Trump's Second Term Is Already Devastating Many of His Most Loyal Supporters

Trump’s Second Term Is Already Devastating Many of His Most Loyal Supporters
GONE TO THE FARM
The number of programs vital to rural Americans that have been cut, crippled or outright eliminated by the Trump administration is almost too large to list.
Paul Waldman
Published Apr. 29 2025 1:40PM EDT

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According to the Pew Research Center, Trump got 62 percent of the rural white vote in 2016 and 71 percent in 2020. (While we’re awaiting comprehensive data from the 2024 election, it appears that Trump did at least as well, if not a bit better, in these parts of the country than he did four years before.)

And how has Trump repaid that support? Is he lavishing benefits on rural folk to show them how appreciative he is of their steadfast loyalty? Quite the opposite. Not only has he done nothing to materially improve the lives of rural people, his policies—especially the attacks on government that he and Elon Musk have unleashed—are falling particularly hard on rural Americans.

The number of vital programs that have been cut, crippled or outright eliminated is almost too large to list. He dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which used to buy billions of dollars worth of food from American farmers, while his trade wars have already led to predictable retaliation in the form of China stopping purchases of American agricultural goods.

He gutted the Agriculture Department’s Rural Development office, threatening projects that offer support to rural communities around the country, closed offices at the Environmental Protection Agency that work to prevent pollution in rural areas, and is cancelling research grants to scientists studying the effects of that pollution on rural children. The brutal cuts to Medicaid that Republicans are contemplating to pay for his tax cuts will be devastating for rural hospitals, nearly 200 of which have closed or drastically reduced services in the last two decades. He’s planning a broadband heist that would deprive rural residents of high-speed fiber internet, instead giving Musk billions to provide the overpriced and mediocre Starlink service.

And many rural communities rely on immigrant labor—both documented and not—to sustain farms and food processing plants, work many native-born Americans avoid; Trump’s crackdown on immigration could leave many with worker shortages and missing the economic sustenance those immigrants provide.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-second-term-is-already-devastating-many-of-his-most-loyal-supporters/