“I know a lot of them are murderers, rapists, carrying in hard drugs, stuff like that. If they’re doing that, ship them back. If you’ve got a family … trying to make a new life, leave them the hell alone.”

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, and most other public benefits. Trump has regularly misrepresented this, including when announcing the RAISE Act in August, a bill aiming to curtail legal immigration. “They’re not going to come in and just immediately go and collect welfare,” Trump said. Undocumented immigrants do pay taxes — to the tune of more than $10 billion per year — sometimes paying directly for benefits they will not actually receive.

Trump is “not racist,” Stewart says — just a typical “dirtbag dude.” There are few racists in Stewart’s world, but plenty of assholes — and definitely too many “butthurt” politically correct people who whine too much. She wishes the media would stop making everything about race. “They’re what’s dividing people.”

Nearly everyone in Stewart’s life is white. There was a black cashier at Walmart once, and when she was growing up, an elderly black man lived in the same hollow as her family. He kept to himself and no one bothered him.

“We were raised as you don’t mix races. You know what I mean?” said Stewart. “White people’s with white people. Black people’s with black people. That’s how I was raised. And still to this day, if me and Dozer weren’t together and I’d date a black guy, my family would disown me.”

Does she think Trump’s election was a backlash against the first black president?

“You might have a few people like, ‘We can’t have a black man in there.’ But, like I said, you’re always going to have the assholes. And they’re always going to stand out. But, as long as the media is glorifying these racist idiots, and showing them like, ‘Look how racist this person is,’ it just keeps cropping up, over and over and over again.”

Does she think black and brown people have a reason to feel that their lives are threatened because of their race? “If they feel threatened, they feel threatened. But if someone is just black, they shouldn’t feel threatened just because they’re black. They bleed the same way everybody else does.”

This summer, after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville turned deadly, and as the nation was once again ablaze with reckoning over its racist past and present, Stewart talked about the Confederate statues being removed across the country with her neighbor Roger Chadwell. “What are we gonna do, tear down Mount Rushmore?” said Chadwell, in a rant filled with racial slurs. “They gonna start putting up black statues? We ain’t got no black fucking heroes.”

The way Stewart sees it, Chadwell isn’t racist. “He’s a lot like Trump,” she says. “Just talks shit.”

LOSING A LIFELINE

In Mason, the county along the Ohio River where Stewart and her family live, nearly 20 percent of the less than 30,000 residents live in poverty. The mining industry that was once Appalachia’s lifeline has been on a long decline, and for the past 10 years, employment rates have dropped. In nearby New Haven, the Philip Sporn Power Plant closed in 2015. Two other coal plants in West Virginia have since closed.

During the primaries, at a campaign rally in Charleston, West Virginia, Trump put on a miner’s hard hat, pretended to shovel coal, and told a jubilant crowd he was “going to get those mines open.” “Oh, coal country,” he said. “What they have done.” Trump won both West Virginia and Mason County by wide margins.

Trump was hardly the first politician to capitalize on the loss of jobs, racial resentment, and the fear of being at the bottom — and he likely won’t be the last to leave his promises to this region unfulfilled. In the 1960s, Appalachia became the poster child for the government’s war on poverty — not because the region was singular in its struggle, but because a federal anti-poverty program was easier to sell to voters when its recipients were white. By then, the radical, multiracial labor movement born out of the mines had been brutally crushed, Steven Stoll, who wrote a book on the economic history of the region, told The Intercept.

What followed, according to Stoll, was a concerted effort to confuse white working-class voters about their own interests. “There’s a muddled confusion about what government is for, what it should be doing, who benefits, and we’re still in that crazy muddle,” said Stoll. “They just hate business as usual — and they’re not clear who’s responsible for it.”

Since the election, the president pushed a budget that would slash funds from mine safety enforcement and a host of federal programs that support laid-off coal miners, among others, including the Appalachian Regional Commission, which is credited with helping cut the region’s poverty rates in half. In August, Trump returned to West Virginia and held another campaign-style rally and falsely claimed that his administration was bringing back manufacturing jobs by the “hundreds of thousands.” He told West Virginians that he was “putting our coal miners back to work” – an inflated claim at best.

Despite Trump’s pledge to revive America’s coal industry, American energy corporations are increasingly shifting to natural gas and renewable options. In the last couple years, fluctuations in the global coal market have led to a slight uptick for the industry in the U.S., and a handful of mines have opened — something Trump has attempted to take credit for. But the overall trend continues to point downward.

Today, the best jobs available around Stewart are at a women’s prison and a government-run nursing home. She never went to college — “probably should have, but I didn’t,” she said. A friend of hers started college but dropped out and has been getting her wages garnished to pay off the loan. “They’re taking out of her paycheck and all of her taxes from where she had a student loan. I know you owe someone money, you owe them money, but man, to take it like that from a struggling person, that’s shitty,” she says.

In 2014, in response to the Affordable Care Act, Walmart announced it would stop offering insurance to 30,000 part-time employees. According to an estimate the same year by Americans for Tax Fairness, Walmart and its founder, the Walton family, received $62.1 million in subsidies and tax breaks in West Virginia, including $52.8 million in public assistance for its employees.

Stewart says she is happy with her reduced hours because that allows her more time with her son, even if that means she no longer gets benefits. Her paycheck from Walmart varies as her hours do, but she takes home about $600 every two weeks. Wyatt gets a $500 disability check every month.

Stewart’s boyfriend, Hayes, has been on disability after nearly losing his left foot last year, when a 3,000-pound machine rolled backward onto him at his construction job. He is awaiting a settlement, and he wants to get back to work, but he’ll never be able to stand all day, which limits his already narrow options around here. Stewart’s parents live off disability checks, too, after her father suffered a series of workplace injuries.

Stewart doesn’t shop for herself much — she buys her clothes at Walmart. She has no savings, but for the most part is able to make it to her next paycheck. She’s almost finished paying off her trailer home — which costs her about $400 a month. The plot of land where the trailer is parked is $80 a month. She pays for bills and car insurance and can stretch $20 of gas for two weeks. What’s left goes for food and things for Wyatt. He loves pizza and Mario video games.