nafta, we were working, but then you slowly started seeing the jobs disappear. and then it starts trickle down effect, and then keeps going on. and now, it continues, and now like you said, the tpp, and we are like, there s nothing left of us. there is no steel manufacturing being done in lorain at all. and i guess that i was born after o trip to lo, ohio, we made a stop in philadelphia, talked to a different focus group of voters. when donald trump says make america great, jack, in your view, when is he talking about that america was great? i think, i believe him when he says make america great again for everyone. when do you think he was talking about it was great. i don t think there s a specific time. he s talking about the concept of greatness. he s talking about the concept of america where we were talking about this earlier, actually, the 25 greatest moments in history. was that all history or just recent? last 100 years.
all right. now raise your hand if you ve ever worked or work at republic steel. all right. now i want you to raise your hand if you still work at either of those places. one guy. lee simons was recently forced to retired when republic steel shut down operations. shedding 200 jobs. when i grew up, i thought it was a place that was going to be there forever. when i personally started in the plant, we had 8,300 people working. went from manufacturing to dollar stores. that s the job, dollar stores. driving through this town of 64,000 people, it s hard to miss the number of dollar stores. at the height of it, lorain was growing fast. and the future looked bright for them. when we came to the american legion hall in the lorain and sat down, all of whom voted for barack obama in 2008 and six out seven of them voted for the
american political system like never before. states like pennsylvania and wisconsin voted for a republican for the first time in nearly a generation. in the state of ohio, donald trump convinced white working class voters thate was on their side. in july, i went to the depressed steel-working town of lorraine, ohio, to talk to some of these voters. in the 1970s, lorain, ohio, 30 miles from cleveland was a boom town. it assembled 40 vans, before it thunderbird and the mercury cougar. creating thousands of good-paying, blue collar jobs. even after the ford plant closed in 2005, the town was anchored by two big steel plants, u.s. steel, and republic steel that have been around since the 1890s. but all of that has changed. so i want to start out by asking you guys to raise your hand if you work or ever worked at u.s. steel.
president aga in 2012, we asked them who they thought w to blame for the way things are today. seven years after the auto-bailout that saved detroit and that was supposed to help steel towns like lorain. nafta and other free trade deals, but tim blake, a third generation steel worker,orced to retire from republic steel after 35 years, said the slide began well before the 1994 trade pact with mexico and canada. i wrote a song in 1982, and i recently just put it back out there, and 34 years later, exactly the same thing happened. well they re shutting down our factories bringing steel from overseas, turn their back on this hard working town you know, when we were working in the middle of clinton, president clinton was offic gs were working. and so we would support him even though you may not agree with