It’s been nine exhausting years of the Trump era, and we’re due for four more. I maintain that the United States has always been fascist, but it’s now turned a corner and the veneer of democracy is gone. This time around, it’s more ominous.
By Matthew Chasney
In 2022 I published a photo book called When There’s a Trouble Around. It documented the Trump era in the Rust Belt and Appalachia. I thought I was done and then the 2024 election showed that it still mattered.
Made over the span of five years it was a meditation on the political fallout that happened after capital took all that it could from the land and labor of the Rust Belt and Appalachia. Like most political work, I assumed that it would have a short shelf life. But, on the heels of Donald Trump’s second election, it became relevant once again.
This project was personal. I grew up in Parma, Ohio – a postwar, working-class suburb of Cleveland just a little too late to savor the good times. Parma was a reliable Democratic stronghold in deep blue Cuyahoga County until 2016 when it fell deliriously for Donald Trump. It’s the home of the textbook Obama 2012 – Trump 2016 voter; The working-class white voter, the blue dog democrat, the MAGA conservative, that poor fool (according to the most irritating liberal you know) who votes against his best interest. The truth is that could have easily been me if a few things had gone differently.
I wanted to go to places like Parma. Places where decades of neoliberal austerity, deindustrialization, the financial crisis, and the opioid epidemic depleted communities while making a privileged few very, very wealthy. I tried to show how the people and the land that they were on all bore the scars of this. Over the 5 years that I made this project it’s functioned as an explanation, an apology, a narrative, and now a rebuke.
It’s been nine exhausting years of the Trump era, and we’re due for four more. I maintain that the United States has always been fascist, but it’s now turned a corner and the veneer of democracy is gone. This time around, it’s more ominous. I can’t help but wonder what could have been if the void of anger and frustration that working class people feel about their deteriorating material conditions had been filled by left wing populism instead of Trumpism.
Instead, Democrats were content to maintain an illusion that the status quo was working while Republicans leaned into spectacle and grievance in all of its jagged glory.
And it worked. Why wouldn’t it?
Supporters leaving a Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio. 2017.
A house next to the Lisbon city jail. Columbiana County, Ohio. 2021.
Coal chute. Kopperston, West Virginia. 2020.
Hopper cars lined up at Mittal Steel. Cleveland, Ohio. 2019.
Tract housing. Olmsted Falls, Ohio. 2021.
Big Creek being cleared for a development project in Brooklyn, Ohio. 2019.
A man enjoying a beer and a cigarette while waiting for his driver to return from a stop. Parma, Ohio. 2021.
Deer traverse a field. Brooklyn, Ohio. 2019.
Steubenville, Ohio. 2021.
Parma, Ohio. 2021.
Right wing Parma School Board candidate Horatiu Lungo campaigning at the Parma July 4th Parade. 2021.
Pound, Virginia. 2021.
Chevy dealership. Big Stone Gap, Virginia.
Raleigh County, West Virginia. 2020.
Voting Booth. Norwalk, Ohio. 2021.
Martin Kentucky. 2017.
Matthew Chasney is a Cleveland-based photographer. He is team oriented, has great attention to detail and is proficient in the Microsoft suite.