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Lifelong South Sider delights in Trump's VIP treatment
YOUNGSTOWN
When the voice on the other end of the phone said the president of the United States wanted to meet him, Geno DiFabio, a 54-year-old lifelong resident of the South Side, was skeptical.
It wasn’t a completely unreasonable possibility. Just that morning, DiFabio had appeared on a Fox News show to discuss why he, a lifelong Democrat, switched parties to throw his support fully behind then-candidate Donald Trump.
The voice – a White House communications official – convinced DiFabio that the call was legitimate, and they set a time to meet ahead of the president’s rally at the Covelli Centre on Tuesday. Trump became aware of DiFabio after watching the Fox News segment.
DiFabio voted Democrat for as long as he could remember. He was a Democrat because Youngstown was a blue city and everyone he knew voted blue.
Despite identifying as a Democrat, DiFabio wasn’t ideologically liberal, at least not in regard to social and cultural issues.
“I’m a big Second Amendment guy, I’m very pro-life, I’m conservative,” DiFabio said. “And you know that’s how this whole Valley was. We were always Democrats, but we still cared about the sanctity of life and family values. We went to church. I thought we were losing that.”
Though DiFabio’s experience was exceptional, his story has become a common one post-election – the blue-collar conservative Democrat who hated Obamacare and couldn’t stomach the Democrats’ focus on issues such as transgender restroom use, immigration and corporate regulation.
In 2015, DiFabio was largely unimpressed by the likely presidential candidates who were bubbling to the surface. In his mind there was little difference between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush; both were going to talk, and neither was going to deliver, he reasoned. Politics as usual, in his mind.
Then Trump came along, and DiFabio was sold.
“I was looking for an outsider, and that was Trump. He talked about jobs and bad trade deals. He talked like me,” he said.
Inside Covelli Centre, DiFabio was pulled into a VIP waiting area with a select few local people – including members of the Covelli family – who were to meet the president that day.
Eventually the president arrived, and DiFabio recalls seeing Trump round a corner, after which the president apparently said: “There’s my guy, there’s Geno!”
The men met and DiFabio thanked the president for the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch – DiFabio was worried a liberal justice would further degrade family values in the country – and thanked him for Melania Trump becoming the first lady, whom he described as “the most beautiful woman in the world, other than my wife.”
Trump’s decision to bring DiFabio on stage during the rally was a spur-of-the-moment idea. DiFabio, wearing a white “Trump won, get over it” T-shirt, hadn’t prepared a speech but took the stage and shared exactly what he told Trump in the VIP room.
Since his brief brush with history, DiFabio has spent time talking to local and national media and discussing the experience with friends and family.
He said some of those people urged him to challenge U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Howland, D-13th, in the next election, but he wasn’t interested.
“I’m going to go back to driving truck. I have no interest in running,” DiFabio said. “But I’ll keep talking about Trump.”