Saginaw’s Republicans were amused by the suggestion that their anger at corporate power in America and the military-industrial complex made them sound like liberals from a bygone age.
Yet Lori Patterson, chair of the local Republican party in this crucial region in the swing state of Michigan, was steadfast in her belief that Donald Trump will complete his oft-made promise to “drain the swamp”. She believes Trump will take on the corporate giants she said wield too much control over US politics and citizens’ lives even as the incoming US president assembles a cabinet stacked with billionaires.
“The industrial complex, they’re enriching themselves, and it’s supposed to be about the people,” said Patterson. “Trump made mistakes in his first term. He wasn’t a politician. He didn’t know how to really drain that swamp like he wanted to. He trusted some of the wrong people. He learned that lesson this time.”
Saginaw, a pivotal county in Michigan, voted to give Trump a second shot at the presidency. In 2016, he won the sprawling county, which has cycled through prosperity and decline with the rise and fall of its car factories, but lost it to Joe Biden four years later.
Trump took back Saginaw in last November’s presidential election amid deepening disenchantment with an economic system failing many working Americans and the inability of the Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris, to persuade voters that she would do anything about it.
Following Trump’s victory, Patterson was elected chair of Saginaw’s Republican party in an attempt to heal divisions over support for the former president. The branch was previously led by a couple, Debra and Gary Ell, who were closely aligned with the populist and nationalist America First movement. They drove out those members who showed anything less than total fealty to Trump, including some who steadfastly refused to endorse his claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
With Patterson at the helm, Saginaw’s Republicans pledged to work on “party unity that has been elusive in the past few years”. The America First sign above the entrance to the party offices in a Saginaw strip mall came down.
Though the local party remains strongly supportive of Trump, its leaders have shifted from near-idolatry to a more pragmatic focus on expectations. High on Patterson’s list are the incoming president’s pledges to finish building the wall on the Mexican border and the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
But for her and many of Saginaw’s Republicans, Trump’s core appeal remains the same as it was in 2016: to drain the swamp. Except that, eight years later, their view of what constitutes the swamp has evolved.
Trump, like the Tea Party before him, originally targeted a political system in Washington dominated by career politicians, lobbyists and bureaucrats accused of serving themselves more than the American public.
Eric Kowalewski, deputy chair of the Saginaw party, considers that battle to have largely been won because he said Trump loyalists now dominate the Republican congressional delegation and they will answer to the president.
“He ran on draining the swamp and there’s very few swamp people left in DC,” he said.
Instead, Republican leaders in Saginaw want Trump to target what they regard as corporate control over their daily lives, from the food and the medicines they consume to what many regard as the fleecing of their taxes by the military-industrial complex to fund weapons shipped to Ukraine and Israel.
In his valedictory Oval Office speech on Wednesday, Joe Biden warned about a “dangerous concentration of power” in the hands of the ultra-wealthy, widely read as an attack on Elon Musk and other billionaires who have cosied up to Trump.
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom,” he said.
Patterson and her colleagues do not disagree with Biden’s attack on the concentration of power in the hands of the unelected, but they have different targets in mind.
Saginaw’s Republicans are excited by Trump’s nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr as health secretary. Democrats have attacked the scion of their party’s most famous political family for his vaccine denial and conspiracy theories. But Kennedy’s repeated appearances on Fox News to denounce the food and drug industries have struck a chord with ordinary Republicans.
Kennedy has blamed ultra-processed foods for driving an “obesity epidemic” and accused food manufacturers of poisoning people with chemical additives banned in other countries.
“When we get President Trump back in the White House and me to Washington, we’re going to fix our broken food system and make America healthy again,” he pledged before the election.
Kennedy argues that powerful corporate interests had corrupted regulation, overly influencing agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration in ways that opened the door to the US opioid epidemic, a uniquely American crisis.
To Patterson, it all adds up.
“RFK is going to expose the chemicals that are in our foods. It’s terrible that our foods here in the United States are so different than like of those in the UK. Why are our ingredients so different?” she said.
“The problem is when they’re putting that stuff in our foods, they’re making us more unhealthy which is, in turn, helping big pharma because pharma is making profit off of us being unhealthy. RFK wants to put a stop to this.”
Patterson and a group of Trump voters at the Republican offices in Saginaw tick off the links they see between between the mass production of unhealthy foods, big pharma profiting from drugs prescribed to treat the resulting medical conditions and a health industry raking in huge profits while millions of Americans are dragged down by medical debt.
“Medical debt is really disheartening,” said Patterson. “If someone has cancer or something like that, they’re putting all their their savings and everything into it, and that should not happen. When it costs $100 to administer an aspirin, that’s ridiculous. That’s just taking money from people.”
Karen Abate, a member of the county party executive, describes herself as a Reagan Democrat who bought into the promise in the 1980s that less regulation would mean greater prosperity. Now she sees a dire need for reform.
“The pendulum has swung so far. Things have gotten so out of line. Companies ought to be able to police themselves and not hurt people, and it’s just gotten way, way out of line. It’s time that it swings back the other way,” she said.
Kowalewski links in the military-industrial complex that he said has a grip on the Democratic party and is profiting from the US shipping billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and Israel for its war in Gaza.
“We pay for Ukraine and Israel. I love Israel. The Bible says that we’re to pray for peace in Israel. It doesn’t say we’re supposed to give them everything,” he said.
There are large numbers of Americans for whom the economic system has rarely worked, particularly generations of minority communities trapped in cycles of low pay, debt and poverty. The US has the highest poverty rate among the world’s 26 most developed countries according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The UN children’s agency, Unicef, ranks the US second in relative child poverty among the world’s richest nations, behind Mexico.
But now voters like Abate, who thought the system was working for them, are discovering that it doesn’t.
“These kids today cannot afford to live on their own, they can’t afford their own home. It’s not because they’re not working hard enough. It there’s just there’s no money left at the end of the day,” she said.
While Patterson is enthusiastic about Kennedy’s nomination as health secretary, she understands it represents a shift from traditional Republican values, where government was seen as the enemy and private enterprise the solution. She said there was a greater focus on corporate control because people are feeling its effects ever more acutely.
“More Americans are paying attention to these issues now because they’re affecting their lives directly. People are asking questions,” she said.
But will Trump do anything about it? The incoming president has said Kennedy will be free to “go wild on health” if he is confirmed.
But Trump’s cabinet will also be stuffed with billionaires who are not expected to look favourably on attempts to take down corporate power. He has chosen a hedge fund manager, Stott Bessent, as treasury secretary and a finance executive, Howard Lutnick, to head the commerce department.
Even without counting Elon Musk’s $360bn fortune, the cabinet nominees are worth about $11bn between them. During his first term, Trump’s tax cuts benefited the rich more than the poor.
Kennedy will run up against huge corporate interests, such as when the processed food industry curbed the campaign by the then first lady Michelle Obama to reduce childhood obesity with healthier eating. Powerful lobbies got Congress to declare pizza a vegetable to ensure it remained a part of school lunches and effectively killed plans by federal agencies to reduce sugar in children’s food.
Yet Kowalewski is confident that those days are past and that Trump will stand with his supporters against entrenched corporate interests.
“Trump put RFK in there for a reason. He knows his supporters want it,” he said.
“It’s not that one man is going to turn it all around. But [it is] the team of people, all these people working together across the whole broad government, that’s going to do it – under his leadership.”
