It’s all so new, said Del Signore, the caterer. “We’ve been going to hell in a handbasket for years,” he said, “so he’s not going to fix it in a week or a month.”
But that doesn’t mean he has forever either. Del Signore echoed the timetable of the others.
“Six months to a year,” he said. “Steel may never come back, but we’re sitting on a ton of coal. We’re also sitting on a ton of natural gas. He’ll create jobs.”
Kirsch told me he will be watching in particular the employment numbers at Rosebud Mining in nearby Kittanning. It’s the largest coal company left in the area, he said, and it has about 500 employees. If that number starts ticking up, he said, that will be his indicator that Trump is keeping the promises he made.
“He’s just got to follow through with what he said he’s going to do,” Schilling said in her house filled with the old football stories about her son.
People here I talked to who didn’t vote for Trump—and there some in this county where Democrats still nominally outnumber Republicans—are hoping for more jobs as well. But they aren’t so optimistic.
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