The white rural reckoning
Trump is betraying the very voters who put him back in power.
This article is co-authored by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. Their book “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy” will be released in paperback later this month. Schaller is professor of political science at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Waldman is a columnist for MSNBC; his Substack newsletter is The Cross Section.
After our book, “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” hit shelves in February of last year, we made a wager: Tom bet that Donald Trump’s support among rural white voters had peaked in 2020, and Paul predicted Trump would further increase his white rural support in 2024.
Alas, Paul looks to be the winner. While the final tallies are not yet in, the AP Votecast shows that Trump’s overall rural support increased by three points from 2020 to 2024, and about three-quarters of rural residents are white. Those numbers indicate he’s pushed up his ceiling among rural voters each of the three cycles he’s been on the ballot.
More than 100 days into his second term, however, Trump’s policies are starting to wreak havoc on the very rural white citizens who have been his most loyal geo-demographic voting base. If they voted for Trump last year hoping he’d make their lives better, they’re quickly finding out they made a mistake.
Farm policy
Given the damage of Trump’s first-term agriculture tariffs, rural American farmers may have forfeited the right to express surprise or dismay about what’s happening to them — again.
Despite Trump’s “trade wars are easy to win” bluster, farmers learned the hard way in 2018 and 2019 how easily those wars are lost, especially when the primary combatant is China. After Beijing reciprocated by retaliating against Trump’s tariffs with its own on US farm exports in Trump’s first term, American farming losses and bankruptcies quickly mounted. Trump had to authorize $28 billion in farm bailouts to make up for the damage farmers endured.
This time around, the cost of Trump’s chaotic trade policy to farmers is magnified by three factors.
The first is Trump’s wildly chaotic imposition of tariffs, which complicate farmers’ crop decisions. Unpredictable tariff policies create uncertainties for any affected industry, of course. But unlike a car bumper or a computer chip, fruits and vegetables are perishable. Farmers unable to make informed short-term or seasonal decisions inevitably suffer irreversible losses. (Sadly, as Grist reports, unpredictable tariff rates also increase food waste at a time when an estimated 14 million American children — many of them rural — live in food insecure homes.) Manufacturers of farm machines are also handcuffed by uncertain trade policies, which are likely to curb industry revenues and cause layoffs.
The second factor is shrinking demand caused by the administration’s reckless DOGE cuts. The dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been devastating for people around the world who relied on American aid, but has hurt American farmers, too. The shuttering of USAID programs threatens the roughly $2 billion in food that the USDA purchases annually from American farmers to supply USAID aid programs that feed starving people around the globe. Those purchases have stopped, leaving crops sitting in storage with no one to buy them. Large-scale farmers in Texas and Virginia are already taking a hit.
As it did in his first term, Trump’s trade wars inevitably produce retaliatory tariffs on American agricultural products, further drying up the market for ag exports, especially to China, which bought $12.8 billion worth of American soybeans last year. Although Trump bailed out farmers for the devastation from his (far smaller) first-term tariffs, it is not certain whether he will do so again; libertarians like Reason magazine’s Eric Boehm are already calling for a no-bailout policy.
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Finally, Trump is coupling tariffs with a deportation policy that will remove an untold number of migrant farm workers whose cheap, irreplaceable labor supply keeps food prices low. As Sandro Steinbach, director of the Center for Agricultural Policy and Trade Studies at North Dakota State University, told The Atlantic before Trump took office, “Any of those [tariff and deportation] policies will be pretty painful in the short run for rural America.”
Coal and extractive industries
Few regions voted for Donald Trump with more enthusiasm than coal country, a land of broken Trump promises.
Since 2016, Trump has repeatedly claimed he’d bring back all the coal jobs that have disappeared, but he has never delivered. He recently brought a group of coal miners to the White House for a photo op to announce a pair of executive orders meant to promote coal.
“We're bringing back an industry that was abandoned despite the fact that it was just about the best,” Trump said. “We're going to tap that magnificent potential to give our people the glorious future that they deserve, better than they've ever had in the past.”
Trump was so proud of himself that at a fundraiser soon after, he told wealthy donors not to worry about his gullible supporters getting a different kind of job.
