Local Donald Trump supporters dismiss the Republican presidential nominee’s outrageous statements
BOARDMAN
Sitting inside Mahoning County Republican Party headquarters, Connie Spagnola leans in and says of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton: “She’s no president. She wants power over the people like Hitler, and I’ll drink to that.”
But Betsy Johnquest of Youngstown, a Clinton supporter, sees Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as someone who “has no class. I really want to be able to be proud of our president.”
With the election three weeks away, there is no shortage of opinions about the presidential front-runners. Wherever people congregate – in stores, at bars, even in locker rooms – the race for the White House is a hot topic.
Spagnola, a retired hairdresser from Youngstown, volunteers five or six days a week, eight hours a day, at GOP headquarters for one main reason: to get Trump elected.
When a person calls in to headquarters to complain about the 2005 video in which Trump made numerous lewd comments about women and that being famous allows him to grope women, Spagnola has a few choice words and then hangs up.
Earlier when asked by a reporter about the Trump comments – including “When you’re a star, [women] let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab them by the p----” – Spagnola is dismissive.
“So what?” she said. “All men do that. We had pajama parties as [young girls] and we’d say worse than that. If they’re going to pick [this out], they have nothing else. This man did nothing else, ever.”
Spagnola comes from a family of Democrats and supported many of the party’s presidential candidates, including Jimmy Carter in 1976, Bill Clinton in 1992 and John Kerry in 2004. She didn’t vote for Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012 and has no intention of supporting Hillary Clinton, the party’s nominee this year.
“It wasn’t the colored thing” with Obama, Spagnola said. “I’ve worked with black people. It has nothing to do with that. I just can’t see us saying President Barack Obama. It sounds like we’re from another country. He turned me off, and I voted Republican.”
Vernon Nabb of Boardman, a retired contractor and Trump campaign volunteer, said the “whole country” got “upside down” during the last 15 to 20 years, and Trump would restore order.
“Things you wouldn’t think of doing, like going on someone’s property and destroying their signs” are happening, he said. “It’s not only the blacks. It’s the whites as well.”
Nabb also said he is fine with Trump’s lewd comments first disclosed Oct. 7 by The Washington Post, but objects to them being repeated by television reporters and being published in newspapers.
“They have to exaggerate the whole situation,” he said. “There isn’t one person who hasn’t talked that way. On the golf course for someone to say they haven’t said that; it becomes part of a conversation. I’m more concerned with Bill Clinton [the former president and Hillary’s husband] doing the actual act. Donald Trump talked about the act, daydreaming.”
The Trump campaign sees the Mahoning Valley, a longtime Democratic stronghold, as being in play in the general election despite only two Republicans – Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 and Richard Nixon in 1972, both winning landslide national re-elections in those years – getting the majority vote in Mahoning and Trumbull counties in the past 80 years.
The two counties largely backed Republicans between 1856 and 1932.
Mahoning and Trumbull are the two most-populous counties of the 28 in the state Trump won during the Republican primary. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who captured the GOP primary, won the other 60 counties.
In Mahoning County, 6,171 Democrats voted Republican in the March primary, and 21,801 voters without party affiliation cast Republican ballots – several of them casting ballots for Trump based on election results.
Linda Everhart of Boardman, a retired registered nurse and Republican volunteer, said she didn’t like “some of the things [Trump] said [in the 2005 video]; the language with the women 11 years ago. I’m disgusted with the men who’ve probably said the same thing.”
She initially contended that the Bushes – Billy Bush, a TV personality whose cousins are former President George W. Bush and Jeb Bush, whose presidential bid was derailed this year by Trump – were likely responsible for leaking the video. She changed her mind when it was pointed out that Billy Bush lost his job with NBC’s “Today Show” over the footage.
She said, however, the media and Democrats are “trying to find some reason to make this the topic of conversation than what Hillary Clinton has done.”
Like Nabb, Everhart said Bill Clinton has done far worse, calling him a “rapist.”
Everhart said, however, “What I’ll give to the Democrats is no matter what their candidate does, they stick together” while “Republicans cut and run when there’s some scandal against their candidates.”
Among them, she said, is U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, the Republican who said he could no longer support Trump after the 2005 video was made public.
“Portman will never have my vote again,” Everhart said. “I was going to support him.”
Of Hillary Clinton, Everhart said, “She’s a liar. She lies about pretty much anything and wants to continue Obama’s agenda.”
Clinton “lied to the families” of the four people killed in the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Everhart said. The Obama administration, with Clinton as secretary of state, quickly blamed the cause of the attack on an anti-Muslim video when it was an act of terror.
Family members say Clinton blamed the video on the attack while she has denied she said that.
Clinton’s honesty – most notably based on the Benghazi incident and her deleting 33,000 emails from her personal account that included some that were work-related even though she initially insisted that none were – has been a key issue in this campaign.
“What politician isn’t a liar?” asked Harry Haddox of Youngstown, a Clinton campaign volunteer and retired Youngstown firefighter. “She’s no better or worse than any politician. They make promises that they can’t keep.”
Haddox, a lifelong Democrat, added: “Everybody’s got a past. None of us are perfect. Everyone of us has lied.”
Johnquest, a retired city school teacher, said: “At this point in my life, I realize that no politician is perfect. She stands for a lot of the same things I do. A lot of people say she’s a liar, and they say terrible things about her. I think about the good things that she’s done. She’s got the right intention with what she does and says. I trust her. I know she’s not perfect. I know she may make a mistake here and there.”
As for Clinton’s emails, Johnquest said, “I realize Hillary broke the rules, but I think the rules were pretty much broken by a lot of people. I don’t think Hillary is the only one who did that.”
Republicans have “been trying to get Hillary for 25 years and they can never nail anything on her,” Johnquest said. “They make a big deal on things that once you look at it and investigate it, there’s no substance there. They get so frustrated. They’d love to see her behind bars.”
Johnquest sees Trump as not “a great businessman as he claims to be. I think there’s a big leap from being in business and being in government.”
She acknowledges, however, that Trump is “a great speaker. He really connects with people. He’s a great salesman.”
Arlene Denney of Youngstown, a retired banker and Clinton supporter, said, “I never thought of any issue with trust [with Clinton]. I don’t know even where that came about. It seemed like it was a media thing and Trump talking about trust. I never had a feeling ever that she was not trustworthy.”
Denney dismissed the email issue saying, “It was already looked into, she apologized and going forward she knows what not to do. I don’t think it is an issue. Nothing came from it.”
She described the 2005 Trump video as “appalling. I think of it being very, very sexist. I don’t even think any man would do that in a locker room or talk about anybody, so I don’t [accept] this as just locker room talk. There’s no respect for women or real love for women to go with what he said, and he’s married. I find the whole think just hurtful, very hurtful as a woman.”