With President Trump now in office over a month, NBC Political Analyst Nicolle Wallace Is visiting Wisconsin and other swing states to ask lifelong Democratic voters why they voted Republican for the first time ever this election, and what they hope the next four years will bring. On Monday, NBC26's Stacy Engebretson spoke with Wallace about her "In Trump They Trust" series which included a recent stop at a Sturgeon Bay dairy farm featured on the Today Show last week.
Engebretson asked, "Why did you want to focus on a farmer, Brian LaPlant, who you spoke with?"
"Well if you've seen Brian LaPlant, he's absolutely darling. Utterly brilliant," Wallace responded. "He was so clear and so clear eyed about his support for Donald Trump from the beginning, and it came down to wanting a businessman to run this country, to wanting a radical departure, and from feeling frankly completely cut off from today's Democratic party."
Engebretson asked, "What do voters who went Republican this time want Donald Trump to do as President? What are their expectations?"
"They want him to be himself, but they want to see him you know stop throwing elbows and taking cheap shots. So for no voter is Donald Trump perfect, but no President ever is," responded Wallace. "They're pleased by his aggressive action on immigration, even though it's messy, and even though a lot of people say it needs to be fine tuned. They appreciate he got to Washington and started doing what he said he was going to do. They like that he aggressively targets individual companies and asks them to keep their jobs in this country."
Engebretson asked, "What is the one main thing that you've taken away from talking to all these people across the country?"
"Well, I'm going to give you two," Wallace chuckles. "Everybody wants the same things. Everyone wants economic security. They want homeland security. They want national security, and they want to believe that their children are going to have all the opportunities they had and more, and that people have never been more divided in how we achieve that."
Wallace visited seven states for her special report. She plans to return to Wisconsin later to get a presidential progress report from LaPlant.
