Americans are not really so different, nor should we divided. We are all being hurt in different ways, as Trump carries out the Heritage Foundation agenda, Project 2025.
Resist, protest and read Paul Krugman’s analysis of the State of our Union. Understanding of each other’s differences and pain is crucial for our survival. United we stand!
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Argentina and Rural America’s Awakening
Suddenly, Trump’s contempt for his base is showing
OCT 23READ IN APP
Is rural America starting to fall out of love with Donald Trump?
Policy wonks like me have spent decades pointing out that if rural Americans voted based on their informed self-interest, they would be supporting Democrats, not Republicans. Republicans are constantly trying to eviscerate Democrat-supported programs that benefited rural states like Medicaid spending, SNAP (the supplementary nutrition program formerly known as food stamps), and school lunches. Trump is also cutting subsidies for green energy programs like solar farms and wind turbines – subsidies that disproportionately went to red states. Iowa gets 63 percent of its electricity from wind!
Moreover, these programs in effect subsidize rural areas with dollars earned in urban areas: because rural areas have lower incomes than urban areas, rural Americans pay relatively little of the taxes that finance these programs. So Democratic “big government” is highly beneficial to the heartland.
Yet economic self-interest has been swamped by “rural consciousness.” This consciousness rests on a belief that highly educated urban elites don’t understand or value rural culture and rural lives. And I will admit that this belief contains a grain of truth. Urban elites are unlikely to fully understand the attachment of rural Americans to a particular place and its time-worn rhythms of life. Ensconced in salaried jobs, urban dwellers are unfamiliar with the constant anxiety of being a farmer or a small business owner in the heartland. Decades of being battered by the economic changes — deindustrialization, farm consolidation and corporatization, depopulation, loss of community ties, along with the loss of jobs, particularly “male-coded” jobs – have left rural Americans feeling adrift, marginalized and resentful.
And this created an opening to be exploited by the right wing. Much like how Trump peddled fantasies of a manufacturing resurgence or the return of coal-mining jobs, MAGA leveraged the deep discontent within rural America to inculcate the belief that only Republicans, and Trump in particular, respect rural voters. But this is false: MAGA actually holds its most loyal voters in contempt.
And the reality of this contempt is starting to show through — not, at least so far, via the One Big Beautiful Bill’s savage cuts to health care, which will be especially devastating to rural areas, but via the Trump administration’s bizarre fixation on aiding President Javier Milei of Argentina.
The truth is that rural America is even more dependent than urban America on the programs now on the chopping block. The nonpartisan Economic Innovation Group has mapped out where in America people depend for a large share of their income on government transfers: the counties where a lot of income comes from government programs, indicated in yellow, are overwhelmingly in rural areas, while the places where such aid plays a relatively small role (light blue) mainly correspond to major metropolitan areas:
Why has rural America become increasingly dependent on government aid? The main answer is declining economic opportunity, which has led to an exodus of young people, leaving behind an older population that relies on Social Security and Medicare. Even younger rural residents have low incomes that make them eligible for mean-tested programs, above all Medicaid and food stamps.
There shouldn’t be any shame about the fact that rural America is subsidized by more affluent parts of the nation. That is, after all, what a national social safety net is supposed to do. But it should make rural voters oppose politicians who support Project 2025-type plans to rip up that safety net, which will deeply impoverish already poor regions and degrade life even for those not personally receiving aid — for example, by leading to the closure of many rural hospitals, making health care