“I WAS TICKLED pink.” That was how Ronald Schwartz reacted to the election of President Donald Trump.
While the result may have been somewhat of a surprise, his reaction is not so.
When we spoke to him back in October, Schwartz was in campaign-mode as the county manager for Trump in Laurens County in the state of Georgia.
The county includes the town of Dublin, from where Schwartz spoke to us again on the eve of Trump’s inauguration.
“A lot of people thought it would never happen, but some of us had quite a bit of faith that it would. You know a lot of us spent a lot of time helping him,” he says.
So for us we’re enthused, but if you look at the other side they’re really disillusioned.
Schwartz was in campaign mode until the very end. Trump won in Laurens County by a healthy margin of about 2:1, but the Indiana native says he was checking absentee ballots and voter registrations until after 10pm on election day.
It meant he knew little about how the votes were going until later, when the rest of the world was realising that Trump had a shot at winning.
I hadn’t heard anything about what was going on and when I got home I turned on the TV and they were saying that Trump could win this thing. He only needed one of the three states and he could actually win it.
“I stayed up ’till 3.30am expecting them to call Michigan but they actually called Pennsylvania and put it away and I was tickled pink. I couldn’t believe it,” he adds.
Transition team
Schwartz supported Trump from the early days of the primary stage, in large part because of his pro-gun and anti-establishment stances.
So has Trump’s choice of several billionaires for his cabinet made him feel like he’s broken his promise to ‘drain the swamp’?
“No, because the billionaires who are there are successful people,” Schwartz says.
And I think with the agenda being set as it is, they’re going to be expected to perform for what the people want not what they want. Because Trump got elected by the people, he didn’t get elected by the ones with lots of money.
He doesn’t worry about the new president’s tweeting either, saying Trump will become more businessman than showman in office.
“It (Twitter) has gotten him a long way but I think he has to be extremely careful now that he’s actually going to be president,” Schwartz warns.
He might have to cut the comments down but I don’t think it’ll keep him from going to the people with his position. But I do think that they’ll have to monitor it.You know he’s a showman, but I think when it comes down to it and it comes to actually doing the job a lot of that’s going to go away and the seriousness is going to come in.
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