YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio >> “Is this idiot for Trump?” Mark Wasko asked, his voice booming across the parking lot of an out-of-business supermarket.

It was a late weekday morning in a troubled, shrinking Rust Belt city that is fed up with being known as a troubled, shrinking Rust Belt city. The man Wasko was calling an idiot — perhaps seriously, or playfully, or both — was his friend Vincent Archangelo Strines.

Wasko, 48, had seen Strines, 55, a beefy blond man with a pack of cigarillos in his breast pocket, sitting behind a folding table and selling raffle tickets to support his nonprofit addiction recovery organization. So Wasko had parked his big soda truck in the lot and hopped out. He was appalled to learn that his friend, normally a Democratic voter, was now supporting Donald Trump.

He looked Strines in the eye. “You’re an idiot,” he declared.

So began a particularly spirited variant of the big argument currently consuming Youngstown: Does Trump, a Manhattan billionaire, really deserve to be the voice of the beleaguered American working class? It is a question of almost existential importance in a city where the steel industry’s demise was so dramatic that Bruce Springsteen wrote a bitter ballad about it. To many, Trump’s blunt language and swaggering persona feel familiar and welcome, and ring true.

Youngstown is the kind of blue-collar Midwestern stronghold where Trump’s struggling campaign must make a strong showing, particularly among white voters, if he is to have any chance of winning the presidential election. Broaching the topic of Trump on a street corner or bar stool here — and thus delving into matters of race, economics, immigration and the still-painful matter of the city’s disintegration — can be a volatile business.

“If you want to punch me in the face, do it,” Strines dared Wasko casually, after about 15 minutes of debate that played out under a billboard for a nearby adult novelty store called Sassy Sensations and touched on all of those issues.

Cars whooshed up and down Mahoning Avenue, past businesses shuttered or struggling, and past tired residential side streets now considered “food deserts” since the grocery store, a Sparkle Market, closed down about four years ago. Youngstown, a city of about 65,000 people, is about 60 percent smaller than it was in 1960. Decades ago, blacks, Irish, Italians and Eastern Europeans came to work among the great blast furnaces of the old mills. When those businesses closed between 1977 and 1982, tens of thousands lost their jobs.

Youngstown, as Springsteen noted in his 1995 song of the same name, once produced the iron and steel to fight America’s wars. It has also produced the boxing great Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, a passion for high school football that rivals West Texas’, a tradition of political corruption — mostly the work of Democrats — and a long history, recently somewhat diminished, of mafia control. It is the rare small city whose past is dotted with car bombings, mob hits and characters with names like Moosey, Fats, Big Ernie and Brier Hill Jimmy.

Today there are still some metal industry and manufacturing jobs. There is a big General Motors plant north of town that produces the small Chevrolet Cruze sedan. There is a maximum-security prison that opened in 1998. There is a business incubator, focused on re-imagining Youngstown as a hub for software and 3-D printing.

In addition, there are signs of recovery from the Great Recession: The unemployment rate, which peaked at nearly 17 percent in January 2010, stood at 7.6 percent in June.

There is also a widespread belief that Trump is right when he says that the United States must renegotiate the terms of its trade with the world.

Strines said that he worked for years as a quality assurance superintendent in the aluminum business, making good money until health issues related to his drinking problem forced him to retire. In that time, he said, he saw many businesses go under because China could produce aluminum for a fraction of what it cost U.S. companies. He is hoping Trump will institute more protective tariffs.

“I think he could bring the economy back,” he said. “He’s a take-charge kind of guy.”

Wasko huffed. He doubted that Trump would follow through on any of his promises. What about the border wall? Trump was never going to get Mexico to pay for that, he said. And anyhow, wasn’t America great already?

Strines said: “You think America is great? Come look for a job in Youngstown.”

On a Monday earlier this month, Trump visited Youngstown State University, where he delivered a foreign policy address in which he promised a more forceful response to what he called “radical Islamic terrorism.” Among those in the invitation-only crowd was Donald Skowron, a retired police officer active in the local Republican Party. On his phone, Skowron showed off photos in which he stood beside the road with big signs, meant for Democrats, that read, “CROSS OVER” and “VOTE TRUMP.” He said 19 of 20 drivers responded with a thumbs-up. “The last one,” he said, extending his middle finger — “I get those.”

Wendy Aron, 58, emerged from the speech energized. She was once a supporter of President Barack Obama but was dismayed by the weakness of the post-recession recovery. Her housecleaning business in the Youngstown suburb of Boardman has shrunk, going from a dozen employees to a two-person operation: her and her daughter. Working people, she said, don’t have the money to pay for maid service anymore.

Many of her close friends remain Democrats. “They just put me down,” she said. “I don’t want to even talk to them.”

Gayle Hite, an employee at a hospital, and her husband, Joseph, were not invited to the speech, but got as close to it as they could, waiting outside a campus building with her wearing a “Make America Great Again” T-shirt.

