Each time President Donald Trump—nominally the leader for the entire country—has been asked about the government shutdown, he has replied with the rhetorical equivalent of a shrug, claiming that the situation is hurting “Democrat things” and that he is protecting the paychecks and priorities of his supporters. “The Democrats are getting killed on the shutdown because we’re closing up programs that are Democrat programs that we were opposed to,” he told reporters last Tuesday. “We’re not closing up Republican programs, because we think they work.”
Those words are backed by actions. The president has taken extraordinary steps over the past three weeks to weaponize the closure of the government, steering federal funds to shield his chosen beneficiaries from the shutdown’s harms even as he opportunistically damages the interests of his opponents. But despite Trump’s efforts, he has failed to split the shutdown into a red-blue binary of winners and losers. His MAGA base has already been affected by the shutdown, his denials notwithstanding—and the pain for the president’s supporters will increase significantly if the lapse in government funding continues into November.
Farmers, a key constituency for Trump, are among those getting hurt. The Department of Agriculture halted crucial farm aid just as planning for the 2026 planting season was getting under way. Furloughs and mass layoffs, meanwhile, have decimated a small-business-lending program popular in rural communities. Federal subsidies keeping small-town airports afloat are scheduled to run out within days. And despite what Trump might suggest, the majority of the federal employees who are currently going without a paycheck live outside of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. Trump-friendly West Virginia, for instance, has among the highest number of government workers per capita in the country. “No matter how these programs are labeled by the administration, the cuts that are happening hurt everyone,” Abigail André, the executive director of the Impact Project, which has been tracking federal workers’ fates during Trump’s second term, told me. “It’s difficult to argue that you can cabin off certain parts of the country from impact effectively for very long.”
It’s true that Trump has been able to blunt some of the real-world ramifications of the shutdown for wide swaths of the public. Troops—whom the president sees as a key part of his political base—were supposed to miss their paychecks for the first time last week, but Trump ordered funds to be repurposed to cover the cost of their salaries. He did the same for members of the FBI, immigration agents, and other federal law-enforcement officers. He has steered money from tariff revenue to continue funding for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children—commonly known as WIC—and ordered certain military celebrations to continue as planned. The administration is also looking for ways to pay air-traffic controllers, Politico reported. The moves, perhaps ironically, may be helping lengthen the shutdown by taking some of the pressure off of lawmakers to end the impasse.
But the longer the shutdown drags on, the more certain groups are going to require special treatment—and the more Trump’s supporters will get hit as collateral damage. The administration has said it plans to “batten down the hatches and ride out the Democrats’ intransigence.” That strategy is making some of the president’s allies nervous. Republicans are privately clamoring for additional carve-outs or bailouts to shield their constituents from the growing impact of a closed government—and are more publicly acknowledging that the expiring health-care subsidies at the core of the shutdown fight will also hurt their voters. All of this could force Trump, who has so far been something of a bit player in the shutdown drama, to take on a more central role in the inevitable dealmaking necessary to reopen the government.
On October 17, Arkansas lawmakers passed a resolution saying farmers were “in need of strong leadership from President Donald J. Trump” and Congress to prevent the imminent closures of thousands of local farms. “This is going to affect the state of Arkansas in a very mighty way,” State Representative DeAnn Vaught, a Republican and farmer who introduced the resolution, told her fellow legislators before the vote. She likened the situation to “a tsunami coming.” The government shutdown arrived as farmers were already suffering from low commodity prices, Trump’s trade war, increased tariffs, and the expiration of the Farm Bill, several industry experts told me. Nearly half of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s staff has been furloughed, and local offices that help farmers access capital and other assistance have been closed since early October. Trump has promised to provide a bailout for farmers using billions of dollars collected from tariffs, but USDA officials have said plans for aid are on hold while the government is closed. Yesterday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said her agency would be reversing course and restarting several aid programs beginning Thursday. But industry leaders have predicted that up to a third of farms in Arkansas could be forced out of business before next year’s harvest without more federal intervention in the form of a multibillion-dollar bailout. Farmers in other states are facing similar pressures.
“The biggest worry of farms that see themselves as eligible for a trade-related bailout is that the delay may make it difficult to get the money,” Vincent Smith, a professor in agricultural economics at Montana State University, told me.
Chris Gibbs, who grows corn, soybeans, and other crops in Shelby County, Ohio, told me he was waiting for the government to reopen so that he could apply for a commodity loan at his local Farm Service Agency. The office has been closed since October 1. The program’s website says this is because of the “Radical Left Democrat Shutdown” and that Trump “wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.” Rollins wrote on X yesterday that those offices would reopen on Thursday at Trump’s direction, providing more than $3 billion in assistance. The people who will be staffing the offices, many rural voters themselves, will continue to miss paychecks as they return to work.
“Special thanks to our great USDA employees who continue to work without pay to serve our farmers and ranchers,” Rollins wrote.
