YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Bob Wilson was coming of age when sulfur stung the night sky and the valley glowed with molten steel. Scarfers hissed, slag cooled, unions marched like armies and train tracks knew no rust. Weeks were flush with paychecks and promises in a potent vision of America that would vanish before Wilson stepped too far into manhood.

“You could watch it all from a bridge,” said Wilson, an auto mechanic. “Hot ladles and steel and men working. Then it was gone.”

Bruce Springsteen immortalized the nobility of men who once stood before the furnaces and the betrayals of a collapsing steel industry. His 1995 song “Youngstown,” a poetic elegy in a vast working-class canon, is still revered by the city that inspired it.

But many of the machinists, miners and laborers who embody Springsteen's lyrics from the Rust Belt to the Appalachian coal fields have turned to the swagger of Donald Trump in a long-denied bid for redemption. Springsteen's politics may have stayed liberal, but economic decline, foreign competition, crime and abandoned mills have turned many in Youngstown — notably blue-collar white men — toward the right-wing, isolationist politics of a billionaire reality-TV show star.

“I call it the pissed-off steelworkers party. A lot of people like someone who causes trouble. That's why Trump is so popular,” Wilson said. “Why am I voting for him? He's not Hillary Clinton. You know, my entire adult life I've been voting for the lesser of two evils.”

A little farther down the Mahoning River, Bill Skinner climbed down from polishing the top of his truck and told the ragman he'd pay him something next week. He pulled off his gloves, lighted a cigarette and railed that Muslims want to impose Islamic law, political correctness imperils masculinity and jobs keep dying or getting sent to Mexico or China.

“Steel is wiped out, and Obama is wiping out the coal and mining industries. Hillary wants to finish what he started. Our country is $20 trillion in debt. America has gone from the toilet to the sewer,” he said. “Hillary and anyone connected to her should be in jail. If anyone's going to stop this nonsense, it's a guy from the outside.”

Springsteen is a progressive who campaigned relentlessly for President Barack Obama. In a recent interview with British television, he called Trump “a con man” and a “flagrant, toxic narcissist.” But he acknowledged that much of the nation — like characters in his songs — feels battered by Wall Street and abandoned by the Democratic and Republican parties.

“You have 30 to 40 years of de-industrialization and globalization of the economy, so there are a lot of people who were left out of that,” Springsteen said. “Voices have been fundamentally ignored and not heard. These are folks who feel Donald Trump has been listening to them and speaks for them on some level.”

Springsteen's song “Youngstown” tells of working men forsaken by corporations and foreign competition that cost the city more than 40,000 manufacturing jobs after “Black Monday” in 1977: “From the Monongahela Valley/ To the Mesabi iron range/ To the coal mines of Appalachia/ The story's always the same/ Seven hundred tons of metal a day/ Now, sir, you tell me the world's changed/ Once I made you rich enough/ Rich enough to forget my name.”

Such indignities represent Trump's wellspring among the bitter and bewildered sons and grandsons of European immigrants who prospered during America's industrial age. Trump has fallen behind in the polls, but his protective trade policies, law-and-order promises and anti-immigration rhetoric of walls and deportations have resonated in Ohio. In Mahoning County, a traditional Democratic bastion that includes Youngstown, the number of Republican voters more than doubled to about 36,000 after the March primary.

“Trump says stuff that is coarse and rough-and-tumble like we are. Closing the borders and stopping (Islamic State) is enough for some people,” said Dan Rivers, a conservative radio talk show host on WKBN-AM in Youngstown. Rivers noted a number of Trump's comments, especially about women, have been “indefensible … but even with all his faults, I believe he's better than Hillary Clinton, and that's the sentiment of the audience.”

Of Springsteen, he said, “Bruce supports a lot of liberal causes, but conservatives give him a pass. He's an icon. He's done so much good. They think he's a true working-class guy.”

Youngstown's population has fallen from more than 166,000 in 1950 to about 65,000 today. Unemployment is about 7.5 percent, much higher than the national average but down from 13 percent in 2011. Poverty is persistent

“Springsteen sang about hardship and misery, and it hasn't gotten any better,” said Bill Slanina, a retired city asbestos inspector who is one of more than 6,000 Democrats in the county expected to vote for Trump. “We haven't had the uplift I would have hoped for. Trump wants to make America great again. I guess everyone gets on their milk crate and makes promises. He's worth a try.”

Wilson stood amid the tools, compressors and grime of his trade. He sat in an old chair near a particle board pinned with the yellowed obituaries of steelworker friends.

“A good part of Youngstown is a welfare state now,” he said. “I've got houses full of idiots around me. No one goes to work. But they never run out of money for dope or malt liquor. That kind of irks me.”

Much of that resentment has been imposed by larger forces. The song “Youngstown” is from the 1995 album “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” a sober meditation on how changing economies laid waste to America's manufacturing regions. It also traces the parallel struggles faced by immigrants trying to find their ways in a new and suspicious land. They are the same issues Trump has ignited with his campaign, but Springsteen, unlike the candidate, praises diversity.

“We are a nation of immigrants and no one knows who's coming across our borders today, whose story might add a significant page to our American story,” he writes in his autobiography. “Here in the early years of our new century, as at the turn of the last, we are once again at war with our ‘new Americans.'?”

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com