PLAINS, Pa. - Behind the counter of the pink-tiled D’s Diner, Tammy Malloy chatted in between serving a late morning wave of tables. The 67-year-old said she had come to work beaming the day after the November election, in which she had voted for Donald Trump.
And now, 10 days into Trump’s second presidency, Malloy was still thrilled with what she was seeing happen in Washington. She was particularly pleased with Trump choosing Pete Hegseth, a former weekend Fox News host and Army veteran who was dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct and alcohol abuse, to lead the Defense Department. Why?
“To get rid of the DEI,” Malloy said, using the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, a favorite conservative punching bag. “There’s two genders. I don’t care if you identify as a monkey, you’re still either a male or female. The last four years shoved it down our throats.”
But she thought Trump was being too generous in offering resignation deals for federal employees who don’t want to return to work in the office. It’s the only thing so far she’s disliked that Trump has done - a list that includes freezing various federal grant programs in an effort to weed out diversity initiatives and pardoning violent offenders who participated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I can’t work from home,” Malloy said, standing by the diner’s swinging kitchen door, holding a half-glass of milk, with a black apron tied around her torso.
Despite the chaos and confusion some of Trump’s early actions have caused in Washington, there was a collective shrug among his supporters here in northeast Pennsylvania, several of whom argued that no actual damage had been done by the new orders to freeze spending. In interviews with nearly 20 people in the region in recent days, most Trump supporters were in favor of his efforts to scale back the federal workforce, to stand by controversial Cabinet nominees and to slash foreign aid.
Support for Trump in Luzerne County, home to Plains and once a Democratic stronghold, has only grown in the four years since he left Washington appearing to be politically finished, following his unsuccessful efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Luzerne, and neighboring swing counties like Lackawanna and Monroe, each moved toward him by roughly five more percentage points in November. That included Hazleton, a majority Latino city in Luzerne County that Trump won by even more than he did four years ago.
“I trust him. Is he going to do everything right in the next four years? Probably not,” Malloy said. “Is he going to do everything I agree with? Probably not - but he’s going to do most of what I agree with, and I’ll take it.”
On a recent morning, Malloy stood next to fellow server Lisa Barrett and their boss, Dan DeMellier, who has owned the 24-hour diner for nine years. They each think about Trump differently, indicative of how the region remains politically competitive, even as it has swung toward the current president. Malloy paid little attention to politics most of her adult life until Trump’s 2016 run and has been a supporter of his and an avid Fox News viewer ever since. She prays for him every night.
DeMellier, 49, voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden but took a chance on Trump this fall after profits at his restaurant plummeted over the last few years. He doesn’t think he’ll see the cost of goods begin to fall for at least another six months but believes that under Trump, they gradually will.
“I’m just looking for a change,” DeMellier said. “Everybody says he can pull us out. I think anything was better than the last president.”
Barrett, 63, has been a restaurant server and a Democrat her entire adult life, never voted for Trump and finds him utterly off-putting. But she said she supposes that he may be able to do some good for the country. She fears Trump enacting tariffs will drive prices up more. But Barrett’s son, she said, tells her Trump’s immigration initiatives are a positive thing.
“I don’t think it’s all bad,” Barrett said of Trump’s agenda. “I really don’t.”
DeMellier said he wasn’t fazed by the Trump administration calling for a pause of federal loans and grants, saying he didn’t “pay too much attention to it,” but that “media just blows it all out of proportion.”
He said he supports scaling back some federal DEI programs and employing fewer people in them, without scrapping diversity initiatives altogether. And there probably are select situations, he said, in which a transgender teenager may need relevant medical care through a federally run health-care program, despite Trump signing an executive order to prohibit it.
When it comes to the officials Trump has chosen to surround himself with in his second administration, DeMellier draws the line at Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., arguing that being wealthy doesn’t qualify someone to have a seat at the table of federal government.
But DeMellier dismissed the scrutiny surrounding Hegseth’s past conduct. Hegseth had paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017, according to information he provided to the Senate, and he acknowledged engaging in extramarital affairs. Former colleagues also had reported that he was a heavy drinker.
“Who cares if he had three wives? Who cares if he drinks? Everybody drinks,” DeMellier said.
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‘What he said he was going to do’
A week and a half into the second Trump term, Joe Granteed sat inside the Luzerne County Republicans’ strip mall office, recalling how a dozen years ago he was knocking doors for Obama’s reelection campaign.
