President Trump won his second term in office with the overwhelming support of rural America.
Not only was overall turnout up in the nation’s rural counties, but Trump won many of those areas by more than two-to-one. And while it is a little too much to say that Trump’s dominance with rural voters delivered him the White House, it is true that without this over-performance, his path to victory would have been harder.
Given the importance of rural voters to his political coalition — and that of any Republican who hopes to follow in his footsteps — you might assume that Trump would prioritize the interests of rural voters. This is, after all, what you’re supposed to do in a democracy: reward your supporters for their support.
Not so for Trump and his Republican allies in Congress. If anything, their agenda is calibrated to devastate rural America.
Consider the budget proposal now making its way through the House of Representatives. To pay for their $3.8 trillion tax plan, which includes possibly trillions in tax cuts and extensions for the wealthiest Americans, Republicans want to cut $700 billion from Medicaid and other federal health programs. If passed into law, these cuts — some which come in the form of work requirements for Medicaid — could cause as many as 8.6 million Americans to lose their health insurance.
Some prominent Republicans may see many of these Medicaid recipients as adult layabouts, but it’s more likely that these cuts will affect low-income children, seniors and Americans with disabilities, who rely on Medicaid for health and home care.
But the big point I want to make is that, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, rural areas in particular depend on Medicaid spending. Nearly half of all children in rural areas, 47 percent, receive health insurance through Medicaid. Rural hospitals, which have struggled to stay afloat in the face of broad and overlapping challenges, also rely on Medicaid to stay open and provide needed services to isolated areas.
House Republicans also want to slash the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to reduce so-called waste, fraud and abuse. (In truth, SNAP is among the most efficient federal assistance programs in operation.) Again, these cuts — which will effectively pay for tax benefits for people with higher incomes — will most likely hit children and other vulnerable populations hardest. And as with the proposed Medicaid cuts, this will hit hard for rural areas, where roughly one in seven households receive SNAP benefits.
These estimates are likely to understate the extent of the damage, given the Republican Party’s interest in work requirements and additional scrutiny to prove eligibility. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out:
Rural unemployment is often higher, work can be more variable, and work opportunities are often farther away and harder to reach. Rural residents are also older, on average, than nonrural residents, and older adults can face particular challenges maintaining steady employment, including health challenges.
House Republicans have proposed other cuts: to programs that provide free meals to children in low-income school districts, to programs that provide care to seniors and to programs that provide rental assistance to at-risk families. And this is all on top of Trump’s trade wars — which threaten to upend rural producers of agricultural goods — as well as his unilateral moves to try to slash funding for rural broadband and to try to roll back the production of clean energy, at one point freezing grants for farmers and rural business owners who purchased renewables such as solar panels.
Much of the conversation about the political state of rural America, and specifically that of white rural America, is preoccupied with questions of culture. Democrats are seen as incompatible with the norms and mores of this segment of the country, with commentators engaged in endless conversation about the specific positions and the specific language the party could use to make inroads.
The irony is that for all of the Republican Party’s cultural affinity for rural America, its policy agenda is singularly hostile to the material interests of the millions of Americans who live in rural areas. But no one seems to want to ask Republicans, or Donald Trump for that matter, to explain the yawning distance between what they promise for rural Americans and what they actually do for rural Americans.
If Trump and the Republican Party can successfully cut Medicaid and SNAP to pay for upper-income tax cuts, they will almost certainly plunge millions of people — including many of their supporters — into poverty, possibly made worse by the economic disruption of the president’s trade agenda. It is a good thing for Republicans, then, that they have grown exceptionally skilled at using cultural grievance and resentment to spin devastation, often of their own making, into political gold.
What I Wrote
My Wednesday column was on the administration’s latest attacks on the Constitution. I also speculated on why conservatives seem uninterested in standing against the president’s contempt for some of the basic elements of the American political tradition.
Which brings us back to the current president. What Trump brings to the table of American politics is personalist and authoritarian rule of a kind that we haven’t seen in the national government but that we have seen in other countries — and even in certain places at certain points in our own history. But whether you think this moment is continuous with our past or a break from it, one thing we can say for sure is that conservative support for this type of governance is not an aberration. It belongs to a consistent pattern of enthusiastic support for tyrants and would-be tyrants.
Now Reading
Adam Hochschild on Manisha Sinha’s new history of Reconstruction for The New York Review of Books.
