John King of CNN on the Road in Arizona….
Varga is a devout Christian and a lifelong Republican, a Trump supporter who participated in CNN’s “All Over the Map” project during the 2024 presidential campaign. We revisited with her and others in our Arizona group to get their assessment of the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s new term. Most of the takeaways were not good news for the White House:
- Every voter we spoke with, even Trump supporter Vargas, said prices were not dropping as fast as they had hoped.
- Trade is critical in this border state, and the turmoil caused by Trump’s erratic tariff threats is hurting business big and small.
- Illegal border crossings are down, a big Trump promise kept. But businesses along the border complain legal crossings are down, too, and say their sales have fallen as much as 40% over the past 100 days.
- How Trump is going about making changes is raising alarms.
Varga still counts herself as a Trump supporter at 100 days. But her questions about what is happening in Washington are potentially troubling for the White House and the GOP Congress.
“I’m feeling good about a lot of the promises that he made on the campaign, but I am worried about a few things as well,” Varga said in an interview at the Tucson restaurant site. “I’m worried about Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security. He did say that he was not going to cut them. That he was just going to find waste and I really hope that he sticks to that.”….
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“I am not for slashing,” she said. “It’s important because we need to take care of people with disabilities and our elderly and those that depend on it. And they can’t survive as it is right now. We cannot cut.”
Asked if she is confident Trump will keep his promise not to cut Social Security and Medicare, Varga said: “I worry about it, but I’m hopeful.”
Varga said her cost of living is “down a little bit” but added “there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done.” The constant tariff threats are now part of the problem, she said.
“It is causing some disruption,” Varga said. “We make gift baskets, and I have noticed that the items we put in our gift baskets have gone up.”
For now, she takes the president as his word when he says any pain is necessary to fix broken trade relationships. “If he doesn’t come through, though, he’s going to have a lot of people turning on him.”
Some other notable shifts from our conversations with Varga before the 2024 election:
- She no longer believes Trump’s claim the 2020 election was rigged.
- She is open to supporting Democrats for local office because of her disappointment with some Arizona Republicans.
- She disagrees with friends who call Trump a dictator or question whether he is a good person. But some complaints ring true. “Sometimes I agree,” Varga said. “And things better change or he’s going to lose me, even.”
Melissa Cordero is an Air Force veteran and liberal Democrat — a progressive organizer still trying to understand what went wrong in November.
“We just have to get meaner,” Cordero said.
The scope of change in the past 100 days has Cordero feeling a bit dizzy.
“I’m constantly going, ‘Can he do that?’” she said.
Cordero’s life has been affected by the new administration in a number of ways. She and other members of a progressive veterans group, Common Defense, recently visited a group of deported veterans in Juárez, Mexico. She says she just lost a modest conservation grant from the National Science Foundation because it was part of a DEI program. She noted that her parents, both veterans, are worried about losing their federal jobs. And she took part Thursday in a Tucson protest over Trump’s cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“There’s no one answering the phones,” she said. “Mental health, just cutting, making cuts in that area. That’s what all of us veterans need the most.”…
image…Arizona business owner Tamara Varga talks with John King in Tucson, Arizona…CNN
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