Residents of unincorporated New Castle, Pennsylvania, drove a surge in support for Donald Trump in 2024. Now, they're counting on him not to cut their Social Security benefits, The Washington Post reported.
New Castle used to be a booming industrial town, and a century ago it was a bastion of support for Democratic politicians, said the report: "Before Trump won New Castle, the city had last backed a Republican presidential candidate in 1956, when voters narrowly supported Dwight D. Eisenhower (R) over Adlai Stevenson (D), according to Andrei Pagnotta, a resident who has spent years studying the region’s election results. But the city changed dramatically as factories closed and younger residents moved to more vibrant urban areas ... The city’s population of 21,000 is roughly half what it was during its peak in the 1940s."
One resident who plans to switch to the Republican Party and backed Trump despite disagreeing with him on social issues, Lori Mosura, says that she was driven to do so by money being tight. “He is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich,” she said. “I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.”
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Trump is infamous for having run a series of scams on the vulnerable, including a fake university that defrauded people with promises of training to become a real estate tycoon. His nominee to be attorney general is a former Florida law enforcement official who dropped a probe into that case around the same time a group supporting her candidacy accepted a gift from Trump's charitable foundation, since shut down.
As for her message to Trump now, Mosura said: “We helped get you in office; please take care of us. Please don’t cut the things that help the most vulnerable.”
For his part, Trump has repeatedly pledged not to touch Social Security or Medicare. However, his "Department of Government Efficiency" task force headed up by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy has pledged to cut more than $2 trillion from the federal budget, and experts have warned there is no possible way to do this without cutting key entitlement programs like Social Security.
