Nina Wasiura

The People Nina Wasiura

The shock of the 2016 election was not that Donald Trump won-it was that he could be in a position to win. The surprise was not that one hundred thousand people spread across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania altered the course of history-it was that, in a country of three hundred and twenty million mostly decent people, a man who promised to annihilate decency could top thirty percent. Were there idiots and jerks who voted for Donald Trump? Certainly. But there are not 62,985,106 of them. Had there been only 62,885,105, Hillary Clinton may have become president, but the frustrations and misunderstandings and prejudices and calculations and hopes and fears that persuaded even that many of your neighbors to lend their individual voice to this con artist would have remained. This book cannot claim to explain Trump's Midwestern appeal in full. It can only offer the perspectives of seventeen residents of Muskegon County-a struggling post-industrial semi-urban space on the shores of Lake Michigan that, on November 8, 2016, cast 5080 more votes for an abrasive B-list celebrity than it cast for native grandson Mitt Romney four years prior. The story is told from their perspectives, in their words. The result is a portrait of a seemingly inconsequential place that, like so many of the other seemingly inconsequential places between La Crosse and Bethlehem, played its small role in ushering the world into The Age of Trump. This is not a work of political science, nor of sociology, nor of journalism, nor of literature. It is an unvarnished look at how seventeen of your neighbors see this moment, and how they got here.