As Jeremiah Wilburn, a 45-year-old operating engineer, browsed the aisles at Walmart for a new pair of coveralls, he reflected on some of those shifts. Like many voters here, after siding twice in the elections with former president Barack Obama, he decided to gamble with Trump in 2016. And for most of the past two years, he was pleased. The economy was humming, jobs were flowing and wages seemed stable.
Until now.
“I was doing fine with him up until this government shutdown,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. You’re not getting the wall built for $5 billion. And Mexico is not paying for it, we all know that, too. Meanwhile, it’s starting to turn people like me away.”
He worries about the impact the shutdown will have on the economy. He’s concerned about the impact on his brother, who works for the TSA in Florida.
To him, the shutdown standoff has also poked holes in Trump’s ability to say that he cares for the working class, given that 800,000 federal employees and additional contractors going without a paycheck.
“You can’t expect people to come to work without getting paid,” Wilburn said. “If I were them, I certainly wouldn’t come to work.”
