Bamboozled. Screw Job. Hoodwinked. These are all ways of explaining how President Donald Trump and his swampy one percent oligarchy treats the people who voted for him. Trump’s through-the-looking-glass budget proposal presented on Tuesday cuts everything from food and healthcare assistance to funding for the arts—all to serve robbing the country’s coffers to give the one percent more gold-plated toiletries.
The President’s budget would follow through on a proposal in the administration’s earlier “skinny” budget to defund many regional economic development programs, including the Appalachian Regional Commission.
“The Appalachian Regional Commission has played a pivotal role in creating infrastructure in West Virginia and helping to diversify our economy,” Boettner said. “But the Trump budget zeros it out completely, ends it forever.”
As TIME explains, this is particularly perfect as the historically Republican-leaning region went to Trump in a big way this past November.
The commission is a federal-state partnership that services economic growth in 420 counties across 13 states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Trump won 10 of those states.
Using data from the New York Times, TIME crunched the numbers for the counties included in the ARC, and found that Trump won 95% of them in the presidential election, even the majority of the counties in Virginia, Maryland, and New York — the three states in the ARC Clinton won. Just 20 counties out of 420 voted for Hillary Clinton. In West Virginia, where all counties are part of the ARC, Trump trounced Clinton by 42 points; she did not win a single county.
The people in these areas have very poor and desperate for a rapidly dying economic model of coal. With this budget and with the Republican Party’s movement to end healthcare for people without money, Trump and his Republican Party seem to be hoping that they can kill everyone before they wise up to scam. Trump may be more obviously cruel to his enemies but in the end he’s screwing everybody.