“We’re losing our best and brightest,” Roger Ford, the 58-year-old president of an energy startup, told me sadly one day as we ambled through a hillside cemetery brightened by graveside flowers. “Too many young people are leaving these mountains looking for jobs in cities, and too many of the ones who stay behind have been caught in an opioid epidemic.”
Mr. Ford has lived here in Kentucky’s Pike County all his life. Around us lay the graves of his ancestors, proud locals all. His great-grandfathers on both sides fought in the Civil War, and uncles and cousins fought in World War I and II.
As the native-born leave the mountains, few immigrants venture in. So as Mr. Ford and I entered a small, empty church nearby, a question seemed to hang in the air: In years to come, who will run the region’s restaurants, gas stations and start-ups, plow its gardens, and honor its dead?
On the Greasy Creek Elementary School Facebook page, Mr. Ford describes himself as “Kentuckian by birth, Southern by the grace of God, Freemason and Shriner.” He is pro-life, pro-gun, pro-police, pro-wall and anti-tax, and told me “God sent Donald Trump.” And many thought God had.
In the 2024 election, 81 percent of Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District — the whitest and third poorest in the nation — voted with Mr. Ford for Donald Trump. Once full of New Deal Democrats, the region had suffered losses that its people felt modern Democrats didn’t care about or address. During World War I and II, the “black gold” dug out of their mountains fed industrial America. Then the coal mines closed, and the drug crisis crept in.
In 2016, Mr. Trump’s answer to these losses took the form of policy promises and a story. Many of the policies he promised never panned out. As James Browning, a thoughtful drug counselor and grandson of a coal miner killed in a mining accident, recalled, he never brought back coal or “great, new jobs.” He did “nothing about drugs.”
But Mr. Trump’s story of stolen pride did take hold. With the fall of coal and American manufacturing, he told his followers, you lost your pride. That’s because others stole it from you, just as they stole the 2020 election, and they still want more — your guns, your families, your way of life. I’ll take revenge on them, he declared: on the pet-eating immigrants, uppity women, spying international students, idle government workers, and the institutions behind them — the universities, the mainstream press, the judiciary, the deep state.
In the first months of Mr. Trump’s second term, his story of loss, shame, blame and retribution has split the country into two emotional zones. Many in America’s blue half have begun to feel a strange fear. They suddenly have to worry about losing college scholarships, jobs, grants, medical care and protection from the prying eyes of government officials gathering information from their social media posts. They have heard themselves described, in Mr. Trump’s Memorial Day tweet, as “scum.” Public officials whose security detail he’s withdrawn fear for their safety. Federal judges who’ve ruled against Mr. Trump have received threatening phone calls.
What do things feel like, I wondered, to the people in Kentucky’s Fifth District? Are we approaching a tipping point when they might start to question Mr. Trump — either because of his threats to democracy, or because his economic policies will make their lives tougher? After all, experts predict Mr. Trump’s tariffs will raise prices, and his budget cuts will hit some of his strongest supporters the hardest. Meals on Wheels: cuts. Heating cost assistance: cuts. Black lung screening: cuts. One nearby office handling Social Security has closed. Even the Department of Veterans Affairs may have to pull back on the services it offers.
These are services people need. More than 40 percent of people in the Fifth District rely on Medicaid for their medical care, including addiction treatment. Now, Mr. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is poised to cut benefits, which could lead to layoffs in the largest employer in eastern Kentucky, the Pikeville Medical Center. Meanwhile, many children in the district qualify for food stamps, and the administration’s chain saw is coming for those, too.
These cuts have led Colmon Elridge, the head of Kentucky’s beleaguered Democratic Party who is Black, to wryly remark, “If somebody who looks like me is your enemy, then you don’t care if the guy in the White House is peeing on your leg and telling you it’s rain.”
When I checked back in with many of the Trump supporters whose lives I describe in my most recent book, “Stolen Pride,” to see if this had changed any of their minds, the overall answer seemed to be no. Some seemed more committed to Mr. Trump than they had been before.
Rob Musick, a religious studies instructor at the University of Pikeville and shrewd observer of his community, noted: “Since the inauguration, I haven’t heard any alarm bells go off” — not when Mr. Trump dressed down Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office and fired U.S.A.I.D. workers, not when ICE raided a Mexican restaurant nearby. “There has been no public response,” he said. And of course, the rise in prices and loss of benefits haven’t hit yet.
Mr. Trump’s angry tone didn’t seem to bother his supporters in the district. Calling his opponents scum? “Oh, that’s how Trump talks. People know how he talks, and they voted for him. I wouldn’t talk that way and don’t like it, but I’m glad I voted for him,” said Andrew Scott, a Trump supporter and mayor of Coal Run Village, a town of around 1,600 nestled next to Pikeville.
As for the likely cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and Meals on Wheels, Mr. Scott mused, “You know how proud and stoic Appalachians are — we know how to take a little pain. People,” he explained, “may have to suffer now to help make America great later. Trump’s tariffs could raise prices but that will force companies to gradually relocate to the U.S.”
