Don Gagne
speaker
157 appearances
14 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 18 Jun
Don Gagne’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 4.
Appearances
I've been in and around Allegheny County these past couple of days and in West Mifflin where a key U.S. Steel facility is located. So let's start there with the local mayor. His name is Chris Kelly.
And he made it clear they were tears of joy he's talking.
Yeah, he's lived it. He grew up in a nearby town where he says it was decades of decline. He says one mill after another closed and more than 200,000 jobs disappeared.
And he sees the new investments from Nippon Steel as new life.
So most are only just learning some of the details, but it's being welcomed for lots of reasons. I met 55-year-old Malik Swain outside a local restaurant. He said it's good news, including what updating these old mills will mean for the environment.
I do want to note here that the United Steelworkers, the national union, has long been opposed to Nippon coming in, citing national security and allegations of unfair trade practices.
And that was a big reason during the campaign last year that both candidate Trump and President Biden opposed this proposed deal with Nippon Steel. Now, though, such concerns seem to be overridden by the prospect of more jobs. But listen to this. I heard this from a local resident. His name is Mike Medich. I'm glad it's Japan rather than China.
because China has a lot of investments in our country, which I don't think they should have. And I'll add here that Medich doesn't necessarily see this as a big engine for new jobs, but he says had this mill closed, that would have been a real blow to the community.
It's a pleasure.
Trump has come to a county that is home to a large number of factories and design facilities for the U.S. automobile industry. As such, there is a large contingent of union autoworkers here who support the president. Among them, you find strong backing for Trump's tariff policies. They believe Trump, when he says tariffs, will bring tens of thousands of jobs back to places like Michigan.
Still, even with the focus here on tariffs, it's common to hear people lined up outside the rally cite tough immigration policies and deportations as the thing Trump has done that they're happiest with so far. Don Garnier, NPR News, Macomb County, Michigan.
Up First from NPR · Trump Administration Latest, USAID Ruling, Super Bowl Preview · 8 Feb 2025
podcast
Where to start? You first. We expected a lot. of aggressive action from the Trump administration right from the jump, because that's what they told us they would do. And we really are in a place where the fire hose is turned on. And every day, as you said, it is multiple big things.
Now we get the legal battles. A judge ruled that the White House could not do what it did, that there are so many questions unresolved about who has the authority to cut these jobs, where the funding to pay workers comes, through September, as proposed for some would come from. So look for direction from the courts, but that may not stop the administration.
And now on top of this comes the judge's order regarding Treasury Department data, overnight data on individual citizens. We are going to see a lot of this, and we still don't know if or how the White House will view orders that they comply with the courts.
And those tariffs were set to go in place this past week. The White House called a 30-day pause on all of that. But yes, the threat really does still exist. And economists will tell you that the tariffs would be very destructive to economies on both sides of the border. Detroit, Windsor, that's the city right across the Detroit River, is the nation's busiest border crossing.
Automobile parts flow across that border. Production schedules depend on that. Tens of thousands of jobs depend on that. There are civic and business partnerships of all kinds across the Detroit River. And all of that's just the start of it. So nobody has relaxed at all.
Dearborn is a majority Arab American city. Biden won big there in 2020. But this last election, it was close, but it went for Trump largely because of anger over the war in Gaza and the Biden administration's support for Israel. Again, it's not that these voters had great hopes for Trump, but they did seem caught off guard by remarks like what we just heard.
People, to me, expressed offense no matter how they voted. Offended Trump saying Gaza would be taken over by the U.S. Offended at the call to relocate Gaza's population. offended at the reference to it as a future Riviera. And there has been, Scott, some finger pointing and blaming those who voted for Trump, but also even toward those who abstained, maybe stayed uncommitted.
So it has been a difficult week in places like Dearborn, Michigan.
It's a pleasure. Thanks, Scott.
Showing 101–120 of 157 · page 6 of 8
← Previous
Next →