WASHINGTON — Patty Tracey has lived in the town of Cicero, near Syracuse, her entire life. Since the 2008 recession, she said she has seen factories shut down, slowly but definitively, as companies seek to maximize efficiency by relocating overseas.

The impact of these relocations hit her family hard a few years ago, she said, when one of her relatives lost a job when Chrysler left and relocated its factory to Mexico .

“If it weren’t for our medical industry we’d be in a trouble there,” Tracey said. “Our hospitals and (Syracuse University) are our wealth.”

Frustrated with years of economic stagnation and jobs streaming out of the country, she was convinced that business tycoon and former reality show host Donald Trump would bring change the country desperately needed.

As Trump became the 45th president of the United States on Friday, hundreds of thousands of people flooded into the National Mall. Tracey and her family members — all enthusiastic Trump supporters — marched on their way to the non-ticketed standing area with hope that is epitomized in Trump’s campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

The central New York economy has been battered with hardship over the last few years.  The car part manufacturer New Process Gear based in DeWitt, for example, closed in 2012 after 124 years in business. This past December, upstate New York lost 4,400 manufacturing jobs, according to the state Department of Labor.

On the campaign trail, Trump often pledged to bring jobs back to the country if he were elected president. At multiple rally events, he addressed working-class people.

As a “Celebrity Apprentice” viewer, Tracey said she developed a sense that Trump likes to engage with people and is genuinely interested in helping them.

She added Trump was not her first choice, but the minute Democrat Hillary Clinton got the nomination, she was set on Trump, she said. Tracey, who voted for Barack Obama in 2012, thought Clinton’s primary opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had great ideas but Tracey felt they were leaning toward socialism. For Tracey, Trump’s ability to negotiate toughly as a businessman was also a desirable quality for presidency.

Judy Lonergan, Tracey’s sister, was particularly dissatisfied with rising health care costs and Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

“We really need to figure out as a society is (whether) the government can help out here what we are going to do with our health care so that everybody can have an affordable health care but other people are paying for the other people to have it. It’s just not right,” said Lonergan, who runs a retail small business.

Her husband also runs a business employing 30 people. As a result of the Affordable Care Act, she said, her husband was no longer able to pay for a portion of employees’ health care.

“You get to a point where there’s no sense being in business if all you are doing is giving everything you make back, and you can’t even take care of your own,” she said.

Standing on the steps of the western lawn of Capitol Hill, Trump delivered an inaugural address that underscored campaign messages to a crowd stretching over about 1.2 miles in the National Mall.

Tracey wore a vivid Syracuse orange and blue-striped jacket over a Syracuse orange fleece, rubbing her hands covered in black gloves. As she listened to Trump’s speech, her eyes misted with tears. She clapped and cheered during the address, putting her hands on her cheeks and shrieking with delight as Trump declared, “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first.”

But she said afterward that Trump’s “make America great again” was, to her, the most moving part of his address.

“I don’t really like saying ‘again’ since I don’t think we’re really bad, but certainly we have to make sure we stay as a world power … (in) trade and business,” Tracey said.

Published on January 20, 2017 at 9:35 pm

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