“They love to dig coal,” he said. “That's what they want to do. They don't want to do gidgets and widgets and gadgets. They don't want to build cell phones with their hands. They're big strong hands.”
Coal is in a long and inexorable decline, but the miners who are left need the government’s help — help Trump is withdrawing.
Trump and Elon Musk are gutting the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, which helps protect miners from black lung disease, an often fatal ailment that has been resurgent in recent years. The administration also paused a regulation established under the Biden administration to limit miners’ exposure to silica dust, a major cause of black lung. And DOGE is planning to close dozens of Mine Safety and Health Administration field offices.
Schools and libraries
Because more than two-thirds of rural counties lost population between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, rural schools are shrinking if not closing. Many of the K-12 schools that have survived are severely under-resourced.
Among its duties, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) tracks beleaguered schools and targets them for federal support. NCES helps determine which struggling, under-funded rural schools need federal subsidies through the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP). These monies provide salary, supply, and technology support to rural schools so small they graduate as few as 10 seniors per year.
Yet according to NPR, all but three of the 100 people NCES employs have been put on administrative leave and will eventually be terminated. For the moment, REAP has been spared DOGE’s fiscal sword. But rural education advocates are worried. NCES employees told NPR that, although REAP grant monies for the 2025-2026 school year are safe, “the fate of these grants beyond that seems incredibly uncertain.”
Trump also slashed funding for universities that serve rural areas and attacked a teacher training program that aids rural schools, which suffer chronic teacher shortages. He’s looking to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provides vital support to rural libraries.
The poor and minorities
Look at any program serving Americans with low or moderate incomes that Trump is trying to cut or eliminate, and you’ll likely find a particularly harsh impact on rural areas.
For instance, the administration is seeking to end Head Start, which supports thousands of child care centers around the country. According to a recent report from the Center for American Progress, “Head Start programs represented 22 percent of the overall child care slots in rural communities, including available home-based care. Approximately 46 percent of all funded Head Start slots are in rural congressional districts, compared with 32 percent in suburban districts and 22 percent in urban districts; and 96 percent of rural congressional districts have at least one Head Start grantee, compared with 83 percent of suburban districts and 81 percent of urban districts. Without Head Start, many rural communities would have no licensed child care center.”
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Rural areas are also being gutted by the administration’s relentless effort to eliminate any program that might give assistance to minorities of any kind, under the guise of rooting out “DEI.” At the Environmental Protection Agency, the administration has moved to cancel environmental justice programs, which includes fighting pollution in rural areas.
But the most devastating effects of Trump 2.0 policies will be felt by rural folks who depend upon Medicaid support to subsidize their health treatments and keep rural hospitals from financial ruin. As Kevin Stansbury, chief executive of a rural Colorado hospital, fretted in a recent New York Times op-ed, Trump’s proposed Medicaid cuts will almost certainly add to the nearly 200 rural hospitals that shuttered during the past two decades.
Why? Because those welfare-hating, Obamacare-opposing white rural voters are more dependent on Medicaid-subsidized health insurance.
“[R]ural hospitals will be particularly affected … because rural patients are more likely to have health coverage from the government than from commercial insurers,” Stansbury notes.
Informational literacy and broadband access
Many rural areas are “news deserts,” where local papers have shut down and there are few options for local news — except for the nearest NPR station. As NOTUS explains, “Because rural stations have smaller audiences, they receive fewer donations and rely more on federal funds than stations based in major cities.”
Trump signed an executive order targeting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which provides support to PBS and NPR, and is asking congressional Republicans to cut off funding completely. While CPB funds provide just a small portion of the budget for the national news organizations, those funds are critical to local stations.
The administration is also looking to sabotage rural residents’ access to reliable, affordable broadband internet. Under Joe Biden, Congress appropriated tens of billions of dollars to connect every American with broadband, a particular challenge in far-flung rural areas. The funding contains a preference for fiber connections, reliable infrastructure that creates jobs during its installation and acts as a draw for residents and businesses.
But now the administration is looking to change the rules to allow Elon Musk’s Starlink to get a big piece of the pie. If they do what they’ve threatened, many rural people will be left with only the option to pay high rates for the same mediocre internet they can get from Musk today; taxpayers will hand him billions of dollars to ensure nothing more than “capacity” in his satellite system.
