President Donald Trump is giddy about his tacky “gold card” visa program, his face plastered on the card like it's some third-world strongman souvenir. As Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick explained on Fox News, “Why shouldn’t we take in the top of the top? And that’s what President Trump is thinking—let’s bring in the best people to help America.”
That’s all Trump cares about: the “top of the top,” the wealthy and powerful. Those are the “best people.” Not the sad sacks who voted for him last election. And his voters are finally starting to find that out.
Take Westernport, Maryland. The town voted for Trump by roughly 40 percentage points last year, even as the rest of the state went heavily Democratic. But when Westernport was slammed by severe flooding over the summer, its FEMA disaster-relief application was denied by the Trump administration, which has actively unraveled the agency. (However, being Trump, he might’ve changed his mind on that recently.)
This is the same administration that loudly attacked the former Biden administration’s response to Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina during last year’s campaign, claiming it was inadequate. It wasn’t. Now, Trump’s team is doing something far worse: functionally shutting down disaster response and making sure federal help doesn’t reach victims at all.
Allegany County, where Westernport is located, suffered $33.7 million in damage. They’re on their own. Trump doesn’t care that some of his strongest supporters are the ones paying the price. And local Republicans are stunned.
The town’s voters thought Trump “was going to take care of the little person,” Bill Kenny, a former grocer, told The New York Times. “Because that’s what he said.”
President Donald Trump, shown in early December.
Of course, as we’ve known for a long time, Trump has zero interest in taking care of anyone, much less “the little person.” What he actually said was “I don’t care about you. I just want your vote.” He made that supposed joke five months before the election.
And now the residents of Westernport are learning the hard way that he was serious.
The same story is playing out across Appalachia. In another deep-red corner of the region, residents are “demoraliz[ed]” that the man they overwhelmingly supported has left them twisting in the wind, according to The Guardian.
Under former President Joe Biden, Appalachia had been earmarked for nearly $900 million in federal investment to help transition the region from dying coal industries into an industrial hub for renewable energy, including solar manufacturing.
“We knew we were living in a historic moment, not just because of the amount of funding, but because the whole region mobilized to meet the moment,” Jacob Hannah, CEO of Coalfield Development, told The Guardian. “It was a once-in-a-generation cash injection designed to prioritize extraction-based communities as part of the energy transition, which for the first time in almost a century made Appalachia very competitive.”
The region responded to Biden’s aid by handing Trump some of his biggest margins anywhere—83% of the vote in some counties. Trump rewarded those areas by canceling those investments so he and his friends could secure even bigger tax cuts.
It’s “demoralizing,” Hannah said.
But don’t expect Trump or the GOP to get the blame.
“Regardless of who’s in power, there’s a lot of finger-pointing, while life gets worse for the common people and the oligarch class keep winning,” Orville Overton, a local business owner and member of the residents’ council, told The Guardian. “I don’t think people know who or what to trust, because both [political] parties have failed us in big ways.”
One party earmarked nearly a billion dollars for the region. The other party took it away. Clearly, both sides failed them equally.
“These are not frivolous things: these are basic services,” Lou Ann Wallace, a representative on a GOP-controlled board of supervisors in rural Virginia, told The Guardian. “And when you work hard for two or three years to secure federal funds, you expect it to be delivered.”
“I don’t think the president knew. I’m one of his biggest supporters, but we’re dealing with the ills of industry here, and we’ve got to be able to clean this up so our people in these hollers can have a quality of life,” she continued.
President Donald Trump, shown in 2017.
If only Trump knew. The same Trump who killed the funding.
Hannah is blunt about what happened. “[The Republican] party has taken away that funding from Appalachia illegally: That’s the stone-cold fact,” he said. “But by the time those facts reach communities on the ground, it’s just so muddy. I think some are asking questions about why training is being shut down and why they didn’t get their SNAP benefits, but where they’ll find the answers is the big issue.”
As long as Fox News keeps lying to these communities, they’ll keep voting against their own survival. Trump has never hidden whom his America is for. It’s not flood-ravaged towns like Westernport. It’s not Appalachian communities watching jobs vanish and benefits get yanked away. He thinks they’re losers.
His America is for the “top of the top”—people rich enough to buy a gaudy gold card with Trump’s face on it. Everyone else is expendable.
Trump didn’t betray Appalachia. He’s doing exactly what he promised, and they’re still lining up to pretend they weren’t warned.
