“Businesses are so much better with all of the rules and regulations that were frustrating them in the past and with the tax changes, they are starting to pick up even more.
“I live in a very rural area and I do know that everyone that I’m acquainted with have jobs right now and they are happy with them.”
Mrs Carter spoke to News Corp Australia last January about why she and her husband Jerry were Trump voters, as did lawyer Samuel Givhan, from nearby Huntsville.
Mr Givhan is an ultraconservative Republican who pushed aside his initial distaste to vote for Mr Trump after earlier backing rival Marco Rubio, and says America is now “better off at all levels”.
“Our community was recently selected by Toyota and Mazda for the location of a joint venture car plant,” Mr Givhan said.
“I do not believe that this would have happened without a Trump presidency. Unemployment is low and our country has enjoyed record highs in the stock markets.”
Citing “deregulation, tax relief, and increased confidence in America” as the main achievements of the Trump administration, Mr Givhan said he believed the president was “not even remotely” treated fairly by “a majority of the media outlets”.
But Mr Givhan said he was “not a fan” of Mr Trump’s Twitter habit and the coarser aspects of his personality.
“While I often find what he says to be troubling, I am generally pleased with what he actually does,” he said, adding “more co-operation and less grand standing” are his top hopes from government in the coming year.
In California, financier and Trump supporter David Blumberg said he tried to not take Mr Trump’s often contradictory statements at face value.
“I read him metaphorically,” he told News Corp Australia.
“He speaks in a broad American colloquial way that has to be taken not literally.
I don’t speak the way he does but I didn’t grow up in Queens in a construction background.”
Describing Mr Trump’s bluntness as a “relief from the polished, smooth” way many politicians talk, he said “I’d rather hear the way he speaks than the majority of them”.
“They are not real, they are not being honest,” he said.
As a vocal Republican, Mr Blumberg is a rarity in his blue-leaning, Silicon Valley community. In fact, he says when he and his partner Michel Armand “came out” as Trump voters in the lead up to the 2016 election, they lost huge pockets of their social circle.
“We did joke that it’s easier to be gay in Mississippi than a republican in San Francisco,” says Mr Blumberg.
“It’s interesting because we have a lot of different friends, some of them from very conservative, ultra religious backgrounds. None of them abandoned us when as a couple we told them we had decided to have children.
“But when we came out as Republicans, I can’t tell you how many friends literally dropped us, some of them telling us why quite strongly, but a lot of them not saying as much, we just dropped off their invitation lists.”
There is no doubt Mr Trump’s opponents are mobilising and November’s midterm elections will be one of the greatest tests of his leadership, with Republicans losing either or both the House or Senate a decided possibility. Should this occur, then the probability of impeachment for President Trump becomes more than a liberal fantasy.
The White House says its 2018 priorities include meeting two key election promises — building the wall with Mexico and overhauling Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act that was Barack Obama’s signature policy.
Both face significant budgetary and legislative opposition, as will Mr Trump’s trillion dollar infrastructure program, which is set to be unveiled in coming days and expected to make the ambitious call of an $800 billion investment from the states and private sector in return for $200 billion federal funding.
The ongoing probe by into Russian influence on the 2016 election continues to shadow the Trump administration, with the president’s disaffected former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, to shortly face questions from Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Mr Bannon drew the ire of President Trump when he criticised him and his family in a recently published book by author Michael Wolff, particularly in labelling Donald Trump Jr as “treasonous” for meeting Russian operatives during the election campaign to discuss his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Mr Trump has repeatedly described the probe as a witch hunt and his lawyer this week said the president was happy to co-operate with questioners to “put the matter to rest”.
Just as last week, Mr Trump tried to put to rest another shadow on his presidency — widespread questioning of his mental acuity and therefore fitness to hold office, which had been repeatedly raised by his opponents and generated hours of cable tv and clickable headlines.
Presidential physician and rear admiral Dr Ronnie Jackson, who also treated the Obama and Bush families, spent nearly an hour answering questions from the White House press corps about how he had “no concerns” about Mr Trump’s mental health, or indeed his general constitution, apart from some excess weight.
It was, like so much of the past year, a first — the first time a sitting president has publicly released the results of cognitive testing — and it was done at Mr Trump’s request in an attempt to silence his critics.
But as is often the case in Trumpworld, the truth depends on who you believe, with CNN’s resident doctor firing back to say that despite Dr Jackson’s repeated assertions the presidential ticker was in good shape, the numbers cited from his labwork showed he indeed had heart disease.
“This is math. This is based on the numbers that Dr Jackson provided,” Dr Sanjay Gupta said, drawing ridicule from Trump’s critics and supporters alike, in a rare show of bipartisan support for America’s most controversial leader.
@sarahblakemedia
The good
Biggest tax reform since Reagan
Unemployment down, Wall St setting records
US lead defeat of ISIS in Iraq
The bad
Failed to overhaul Obamacare
Struggling to build wall with Mexico
Historically unpopular first term president
The ugly
Itchy Twitter finger regularly distracts from agenda
New allegations of paying off a porn star in 2016 to hide affair
Probe into Russian meddling in 2016 election shadows White House