She is a longtime Republican, but her husband, who usually votes Democrat, was planning to vote for Trump this year. They had watched Trump slog through a tough couple of weeks, taking criticism for, among other things, his feud with the family of a slain Muslim American soldier. But what some saw as gaffes were, to Joseph Hite, proof that Trump was a true change agent.

“He’s not bought or sold by anybody,” said Joseph Hite, a retired corrections officer. “He can say what he wants.”

These days Joseph Hite, 64, receives a Social Security check, but he said he worried about the ways in which a volatile world might bankrupt the government. What would it cost to absorb Syrian refugees? And the immigrants coming across the Mexican border?

The couple had watched “Conspiracy Theory,” the cable television show hosted by the onetime professional wrestler and governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura. They were worried about the Bilderberg conference, the yearly, secretive meeting of bankers and policymakers.

“It shows we’re not really running our country,” Gayle Hite said. “Sometimes I don’t believe our vote counts.”

In Springsteen’s song “Youngstown,” the narrator, a laid-off mill worker, wishes for a future not in heaven but in “the fiery furnaces of hell.” The character was inspired, in part, by a real steelworker, Joe Marshall Jr., whom Springsteen had read about in a book.

Today Marshall, a small, sturdy man, who turns 63 on Saturday, can be found in Columbus, Ohio, living in a $500 apartment and drawing a full state pension. After the steel industry fell apart, he pursued a life in law enforcement. He is an ardent Trump supporter.

“He says what the average person is afraid to say because it’s politically incorrect,” Marshall said about Trump.

Marshall worked at the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office for 23 years, at the jail and on patrol — a front-row seat, he said, to the city’s dramatic decline. He watched as the professional classes emptied out, and as the city’s complexion changed: Youngstown, 74 percent white in 1970, is now about evenly divided between blacks and whites.

Drugs came in, he said. The murder rate soared. Young people were dropping out of school at 15 years of age, Marshall said, because they didn’t see what kinds of work a degree would get them.

“Where are they going to go, Taco Bell?” he asked. “That’s minimum-wage jobs.”

Seven years ago, he moved away, taking a job as a corrections officer. Today, his political views are eclectic. The Democrats, he said, “failed Youngstown”: During the steel days, they were the party of overbearing regulations, the ones who told management that they couldn’t open a second blast furnace. “That’s jobs they took away,” he said.

But Marshall also had harsh words for Gov. John Kasich, a Republican. During Kasich’s tenure, he said, “it’s just been cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts” to the benefits of state employees like him. “He tried to take away our collective bargaining rights,” he said.

On Facebook, Marshall’s posts extol the beauty of mixed-race families, and the contributions of blacks to the country’s culture. But he is wary of the big mosque in his neighborhood and suspects Muslims there of planning an attack. The Democrats, he said, seem indifferent to whites.

“Believe me, as Jesus Christ is my lord and savior, I’m not prejudiced or anything,” he said. “But it seems if you’re a minority, they help you out a lot more than if you’re white.”

In Trump, Marshall sees echoes of the man who hired him to be a deputy, James A. Traficant Jr., the sheriff at the time. Traficant would later become a Democratic congressman and Northeast Ohio’s most emblematic politician, until his expulsion from Congress in 2002 after a bribery conviction. (Traficant died in 2014 after a tractor fell on him.)

“He was a good guy,” Marshall said of Traficant, who had hired him personally. “I remember he told me, ‘You screw up, Marshall, I’ll kill you.’”

Like Trump, Traficant, who went by the nickname Jimbo, annoyed and defied members of both parties, dished out scathing personal insults, blasted Washington insiders and purported to speak for the average Joe. He proposed sending troops to secure the Mexican border and criticized free trade. He even sported a flamboyant and gravity-defying hairdo, though it proved to be a toupee.

Back in Youngstown, the fondness for Traficant lingers despite allegations that he was tied to the mob.

“Well, the whole city was like that,” said Kathy Miller, the Trump campaign coordinator for Mahoning County. She said it was difficult to agree with everything Traficant did, just as it is with Trump. But she said that Traficant’s constituent services were unparalleled.

“Jimbo got it taken care of,” she said.

Out in the parking lot, Strines seconded the praise. “He just told it the way it was, and I think Trump is the same type of guy as Traficant,” he said.

Strines even asserted that Youngstown had been a better, safer place when the mob was in control. So it would be, he said, in Trump’s America.

Once upon a time, he said, everybody in Youngstown knew that if someone messed up and failed to follow certain rules, “that’s where the mob would step in.”

“That’s where Trump would step in,” he said. “Once somebody’s got fear, like Iraq will have, like China will have,” he said, the world will grow calmer. “All of those illegal aliens better pack up their toothbrushes and start running.”

Wasko wasn’t buying it: “So let’s instill fear in everyone in America,” he said sarcastically.

“No,” Strines said, “only the bad ones, man.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company