In Trump country, a positive response to travel ban

Trump promised to put America first during the campaign, his supporters say, and he's doing it.

Don't talk about airport protests in Trump Country. In the places that propelled Donald Trump to the White House, the president's fans couldn't be much happier with his executive order temporarily banning refugees and immigrants from seven mostly Muslim countries.

Trump promised to put America first during the campaign, his supporters say, and he's doing it. That includes securing the nation's borders and doing everything possible to prevent terrorists from entering the U.S.

In their view, Democrats and liberal snowflakes and soft-hearted do-gooders just need to calm down. Trump is being Trump.

"He's going to do what he says and says what he does," said Barbara Van Syckel, 66, of Sterling Heights, Michigan. "That's a little frightening for some people."

Two of Barbara Wood's three sons served in the military after Sept. 11, and she's all for Trump and his immigration order.
The president "is fulfilling his campaign promises to the best of his ability. I applaud him for that," said Wood, who lives in suburban Birmingham.
Thousands of people have demonstrated at U.S. airports since Trump issued an order Friday blocking people from seven countries in the Middle East and Africa from entering the United States and suspending refugee immigration for four months. The protests included a gathering of several hundred people in Birmingham, the largest airport in a Southern state that Trump carried with ease.
Washington's state attorney general filed a lawsuit over the order, and a federal judge in New York issued an emergency order temporarily banning deportations of people from the seven nations. Some Republican lawmakers have questioned the order, with Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina saying they fear it will become "a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism."
Yet none of that criticism matters much in Trump Country, those states and counties where Trump claimed the votes to win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Retired social-service worker Judith Wilkenroh says the order shows Trump "means what he says."
"He's just unafraid. He's just going ahead like a locomotive, and I like him more and more every time he does something," said Wilkenroh, 72, of Fredrick, Maryland.
Trump supporters said they are happy with the immigration order and the ideas behind it. Some Trump backers said they might do things a little differently than the president, but their overall reaction is positive.
"We're not the world's Social Security office. We're not here to take care of people," said Jim Buterbaugh, the head of custodial work and maintenance at a public school in the western Montana town of White Hall. "I understand that people need help, but there are other ways besides bringing them here."
Buterbaugh, who has actively fought the re-settlement of Syrians in Montana, was frustrated that Trump's moratorium did not include countries such as Saudi Arabia, where most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were from. The executive order also did not include the creation of safe zones for refugees, which he favors.
Mike Honaker has some misgivings, too. A Trump supporter in a struggling West Virginia coal town, he didn't think "blitzing everybody" with an order that spread chaos around the world was the right way to go.
But Honaker worries about terrorism and does not have a problem with Trump's plan to screen refugees more thoroughly. Overall, Honaker likes 85 percent of what the president has done so far.
"I think he's shaking it up, the whole of Washington, D.C., and half the country, like he said he would," he said.
Attorney Terri King, 56, said Trump's order has widespread support in her Rust Belt city of Middletown, Ohio.
The only people who don't support it are "those who are paid to protest on the left ... and some Democrats," said King, an also-ran in a GOP congressional race last year.
Republican Scott Presler of Virginia Beach, Virginia, likes Trump's order so much he thought about staging an airport protest of his own in support of the president.
Presler, who is gay, said he wanted to go to Virginia's Dulles International Airport to support the president's immigration ban while carrying a sign that said "Radical Islam Murders Gays." But he said he stopped short of making the trip out of fear for his safety.
"I'm a compassionate human being," said Presler, 28. "I'm a humanitarian. But I'm also compassionate toward the health and well-being of the American people. We have 50,000 homeless veterans in this country. We have our own poor and suffering."

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to In Trump country, a positive response to travel ban
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2017/0130/In-Trump-country-a-positive-response-to-travel-ban
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe