Trump Takes a Chainsaw To Rural America:

The working class base of Donald Trump’s winning 2024 coalition is being screwed most by his policies

Feel free to check the past Biden Era archives and follow the editions to come in the Trump Era on Substack, Medium, and LinkedIn, including those on the 2024 Autopsy, Bench-Building, DOGE News, Project 2025 Authoritarianism, Progressive Populism, and more (First Come, First Serve!).

Via stablediffusionweb.com

Before my main piece, here are some short blog and book recommendations that touch upon similar themes in my past blog posts:

America’s Undoing by Corbin Trent

BIG by Matt Stoller

Lucas’s Substack by Lucas Kunce

Jared’s Substack by Jared Bernstein

Beyond the Whiteboard by 2026 California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter

The Last Bake Sale: The Fight For Fair School Funding by Andru Volinsky

Democracy SOS piece on “Trump Democrats” by Steven Hill

And Zeteo

This piece will actually be on fire, unlike the Houthi Signal Group Chat 🔥 👊 🇺🇸.

Donald Trump would not be President without the massive support of rural voters (though far from being the only ingredient to his reelection bid). According to 2024 CNN Exit Polls, Trump won 63% of rural voters to Kamala Harris’s 36%. That is actually a fairly low number compared to other numbers I’ve seen showing even higher rural support for Trump.

Trump specifically won around 77%-78% of the farm vote, for instance.

They might be having buyer’s remorse about Trump’s victory. Many people did not think Trump would do the things he has now done. Many people thought he was a competent businessman who would fix problems, even if by breaking institutions at first. And while there are genuinely strong supporters of Trump still, enough swing voters are giving second thoughts.

Yes, Trump is hurting his own working class base. Here are all the ways how his party will do so (courtesy in part of The Daily Yonder):

• Elon Musk’s Starlink company gets public funding from the government at the cost of fiber optic cable broadband access layout

• Trump’s executive orders target programs like the Community Development Financial Institutions fund will starve essential rural community banks

• Rural Housing programs fall victim to the DOGE purge within the Department of Agriculture, Department of Housing & Urban Development, and the Rural Development Office

• USAID funding freezes have paused the transportation of American-produced food to malnourished areas globally, which translates to financial losses for farmers

• The Trump Tariffs (especially on Mexico and Canada) serve as a double financial whammy alongside USAID elimination for farmer exports

• Staffing for disaster recovery and relief efforts have seen astronomical declines in recent weeks as a result of the DOGE government purge, with FEMA funding also in question

• The Bureau of Land Management for public lands in the Western United States will be run by longtime oil and gas lobbyist Kathleen Sgamma

• The education policy move toward more charter schools and private school vouchers will disproportionately harm rural public school districts

• Another federal funding freeze at the USDA halted payments to farmers who were eligible for reimbursement for new fencing and renewable energy installation

• Native American tribes would be impacted if birthright citizenship is overturned and ruled unconstitutional by Trump’s Supreme Court

• Funding freezes at the Environmental Protection Agency paralyze solar installation projects in rural communities

• Make no mistake: public transit and railway cuts will impact rural communities as well

• Republicans still block the Railway Safety Act bill 2 years after the disastrous leakage in East Palestine, Ohio

• USPS Privatization threatens lifesaving services for hamstrung communities in economic and social distress

• Cuts to Veterans Services include a gutting of care for rural veterans

• DOGE cuts also risk mine safety centers in places like West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee

• Mass deportations have the potential to gut the entire US food system

• The FTC Commissioner firings puts an end to addressing market consolidation in Rural America

• Lee Zeldin’s EPA policies and rollbacks on environmental safety guardrails means more air and water pollution in coal-afflicted communities

• GOP budget cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) endanger rural communities and economies as a whole, including rural hospitals and households

• Congressional Republicans are additionally seeking to cut the 2025 Farm Bill itself, which would impact more nutrition programs and rural conservation projects

• And here are the Trump first term highlights via Investigate Midwest and Trump Research Book

All of which makes Bernie Sanders’s “Fight Oligarchy” Campaign Tour and Elizabeth Warren’s oversight crusades even more important. What we are witnessing today is a massive transfer in wealth from the bottom to the top, sacrificing Trump’s own base in the process for the luxuries and extravagance of the Elon Musk-Jeff Bezos lifestyle. The American Heartland is being left behind even further than it was.

But as we learned from 2024, it will be up to Democrats to get this message out to the American electorate for the midterms and offer a vision of their own, should Donald Trump not invoke martial law or undermine elections in other ways.

For example, 70% of rural elections should not go uncontested. And if Democrats don’t change that, progressive Independent candidates will have to.

And it is possible. RI’s own State Rep. Megan Cotter won reelection handily in 2024 (8 points to be exact), even as Trump carried her own district in the rural southwestern part of the state, by running on issues like fire prevention, forest management, and behavioral health care access.

So for the Democratic Party, to the DNC leaders out there who may encounter this post, as a favor for yourself, bring some real rural talent along. I already have one recommendation to offer in 40-year rural strategist and opposition researcher Matt Barron, who can help you not get crushed in the non metros. You will not regret it.

RIP Congresswoman Mia Love (1975-2025), passing away from glioblastoma, the cancer that killed John McCain, Beau Biden, and Anastasia Golovashkina

And remember. Check your local election headquarters, because 2025 is going to be a very busy election season (starting with the Wisconsin Supreme Court on April 1).