Another day, another story about a rural community, or to be specific, the Trump-supporting white portions of it, still supporting Trump despite it being manifestly bad for them. This time it's Bloomberg making the trip, and this time we're going to Clay County, Kentucky, which, like a great many other rural areas, never recovered much from the Great Recession and has not much in the way of future opportunities on the horizon. The county gets a great deal of assistance from the federal Department of Agriculture. The county is going to be extremely screwed by steep cuts to that department and to food stamps, which are among Team Trump's 2019 priorities.
Cuts to food stamps would be “catastrophic,’’ says [county social services supervisor Karrie] Gay. “We have a lot of clients who have no income. That’s their only source of food.’’
And yes, there is a diner mentioned in the piece. There is always a diner mentioned in the piece.
If this were a New York Times article, there would be at least one paragraph in which a Trump supporter says something shamelessly racist, but which is presented without comment from the intrepid journalist who has braved as much as thirty minutes of non-Interstate travel to put a magnifying glass to the locals. We don't get any insight into just why the locals here voted for Trump by 87 percent; it's not clear whether the question was even asked of them.
What we are given instead is the hypothesis of an Iowa State political scientist, who speculates that, rather than expecting a damn thing from those they vote for, many in Trump-supporting rural counties are explicitly voting for the arsonist just to make sure everyone else gets burned as badly as they do.
A lot of Trump’s rural supporters “don’t sound as if they expect to get anything out of the administration,’’ says [David Andersen]. Feeling abandoned, they just want to “destroy the system overall,’’ he says -– and Trump was “the first candidate in a very long time’’ to explicitly feed such resentments.
Is that a fair assessment? Probably. It's not much different from the message of Saint Ronald Reagan, when it comes down to it: The federal government that you all rely upon for getting by on a day-to-day basis is Bad, and the more of it we can strip from your lives, the better off you will be, because Reasons. He, too, premised much of it on racism, imagining black "welfare queens" siphoning away the monies of his white base. He was eager to surround himself in the tics and mythologies of rural America as a marketing gimmick, even as his administration aggressively ignored their actual needs.
"Burn it all down" has been the Republican Party mantra ever since, championed by deficit hawks and pseudo-wonks like the now-fleeing Paul Ryan, all orchestrated so that wealthy Americans can pay far less in taxes than they did a few decades ago.
It's likely that Clay County, Kentucky, is going to be absolutely hammered by the current federal government shutdown; most rural places are vulnerable due to the outsized role of federal agencies in funding and managing the awkward details of rural life. We can't expect it to change many minds; the notion that government is Bad Because Reasons is carved into a great many Republican souls, and a government shutdown that sabotages what services the county does rely on may only be seen as further proof that such reliance was a bad idea to begin with, even as the money dries up and families go hungry.
But if even one mind in twenty begins reconsidering the wisdom of burning the federal government down out of spite, you never know: The Clay Counties of the nation may yet begin to waver.