Now, a faded gray Trump cap accented his hooded sweatshirt and work pant ensemble. And in his view, Trump’s cutthroat approach to governing since taking office in January - panicked Washington bureaucrats be damned - was exactly right.
“He’s doing what he said he was going to do,” Granteed said, detailing his satisfaction with Trump’s most controversial Cabinet nominees, his aggressive posture on the border and immigration, pausing some federal programs to determine whether they’ve gone too “woke” (“It’s got to be done,” Granteed said), and pulling the security details of former administration officials such as John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and others who face threats on their lives from Iran.
Granteed agreed with every action the president had taken over the last 10 days - even if he thought it was “a little early” for Trump to baselessly speculate that DEI initiatives had caused a tragic plane crash in Washington the night before. His support for Trump’s pardoning of Jan. 6 defendants was no exception.
“I was there,” Granteed, 68, revealed, referring to a rally on the National Mall ahead of Congress’s election certification in 2021. A violent storming of the Capitol building followed. Granteed said he had stopped when he reached the security perimeter outside the Capitol, explaining with a laugh that he’s “not that young anymore” and “couldn’t climb scaffolding or walls.”
A man in a cherry-red blazer who had sat down at the table minutes earlier, placing a fistful of candy on the conference table in front of him, chimed in.
“I was pardoned,” he said, introducing himself as Frank Scavo, 61, one of 1,500 defendants Trump pardoned on his first day back in office. (Scavo had already served his 60-day sentence at a low-security federal prison on a conviction of unlawfully parading inside the Capitol when Trump signed his broad pardons last month.)
This fall, pro-Trump activists like Granteed and TJ Fitzgerald, a bail bondsman who runs the grassroots Luzerne County Republicans group, helped give the GOP a voter registration advantage here for the first time in more than 50 years.
“Here’s another reason Trump won,” Scavo said, changing topics after discussing Jan. 6 and his recent pardon. He grabbed an off-brand miniature sucker from his pile of candy on the table. “You see the size of this lollipop?”
“Used to be bigger,” Granteed replied.
“Yeah. The average consumer is like, ‘We’re done with this,’” Scavo said. “Even for a small lollipop, this is too small.”
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‘Some difficult decisions had to be made’
In adjacent Lackawanna County, where Biden spent the first decade of his life, Trump’s entrance into politics cost Democrats significant ground. Harris won the county by 3 percentage points this fall - a similar margin to Clinton there in 2016 but a stark departure from Obama’s 27-point lead in 2012.
Those largely working-class voters didn’t show up to the polls anxious about threats to democracy, said Justin Taylor, a registered Democrat who had served for two decades as the mayor of Carbondale but who has supported Trump since 2016. Taylor said he has seen other “middle of the road” Democrats like himself desperate for changes on both economic and social issues, and he believes Trump had to come back into office to make sure changes happen.
The people here who voted for Trump, though, weren’t surprised that they hadn’t yet seen prices fall since he took office. Costs crept up under Biden, Trump’s supporters said in interview after interview, and they expected it would take time for Trump to bring them back down - even as Trump has said since the election that grocery prices may be difficult to lower.
Chris Chermak, a Lackawanna County commissioner and the county’s lone Republican official, said he couldn’t believe just how much ground the GOP gained across the state this election, including ousting the state’s senior Democratic senator, Bob Casey, and an incumbent congressman in the area. But in hindsight, the high cost of living paired with scarce quality job opportunities in the region, Chermak said, made voters want someone in office who would make “drastic, drastic decisions.”
“I don’t have a problem with what he’s doing, and most of the people I’m talking to, I believe, feel the same way,” Chermak said of Trump’s first days in office. “Just some difficult decisions that had to be made.”
Returning to his truck outside the Walmart in Dickson City, Brian Williams, 49, said he liked what he had heard on the news about Trump mandating federal employees return to office buildings, and how the highly publicized ICE raids were sending a message to violent migrants. Williams said he was on board with most everything Trump has done in a flurry of executive actions and slashing of programs.
“I like the fact that they’re trying to cut stuff, that they had, what was it, DOGE, and was it MLB or DOB, or whatever?” Williams said, trailing off, trying to remember the acronym “OMB” for the agency that administers the federal budget. He wasn’t the only local resident who struggled to recall the specifics of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze federal loan and grant programs in an effort to weed out diversity and equity. But in conversations here, that kind of initiative was well received.
“People like the brand he has sold them,” said Thom Shubilla, chairman of the Luzerne County Democratic Party, on why Trump has won over so many former Democrats in the region. It’s his ability to “hammer home a very simplistic message” in a way Democrats haven’t.