Outgoing President Trump’s frequent visits to Western Pennsylvania were emblematic of his time in office.

He brought aspirational ideas. He made questionable claims. He galvanized supporters and detractors alike.

He made his first official Pennsylvania campaign stop in Pittsburgh in April 2016. Trump, then the front-runner for the GOP nomination, addressed nearly 9,000 supporters inside Pittsburgh’s David L. Lawrence Convention Center. Outside, hundreds of protesters converged on the Downtown convention center and the scene turned chaotic. At least four people reported being pepper-sprayed, and police in riot gear struggled to disperse the crowd.

One protester made it inside and tried to disrupt the campaign event.

After the protester was removed, Trump said the man had a “very weak voice” and added, “Oh, he’s leaving. He’s going home to mommy.”

During his 45-minute speech, Trump made promises that resonated with the crowd.

“There are few places that have been more devastated by our trade policies than Pittsburgh,” Trump said, referring specifically to the steel and coal industries. “Don’t worry, we’re bringing it all back.”

He didn’t provide specifics on how he’d try to do that.

In a strange, off-the-cuff remark, Trump asked, “How’s Joe Paterno? We’re going to bring that back? Right?”

Paterno, the Penn State football coach fired in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky child sex assault scandal, had died four years earlier. Some in the crowd groaned.

Trump returned to Western Pennsylvania that June, appearing before more than 2,000 supporters in a sweltering hangar at Pittsburgh International Airport.

In the preceding week, Trump had been criticized for questioning whether the “Mexican heritage” of an American-born federal judge in a lawsuit against him might be affecting the judge’s decisions because of Trump’s desire to build a wall along the Mexican border and his strong stance against illegal immigration from Mexico. Then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, said Trump’s remark was a “textbook definition of a racist comment.”

Trump’s response: “Everything is politically correct. You say something that’s a little bit off, and you get headlines. They’re like a bunch of babies, a bunch of dumb babies.”

“We’re going to make America great again for everybody. We’re going to have a country that’s unified … white, Black, the richer, the poorer, everybody,” Trump said. “We’re going to bring everybody together.”

Trump made several more campaign stops in Western Pennsylvania before the 2016 election, punctuated by another Pittsburgh International Airport event two days before Election Day. Trump’s campaign said 9,000 people crammed into a hangar and another 3,500 people who showed up couldn’t get in.

“The momentum is there for Trump. What’s there to be excited about Hillary?” Trump supporter Grant Twiss, of Erie, told the Tribune-Review before the event.

Trump as president

That momentum propelled Trump to a 44,000-vote win in Pennsylvania on Election Day, making him the first Republican to carry the state since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Pennsylvania remained important to Trump during his first term and throughout his reelection campaign. During the last two months of the campaign, Trump made 15 stops in Pennsylvania, more than in any other state, according to the Chicago Tribune, which tracked the candidates’ stops.

Trump made his last Western Pennsylvania stop in Butler County on Halloween, speaking to thousands of supporters at Pittsburgh-Butler Regional Airport.

In his closing argument to voters, Trump said, “Joe Biden will shut down your economy, ship your jobs to China where they pay him a lot of money, raise your taxes $4 trillion and send your state into a deep depression. There will be no fracking, no mining, no natural gas, no heating in the winter, no air conditioning in the summer.”

He didn’t stop there: “There’ll be no Easter, no Christmas, no Thanksgiving, no Fourth of July, no nothing.”

“We have made America strong again. We have made America proud again,” Trump added. “And with your help, we will make America great again.”

Strong support here despite loss

Trump didn’t get enough help on Election Day. Although he collected more than 400,000 more votes in Pennsylvania than he did in 2016, he lost the state to former Vice President Joe Biden by more than 80,000 votes.

But his support throughout much of Western Pennsylvania has not wavered.

Trump never posed much of a challenge to his Democratic opponents in Allegheny County, losing by 16.6 percentage points in 2016 and 20.4 points last year. But he was dominant in the six surrounding counties (Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland), winning by a nearly 2-to-1 margin combined in both races.

Despite repeatedly making claims of widespread election fraud, both in and out of court, Trump failed to get the election results overturned in Pennsylvania or anywhere else.

“This election was rigged, and we can’t let that happen for our country, and we’ve got to turn this around. We won Pennsylvania by a lot, and we won all those states by a lot,” Trump said in a phone call to Pennsylvania’s Senate Majority Policy Committee more than three weeks after the election.

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