A year after Trump's election, York, Pa., is forever changed [View all]

[DonViejo]

By Matt Viser, Globe Staff November 04, 2017


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Trump’s election a year ago profoundly altered the United States in ways that continue to reverberate, but perhaps most visibly and disturbingly in how we talk to one another, especially about the hardest things, like the nation’s racial divide. The volume is up; the edge is sharp. Old grievances feel new, and civility is being sorely tested.

Certainly, that’s how it went down in York County along the southern border of Pennsylvania. York went big for Trump in the election, with a 63 to 33 percent margin over Hillary Clinton that helped the billionaire reality TV star capture the state and vault into the White House. Yet, the morning after, Trump’s win seemed less like a victory for democracy — the kind celebrated in high school civics classes — than a trigger for tensions felt across York County and the rest of America.

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A year later, they haven’t stopped worrying.

With its small-city core of York, surrounded by fields and hills that rise from the broad Susquehanna River, the county is politically split between urban and rural; between black or brown and white; between older, settled families and newer immigrants; between Democrats and Republicans.

In other words, America.

It’s the kind of place where a simple Trump sign or cardboard cutout is seen by some as a show of pride in working-class values, but by others as a racist affront. Since Trump’s election, York residents have been un-friending one another on Facebook, avoiding one another at grocery store checkout lines, and leaving churches whose pews now feel uncomfortable.

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