Just as we talk about the First Republic, the Second Empire, or the Fifth Republic in France, so Sinha divides American history into phases, although the transition from one to another is not so neatly demarcated, sometimes taking years. Her focus is on what she calls our Second Republic: the promise of Reconstruction following the Civil War. This period, she points out, brought not just new rights for the formerly enslaved but hope for women and Native Americans, surprising flashes of solidarity with freedom struggles elsewhere, and “the forgotten origin point of social democracy in the United States.”
Alex Shephard on Trump’s corruption for The New Republic.
For Trump, this is what being president is all about: He is entitled to a massive windfall and a luxury jet because he is in charge of the world’s most powerful country. He explained the jet as a simple perk of being the commander in chief of the American military. “I think it was a gesture because of the fact that we help, have helped, and continue to, we will continue to, all of those countries: Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Qatar, and others,” he said on Monday. A $400 million jet he will use when he leaves office is simply a perk of the job — as are lucrative real estate and cryptocurrency deals. Trump calls it a gesture, but it’s clearly something more.
Ted Chiang on artificial intelligence for The New Yorker. (This is an older story, but it’s still very good and worth reading.)
The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.
J. Michael Luttig on the end of the rule of law in America, for The Atlantic.
For the almost 250 years since the founding of this nation, America has been the beacon of freedom to the world because of its democracy and rule of law. Our system of checks and balances has been strained before, but democracy — government by the people — and the rule of law have always won the day. Until now, that is. America will never again be that same beacon to the world, because the president of the United States has subverted America’s democracy and corrupted its rule of law.
Caitlin M. Green on transphobia and false compassion for Liberal Currents.
Again, when we are “thinking of the children,” we are supposed to imagine our child as cisgender, not as one of the trans and cis kids who would benefit from gender-affirming health care.
Photo of the Week
Anyone who bikes into downtown D.C. from Union Station will recognize this storefront. Taken on a Fujifilm X-E3 digital camera with a vintage Olympus lens adapted for the body.
Now Eating: French Lentil Salad
No comments! This is just a really good lentil salad. Easy to put together and great for a simple lunch with a green salad and crusty bread. Recipe comes from New York Times Cooking. One thing to know is that this is the kind of dish that lends itself well to substitutions or even omissions. Can’t find radicchio or don’t want to use it? No problem! Prefer black beluga lentils or even brown lentils to French lentils? Shouldn’t be an issue!
Ingredients
-
1 ½ cups dried lentils (preferably French green lentils)
-
5 thyme sprigs, plus 2 teaspoons thyme leaves
-
5 small rosemary sprigs
-
2 fresh bay leaves
-
¼ cup red wine vinegar
-
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more to taste
-
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
-
2 teaspoons honey
-
1 large lemon, zested and juiced
-
Salt and freshly cracked black pepper
-
2 medium shallots, trimmed, halved and sliced lengthwise (about 6 ounces)
-
2 to 3 small garlic cloves, minced
-
3 medium carrots, thinly sliced (about 8 ounces)
-
1 small head radicchio, halved, cored and thinly sliced (about 6 ounces)
-
1 large bunch parsley leaves and stems, finely chopped (about 4 ounces)
-
1 tablespoon roughly chopped dill
-
2 teaspoons chopped tarragon leaves
Directions
Sort through lentils, removing any small pebbles or stones, then rinse lentils well. Using kitchen twine, tie the thyme sprigs, rosemary sprigs and bay leaves together in a small bundle to form a bouquet garni. (While not essential, this will make it easier to discard the herbs after cooking.)
Add lentils and bouquet garni to a large pot and add enough water to cover by 2 inches. Bring to a boil on high, then reduce heat to maintain a simmer. Cover and simmer until lentils are tender, 12 to 20 minutes, depending on the type of your lentils. Discard the bouquet garni. Drain the lentils and rinse with cold water. Line a sheet pan with a towel and pour lentils out evenly onto the pan to dry and cool.
While the lentils cook, prepare the vinaigrette: In a large bowl, combine vinegar, olive oil, mustard, honey, thyme leaves, half the lemon juice, 1 tablespoon salt and 2 teaspoons pepper; whisk well. Add the shallots and garlic and mix well to combine.
Stir in the carrots and radicchio to coat, then add the cooled lentils and toss again. Stir in the parsley, dill, tarragon and half the lemon zest.
Taste and adjust the seasonings for salt and pepper. Finish with a generous drizzle of olive oil, lemon juice to taste and a few more pinches of lemon zest. This salad can keep covered in the refrigerator for up to four days, but it likely won’t last that long. The flavor will improve with time, but you will need to readjust the seasoning again upon serving.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
The post Republican Hypocrisy Reaches Into the Countryside appeared first on New York Times.
