Deep in Trump country, voters want more deportations and less Epstein

Carrolltown, Pennsylvania: The crispy skin of a whole roasted pig sits on a bed of aluminium foil next to the buffet table. Men and women pile their paper plates with pulled pork, sausages, beans and sauerkraut, and park themselves at picnic benches while they wait for the speeches. A cardboard cut-out of Donald Trump watches over proceedings, a crown on his head and a copy of the Constitution clipped to his arm.

This is the Cambria County Republican Pig Roast in Carrolltown, a small town in south-west Pennsylvania, two hours east of Pittsburgh and two hours west of the state capital, Harrisburg. The locals – and some out-of-towners – are gathered in a timber pavilion at the American Legion Park, next to installations of an M60A3 tank, AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter and an M5 anti-tank gun.

I’m here to find out what Trump’s supporters think about the US president’s first six months back in office, during which he has wielded enormous executive power, shaken financial markets, bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities and upended political institutions at home and abroad.

Polls show some Americans have turned against Trump since his inauguration, with an average approval rating of 44 and disapproval of 52 – roughly the inverse of January. Economic management was the primary source of his decline, with voters spooked by his sweeping tariffs and focus on matters other than their hip pocket.

And this week, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found Trump’s approval rating on immigration – traditionally his strong suit – fell to a low of 41 per cent. It coincides with a blitz of migrant arrests, especially in California, including raids at people’s workplaces.

But in Carrolltown, as DJ Tommy Gunnz works the decks and party volunteers chat about coming local elections, everybody is agreed on Trump’s best achievement.

“Securing the border,” says 25-year-old postal worker Lucas Taylor, who wears a red MAGA cap and a USA T-shirt. “If I could give him a grade, it would probably be at least an A.”

Cambria County used to be reliably blue, with Democrats carrying it from Jimmy Carter to Al Gore. Barack Obama won narrowly in 2008, but voters turned on him in 2012, and ever since, Trump has dominated with nearly 70 per cent of the vote.

Retiree Sharon Karlheim, who is in her 60s, says Trump is doing a great job, but there is a lot more to do. She wants to see more undocumented immigrants deported, and more of Trump’s political enemies arrested.

“We see a lot of investigations, we see a lot of talk,” she says. “So far, I haven’t seen arrests being made for the things that have happened in the past administration. I’m not going to name names, but I would like to see some arrests. People that were treasonous to this nation. I would really like to see people held accountable.”

These notions of “deep state” malpractice – whipped up, perpetuated and exploited by Trump – persevere among the president’s ardent supporters and the thick belt of American voters who have long felt their government in Washington is a malign force that undermines their interests.

This week, the MAGA universe imploded over Trump’s refusal to release the so-called “Epstein files” related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself in jail in 2019 awaiting trial for sex trafficking. After years of indulging the conspiracy when convenient, Trump is calling it a “hoax” invented by Democrats to damage him.

While I was in Pennsylvania, Trump spurned some of his own supporters, accusing them of swallowing the “bullshit” about Epstein and doing the Democrats’ bidding. He said he no longer wanted their support.

It’s difficult to gauge how damaging this rift might be. The Epstein saga is a big deal in the online community, and for many prominent MAGA influencers. But what about the average punter? Most of the people I met had other things on their mind. If they did care about Epstein, they were happy to make excuses for Trump.

Loading

“I think he’s getting blackmailed, partly,” Taylor says. “I think that’s one of the major reasons why he’s now trying to walk around it a little bit … That’s the one thing that has been kind of disappointing so far. But, of course, it’s not going to make me go Democrat either – nowhere near.”

Karlheim, who believes Trump’s presidency is God’s plan and was foretold by a now-deceased prophet, has her own ideas about what’s happening.

“There was enough time between Trump being elected and when he took office for a lot of things to disappear. So I think they got rid of a lot of stuff,” she says. “Do I think our current government is lying or covering things up? No, I don’t believe that. But I also prophetically say: these things will be uncovered. So I am just keeping the faith that everything will be exposed.”

The Carrolltown crowd hears from several speakers, including the state director of Gun Owners of America, who explains the group’s latest efforts to undo gun controls, and Pennsylvania state senator Wayne Langerholc, who wears a backwards cap, shorts and a T-shirt that says: “Whiskey. Steak. Guns. Freedom.”

He tells me Trump is doing a fantastic job. “It’s good to see a leader back in the White House, one that has conviction, one that has been able to close the border,” Langerholc says. He acknowledges some economic ups and downs prompted by Trump’s tariffs, but says it’s about riding the course. As for the Epstein matter: “That’s not something that I’ve had any constituents reach out to me about.”

‘It doesn’t smell like chocolate any more’

The next day, I head east to Pittston, where Vice President JD Vance is speaking about the One Big Beautiful Bill, the government’s main economic legislation, which is now law.