Gibbs, a former Republican and longtime USDA official who now chairs his local Democratic Party, said he opposes Trump’s tariff-and-bailout policies but acknowledged that many farms “are under extreme pressure” and need help as they approach another planting season with tumbling prices for soybeans, corn, and wheat. China, a crucial market for American crops, has reduced its purchases in response to Trump’s trade war.
“We’re going to lose some farmers,” Gibbs told me.
Even as his voters face hardship, Trump has made light of the shutdown, posting memes of Democrats in sombreros and depicting his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, as the grim reaper. Throughout the shutdown, Vought has been cast by the administration in the role of a shadowy and brutally effective operator empowered to direct the trauma of a government closure exclusively toward Democratic priorities.
Vought has sought to live up to Trump’s hype, taking to X to announce freezes and cancellations of more than $35 billion for projects in Democrat-led states and pledging to enact upwards of 10,000 permanent layoffs during the shutdown. But his push to target blue states—including by halting $18 billion worth of infrastructure upgrades for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s hometown of New York—has not been as seamless as Trump may have envisioned.
When Vought announced that “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” he listed 16 states—all of which voted against Trump in 2024. The post did not mention Montana, which was set to receive part of a $1 billion grant to help produce hydrogen fuel—a grant that was canceled by Vought’s announcement. Republican Governor Greg Gianforte had been among the backers of the project, saying in 2023 that it “would create good-paying Montana jobs.”
Just last month, local leaders in Mineral County, Montana—where Trump won more than 70 percent of the vote last year—had celebrated the proposed project as a potential boon to the community. The town of St. Regis had lost one of its largest employers, a sawmill, in 2021, and the hydrogen project was set to replace some of those jobs, State Senator Denley Loge, a Republican who represents the area, told me. Vought’s cancellation announcement was devastating for a rural community already struggling from the shutdown, he said.
“Western Montana—especially the county we’re in—is pretty economically depressed, and this might have been just a little bit of a boost,” Loge said of the hydrogen project. “It’s disappointing, because we were finally thinking we were making some momentum.”
Several of the other 321 energy projects that were canceled are located in congressional districts represented by Republicans. White House officials have maintained that Democrats are to blame for any collateral damage from the shutdown. They have repeatedly pushed Schumer and other Democratic senators to vote to reopen the government before any negotiations over health care can begin. “The Trump Administration is working day and night to mitigate the pain Democrats are causing, and even that is upsetting the left—with many Democrats criticizing the President’s effort to pay the troops and fund food assistance for women and children,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told me in a statement.
It’s not clear whether that sentiment will be sufficient for Republican lawmakers who are hearing from a growing number of their impacted constituents as the shutdown stretches into its fourth week. “Government shutdowns have tangible, painful consequences for real people,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia, wrote on October 7 in a local op-ed, highlighting the state’s large concentration of federal employees. High-poverty states such as West Virginia rely disproportionately on government aid, including food stamps and other programs that are set to run out of money as soon as next month.
Some Americans might find buying a house or accessing scarce forms of transportation more difficult because of the shutdown. The National Flood Insurance Program is currently dormant, disrupting potential home sales along the Gulf Coast. Republican lawmakers have clashed over a stand-alone bill to reauthorize the program amid the shutdown, Politico reported. The Essential Air Service, a subsidy program that supports airlines operating out of small-town airports, is set to run out of emergency funds by November 2. Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, where the service helps connect remote communities that are inaccessible by road, said she has been reaching out to the Trump administration to relay how detrimental any disruption would be for her constituents. Even Congress—which is uniquely positioned to end the shutdown—is feeling it. Members are still getting paid (the House hasn’t taken a vote since September 19), but many of their staffers missed a paycheck for the first time on Monday.
The administration’s moves to lay off thousands have not fallen neatly along partisan lines. On October 10, the entire staff of the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, a small-business lending program popular in underserved areas, received layoff notices. The CDFI Fund typically would be disbursing grants to small nonprofits and banks around this time of year, providing capital that would disproportionately flow to borrowers in rural America, industry leaders told me. Eight of the 10 congressional districts that received the most CDFI-supported funds are represented by Republicans, according to a recent analysis by the Urban Institute. (CDFI Fund staff also help support key pillars of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, including a revamped version of Opportunity Zones designed to boost rural communities.)
One CEO of a local lender, speaking on condition of anonymity due to fear of retribution by the White House, told me that community banks “serving small towns in rural America” will ultimately be forced to close because of the Trump administration’s layoffs.
“It’s going to be brutal,” he told me.
For his part, Trump has said little about the impact of the shutdown on his supporters, instead telling Fox Business recently that the lapse in funding had given him “the right to cut programs that Republicans never wanted,” including “giveaways” and “welfare programs.” But those programs are a lifeline to the very people who helped Trump get into office—which makes his minimization of the shutdown an unsustainable position, André, of the Impact Project, told me.
“People across the country may not all notice right away, but the most vulnerable among us probably feel that pinch already,” she said. “And the longer it goes on, the more of us will be impacted.”
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