Tucson, Arizona
CNN
—
The Special Eats Café is a work in progress: new gas pipes just installed, the walls ready for a fresh coat of paint, and the kitchen racks stacked with pots and pans for the work ahead.
It is a crucial next chapter for Tamara Varga and her passion project: helping people with special needs, including her two sons. The project includes two food trucks, a sweets shop and soon the restaurant, staffed by workers with autism, Down syndrome and other challenges. The restaurant has 50 workers now; Varga hopes there will be more as the business expands and her restaurant not only serves food but offers kitchen training.
“It is a lot of work,” Varga said as she gave a kitchen tour. But also, this: “It is my passion. And it is my calling. This what I am supposed to be doing, and it fulfills my life, and it blesses me.”
Varga is a devout Christian and a lifelong Republican, a Trump supporter who participated in CNN’s “All Over the Map” project during the 2024 presidential campaign. We revisited with her and others in our Arizona group to get their assessment of the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s new term. Most of the takeaways were not good news for the White House:
Every voter we spoke with, even Trump supporter Vargas, said prices were not dropping as fast as they had hoped.
Trade is critical in this border state, and the turmoil caused by Trump’s erratic tariff threats is hurting business big and small.
Illegal border crossings are down, a big Trump promise kept. But businesses along the border complain legal crossings are down, too, and say their sales have fallen as much as 40% over the past 100 days.
How Trump is going about making changes is raising alarms.
Varga still counts herself as a Trump supporter at 100 days. But her questions about what is happening in Washington are potentially troubling for the White House and the GOP Congress.
“I’m feeling good about a lot of the promises that he made on the campaign, but I am worried about a few things as well,” Varga said in an interview at the Tucson restaurant site. “I’m worried about Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security. He did say that he was not going to cut them. That he was just going to find waste and I really hope that he sticks to that.”
Varga is closely watching the budget debate, knowing Republicans can’t make their math work without find giant savings in those social safety net programs.
“I am not for slashing,” she said. “It’s important because we need to take care of people with disabilities and our elderly and those that depend on it. And they can’t survive as it is right now. We cannot cut.”
Asked if she is confident Trump will keep his promise not to cut Social Security and Medicare, Varga said: “I worry about it, but I’m hopeful.”
Varga said her cost of living is “down a little bit” but added “there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done.” The constant tariff threats are now part of the problem, she said.
“It is causing some disruption,” Varga said. “We make gift baskets, and I have noticed that the items we put in our gift baskets have gone up.”
For now, she takes the president as his word when he says any pain is necessary to fix broken trade relationships. “If he doesn’t come through, though, he’s going to have a lot of people turning on him.”
Some other notable shifts from our conversations with Varga before the 2024 election:
She no longer believes Trump’s claim the 2020 election was rigged.
She is open to supporting Democrats for local office because of her disappointment with some Arizona Republicans.
She disagrees with friends who call Trump a dictator or question whether he is a good person. But some complaints ring true. “Sometimes I agree,” Varga said. “And things better change or he’s going to lose me, even.”
Melissa Cordero is an Air Force veteran and liberal Democrat — a progressive organizer still trying to understand what went wrong in November.
“We just have to get meaner,” Cordero said.
The scope of change in the past 100 days has Cordero feeling a bit dizzy.
“I’m constantly going, ‘Can he do that?’” she said.
Cordero’s life has been affected by the new administration in a number of ways. She and other members of a progressive veterans group, Common Defense, recently visited a group of deported veterans in Juárez, Mexico. She says she just lost a modest conservation grant from the National Science Foundation because it was part of a DEI program. She noted that her parents, both veterans, are worried about losing their federal jobs. And she took part Thursday in a Tucson protest over Trump’s cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“There’s no one answering the phones,” she said. “Mental health, just cutting, making cuts in that area. That’s what all of us veterans need the most.”
Cordero is a mix of exhausted and energized as Trump angers her and she tries to improve her organizing work.
“I’m angry because the communities I care most about are being attacked,” Cordero said. “Ther LGBTQ community, the trans community. What’s really got me angry is immigration and what’s happening to deported veterans.”
Tucson is in reliably blue Pima County, though Trump did run a bit stronger there in 2024 as he won Arizona and swept the battlegrounds.
Rio Rico is about an hour south in Santa Cruz County, which abuts the Mexico border. Trump won 32% of the vote there in 2020; 40% in 2024. But the tariff turmoil is battering the local economy.
“It’s a brave new world,” said Matt Mandel, an executive at SunFed, a major food distributor with a giant warehouse a few miles from the Nogales border crossing. Every product in the warehouse was from Mexico. It was humming with activity when we visited, forklifts buzzing by to lift pallets of vegetables from refrigerated storage rooms and whiz them to waiting trucks.
“The biggest problem we have up to now is uncertainty,” Mandel said in an interview. “We have talk about tariffs, and then the tariffs are off. We have tariffs. They came into play for three days. They were canceled. But the constant threat of ‘what if’ makes it very hard for us to plan”
Mandel shares Trump’s goal of boosting American manufacturing capacity. But he does not understand threats to tariff the carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes and other products making a pitstop here between farm and table.
“Food does not make sense (to tariff) at all,” Mandel said. “All you are going to do is raise those costs to consumers. People have become accustomed to having all their fruits and vegetables on a year-round basis, and that is entirely due to imports. So putting tariffs on imports is only going to either limit supply, raise prices or both.”
Ray Flores sees the tariff turmoil in his bottom line: He owns more than a dozen restaurants, from upscale venues like Charro Steak to the more casual The Monica, named after Tía Monica, a Flores aunt who inspired the first of the restaurants, El Charro, more than 100 years ago.
“We’re definitely seeing less spending,” Flores said. “We’re seeing numbers dropping 7-8% around the system right now, and we have stores at different price points.”
The constant tariffs talk is rattling consumer confidence.
“There’s a little apprehension to go celebrate, right?” is how Flores put it. “There’s some fear of spending that extra money out.”
Flores is a true independent disgusted with both national parties. He does agree with some Trump priorities, including cutting government spending and deporting the undocumented who can be credibly linked to criminal activity.
“But I’m a little bewildered about how they have gone about things,” Flores said in an interview. “It seems a bit haphazard.”
Flores sees too much impulse and emotion, not enough planning and collaboration.
On a scale of 1 to 10, he scores the first 100 days a 5.
So what about the next 100 days?
“I don’t want to see it get worse, right? I don’t want to have that aggressive, somewhat mean-spirited decision-making take root in everything we do. But I also don’t want to crash. So, for me — in the middle — I hope it gets better. … If we could end up at a 7 it would be really nice.”