Environment, forests, and national parks
Rural America’s greatest natural assets are its pristine, bucolic settings — places where rural and non-rural Americans alike go to fish, swim, hike, and hunt. But Trump is more focused on allowing private foresters to log our national forests and seems to care little about conserving either rural environments or the countless federal agency jobs rural conservationists hold.
The administration’s slashing of Forest Service funds will have a disparate impact on rural citizens who work for the service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service. As one forestry advocate told Politico, “It’s hard to imagine a more effective roadmap for undermining rural communities and the farmers, families and individuals who call them home.”
Proposed cuts to the National Park Service budget will affect more than 350 national park sites. An estimated 1,000 park service employees or interns were terminated by an executive order Trump signed just days after taking office, many of them surely rural residents, given where remote parks are located.
Rural reawakening
Paul was correct in the short term about rural support for Donald Trump ticking up. But might Tom be proven right over time?
A stunning PBS/NPR/Marist poll released earlier this month showed Trump’s support in rural America since taking office cratering. His February approval rating of 59 percent — a figure that includes both Trump-loving white rural citizens and far less supportive non-white rural citizens — fell 19 points to just 40 percent.
Given the limited number of rural residents in all but the biggest national surveys, that poll could be an outlier. But it suggests doubts may be emerging in the places where Trump got his strongest support — and which are now being punished for believing that he actually cared about them.
It took three presidential election cycles, but perhaps rural Americans are beginning to realize that Making America Great Again is only going to make their lives far worse.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
I live in a red and rural state that put a convicted felon back into the highest office in the land. And while I appreciate the analysis—it’s spot on—I have no confidence that rural voters are recognizing the betrayal or would even vote differently today.
Keep in mind very low rates of education, high rates of poverty and the difficulty of recognizing a mistake given the sea of misinformation they consume ala FAUX news. It is really hard to admit to a mistake—their whole world view is bound up in this shit and like a religious fanatic confronted with evidence that runs counter to those beliefs, it’s far easier to dismiss counter evidence and cling to that belief. I’m not slamming anyone for their right to worship as they see fit, I’m just pointing out that it’s easier to blot out or ignore anything that runs counter to those beliefs than to change them and the same is true for political beliefs.
This is a land of misogyny and racism and though they would never admit it, it’s fear of the other and the different that motivates them. Fear—whether it is reasonable or unreasonable—overwhelms and overpowers the most valuable qualities of human nature: compassion, empathy, curiosity, long-term thinking, and restraint on the use of force and violence. Fear comes with an urgency that eliminates the appraisal of fact or evidence.
Many of the people in this state are afraid to drive in the state’s largest community of under 200,000 people—let alone go to say Minneapolis. The same level of fear allowed our ancestors to annihilate the native Americans whose land we stole when this state was founded. Again, most of these people are good people. They would lend a hand to a neighbor. They love and support their children and grandchildren, they contribute to good causes, but levels of engagement necessary to understand politics, is shockingly low.
Take that largest city for example, fewer thant three percent of eligible voters just elected people to a school board responsible for a budget of over 320 million dollars. That’s typical, so no, I don’t think folks in this state are either capable or ready to admit they might be worse off now—in a few weeks when we begin to absorb more of the price increases caused by their choice for president and putting food on the table becomes exponentially more difficult, they will feel that pain or if they lose their medicaid or medicare or social security, but it won’t change their minds.
I am not surprised that many rural farmers supported Trump, as I noted many Trump signs in rural Indiana and rural Michigan in the fall before the election. They seemed to remember the check he sent them but not that he was responsible for their needing the check in the first place. Rare indeed was the Harris Walz sign. Most of the signs are now gone, but a few still remain. On the road to Warsaw, a particularly rabid Trump supporter's house is still decked out, including a new flag (likely made in China) with Trump pictured after the assassination attempt with the words, "Legends Never Die." After the election, the house also had a homemade sign: "Communism has been defeated again."
Meanwhile, a local farmer, here in rural Indiana, who did not vote for Trump, is struggling after Trump froze the money from year two of a three-year federal grant that required the farmer to spend the money, then be reimbursed. That is $7000, which is significant for anyone, particularly for a small farm. Who expects the federal government to default?