Here’s a question: If the election was held again today, would Donald Trump still win the Electoral College?

Despite the hypothetical nature of the query, it’s actually an all-important one. While a huge number of Americans, likely the majority, refuse the un-American Executive Orders of the new Administration as well as his appointment of a white nationalist as White House Chief Strategist, a large minority approved of promises of such on Election Day? Do they still? 

In Pennsylvania–as well as Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin–harsh Rust Belt economics played a role in swinging just enough votes a clearly unqualified, unwell candidate, but it wasn’t just about the money, stupid. There as well as in more affluent parts of the country, Trump’s racism and xenophobia resonated. If these voters get the whiter America they hoped for, would they be okay with a dictator as President?

From Josh Paul’s Newsweek piece about approval for the immigrant ban among citizens in Northeastern PA:

“Our first priority should be the safety of Americans,” says Tino Altavilla, a freshman at King’s College in northeast Pennsylvania. Asked his opinion of the executive order Trump signed Friday afternoon, the physics major said he doesn’t believe every Muslim is a terrorist but that the vetting system needs to be improved before any more people from Middle Eastern countries are allowed into the U.S. “Imagine Syria. There are very few records on some of the people because it’s a war zone.”

Altavilla voted for Trump in November, just like almost 60 percent of voters in Luzerne County, which flipped from supporting Obama by 5 points in 2012 to a 20-point victory for Trump. A third-generation Italian-American, Altavilla tells Newsweek that he thinks Trump should have presented the executive order as a “hold” instead of a “ban,” but that he agrees with Trump’s order. “I’m not sure if his handling was correct, but what he did was correct.”

Most Trump voters from this mountainous county, a two-hour drive west of New York City, were quick to voice their support for the executive order that blocks citizens of seven mostly-Muslim countries from coming to the U.S. for at least three months, bans all refugees for four months and bars Syrian refugees indefinitely. They saw the ban as a smart way to protect the country from terrorist attacks, and they dismissed arguments that the order amounted to a religious ban or comparisons between the order and America’s rejection of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.•