The event is at Don’s Machine Shop, a cavernous industrial shed replete with bulky Mitsubishi laser cutting machines. Vance has a personal connection to the field: his dad worked in a machine shop in Hamilton, Ohio, that eventually succumbed to competition from China.

Vance occupies an unusual space in the Trump administration and MAGA universe: he is a credible political thinker who brings some intellectual ballast, but is arguably its best blue-collar whisperer, having grown up impoverished with a drug-addicted mother.

In Pittston, he began with remarks about the border, which earned cheers and applause. He then turned to economics, including a statistic often cited by the administration: that blue-collar wages are growing by 1.7 per cent – the fastest rate in 50 years.

This is not really true. The White House compared a particular metric for the first five months of presidencies going back to Richard Nixon, not the whole of the past 50 years. The Economic Policy Institute says low-wage workers have been experiencing historically high wage growth for years, and that between 2019 and 2024, the hourly wages of the bottom 10 per cent of workers grew by 15.3 per cent.

In other words, Trump and Vance are trying to take credit for long-term trends, and the strong economy they inherited from Joe Biden.

There are more cheers from the crowd when Vance mentions Trump’s tariffs on “foreign countries who try to bring their crap into the United States of America”, as well as the president’s pledge to “drill, baby, drill” and suspend tax on tips and overtime for the remainder of his term.

Vance also implies that with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill at the start of July, the heavy lifting on domestic policy has been done. “What we’re getting ready to do over the next year-and-a-half is to talk about these big wins,” he tells his audience. “Because if we don’t talk about it, we know too many in the fake news won’t cover it.”

Afterwards, as the Village People’s YMCA plays in the background, retiree Pat Savage-Donio also names the immigration crackdown as Trump’s best achievement. Too many criminals were pouring in and endangering American citizens under Biden. “I don’t think any other country would allow it. I don’t think Australia would allow it,” she says. “He [Trump] says what he’s going to do, and he does it, and that’s what we voted for.”

When I ask about Epstein, Savage-Donio shakes her head. “In the scheme of things, I don’t know,” she says. “I think it’s more of a distraction than what the real, important issues are to the country as a whole. He was a bad guy, alright. I don’t need to know every detail about it.”

On the shuttle bus back to the car park, Republican volunteer Judy Holly-Storms, a retired state police officer, tells me about the police academy in Hershey, about two hours’ drive south. The town is also the home of The Hershey Company, America’s largest chocolate maker. Holly-Storms says that when she would go for a run in the morning, the air smelled like chocolate. But then the factory closed in 2012, and production moved elsewhere in the United States and to Mexico.

Loading

“It doesn’t smell like chocolate any more,” she tells me. “And a lot of people unfortunately lost employment because of that.” But does she really think Trump can bring those manufacturing jobs back to the US? “Yes.”

As for Epstein, she says unless there is a chance of further prosecutions, the issue should be laid to rest. “There are too many other major issues that need to be addressed. I really don’t care about the dirt and the smut unless somebody can be charged.”

Good trouble

On my final day in Pennsylvania, I head to a rally in Harrisburg, on the banks of the Susquehanna River. A few hundred people have gathered at a riverside park as part of a nationwide protest against Trump in honour of the late Democratic congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis, whose mantra was that “good trouble” was necessary for social change.

The crowd skews older and white, and most people have brought signs. Orange Lies Matter, one says. Another reads: Morons Are Governing America (MAGA).

Henri Koretzky, 68, carries a poster accusing Trump of robbing the poor to give to the rich. The first six months have been worse than he feared, he says. “It’s been enough to get me to protest, having never done any protest in 68 years of my life. I’m a proud American, and I think the country has gone in a direction that I’m not proud of. I want to do whatever I can to change that.”

As in Carrolltown, immigration is top of mind here, but from the opposite perspective. Trump’s opponents are horrified by what they see as the demonisation of migrants, the erosion of the rule of law and the construction of a detention facility in Florida that is supposedly surrounded by alligators, which many call a “concentration camp”.

The issue brought the Trump administration to the brink of a constitutional crisis as it fought the courts for the right to do what it pleased, without regard for due process. In June, the Supreme Court handed Trump a major win, finding that federal judges could not grant universal injunctions that delayed government policy while a case was heard.

Koretzky’s parents came to the US as German refugees, and his neighbourhood is home to many migrants from Nepal and Bhutan, so he is especially shocked by the harshness of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Asked if there’s any Trump policy he likes, he says: “I don’t object to him eliminating the penny. Other than that, no.”

Loading

For Trump’s opponents, it has been a long six months, with 42 more to go. They are disillusioned with the Democrats, but hopeful the party will pick itself up soon. Many feel inspired by the selection of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City. They also feel there are capable candidates to take on Vance, or whoever takes the mantle from Trump, in 2028.

Meanwhile, they find solace, community and fun in the resistance movement. Jeannie Hunter, 64, has a sign hanging around her neck featuring a photo collage of Trump with Epstein.

“I’m just trolling,” she says. “This is the only thing they [MAGA] care about.”

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.