Many of the people I spoke to recognized that this bill would create some pain for them or their neighbors, but that didn’t seem to bother them. One Trump supporter told me that if you like the guy who’s making you suffer, you don’t mind so much. As Mr. Trump himself has put it, America is akin to a sick patient, and the tariffs are the surgery — “The patient lived, and is healing.”
James Browning, the drug counselor, had a different take on the Appalachian pain threshold: “A lot of people around here are living on the edge. If we start to see Trump policies lead to price hikes and benefit cuts — especially Medicaid and Social Security and food stamps — some people will begin to say, ‘Wait a minute. I didn’t vote for this.’”
Shea Maynard, who since age 18 had always worked one job, sometimes two, still thinks back to her panic at losing her job a year ago. “We had to apply for food stamps. It took quite a while to process my SNAP application. My husband and I couldn’t turn to friends for a loan because they were having financial issues too,” she said. “In the end, I couldn’t pay my bills and also eat. However hard you work, you never know when you’ll need help.” While I heard a few stories of “waste and abuse,” nearly all the stories I heard about Medicaid and food stamps were stories like Ms. Maynard’s.
If there were anxieties about budget cuts among the people I talked with, they seem to be privately held. No one seemed worried about Mr. Trump’s deportations.
Four years ago, Roger Ford spoke to me about undocumented immigrants in relaxed and measured tones. “We need to control our borders because we’re letting in too many and we don’t know who they are,” he said. “Still some of them are good people.”
Back then, he explained with a chuckle how he befriended a Mexican immigrant who waits tables in a restaurant that he and his wife love. He crossed over at age 14 with “no money, no English” to try to get to his brother, hitchhiking to the wrong town but finally making it to Pikeville. “He buses tables long hours, and on weekends I see him mowing his lawn,” Mr. Ford said. “He works harder than a lot of people around here.” One day he got Covid and was afraid to get treatment, so Mr. Ford told him to call if his temperature went over 103 and promised to find him a doctor.
But now after months of Mr. Trump’s fevered talk of migrants “poisoning the blood” of America, the casual association of all migrants with “evil” gang members dispatched by Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, Mr. Ford’s views seemed to have hardened. Noncitizens, he told me, have no right to due process. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was guilty, Mr. Ford told me, of being a member of the vicious MS-13 gang — this, he concluded from the Homeland Security website — and he thought Mr. Abrego Garcia was rightly deported.
When I asked Mr. Ford about his illegal friend, he said, “He’s coming by tomorrow to do some work for me.” If masked ICE officials rounded him up? “I would help him seek asylum.”
I asked what he thought of a recent statement by Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat: “Today it’s an immigrant with a tattoo. Tomorrow it’s a citizen whose Facebook post annoys Donald Trump.”
“That’s hyperbole,” Mr. Ford responded. “What has to happen,” he continued, are arrests, “Pritzker included — round him up and charge him with obstruction of justice.” With every deportation, it seemed as if Mr. Trump was returning his stolen pride.
So what can be done? Democrats are deeply unpopular. According to a March poll, only 27 percent of registered voters have a positive view of the Democratic Party, the lowest level since NBC News began asking the question in 1990, and my conversations with voters in the Fifth District distilled just how difficult it will be for the party to break through when Mr. Trump has so powerfully captured the bitterness and pain that has taken root in the hills of Appalachia. The last Democratic state senator from eastern Kentucky just registered as a Republican.
But in a two-party system, Democrats are our only plausible alternative to the cruelty of the G.O.P. So what should they do? And what do they need to understand to do it?
Rob Musick explained: “Around here, Democrats come off as against this and against that — and not for anything. They need a big positive alternative vision. And they need to understand that in rural areas like this, the deeper problem is that we’re socially hollowed out. That happy buzz of community life? That’s not here. There are fewer meetings of the Masons, the Rotary Club, the Red Hatters. Our church benches are empty. In the mountains, there’s no safe place against drugs. One elderly woman told me, ‘I don’t open my door anymore.’ I’ve heard teens say, ‘There’s nothing to do.’ A lot of kids are alone in their rooms online with Dungeons and Dragons. I think MAGA plays to a social desert.”
Mr. Musick continued, “The most popular guy in town is a young guy named Ryan Hall” who describes himself as a “weather analyst, storm chaser and a dad.” Mr. Hall has attracted a large online audience giving warnings of floods, storms and deadly tornadoes, like the one that struck Laurel County, two hours away, in May. He’s started the Y’all Squad, an emergency response team which coordinates volunteers to help when these crises hit. With the Trump administration slashing FEMA programs and cutting staff, initiatives like his will be even more crucial.
“I think Democrats need to get behind this kind of effort and initiate a campaign of grand civic re-engagement,” Mr. Musick said. Federal funds could support the best local initiatives, he added, and help start ecology, drama and music clubs — “good local things that lack funding.”
In some ways, what he’s describing is a sweeping effort to restore some of the lost pride Mr. Trump harnessed in his campaigns.
In many local minds, the word “Democrat” is no longer associated with openness, daring, imagination and care. During the last administration, Democratic attempts to build a green America, which many Kentuckians support, fell on deaf ears because the people providing these ideas were Democrats. With his Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Biden directed 73 percent of clean energy investments to projects in red states — projects like making batteries and installing solar panels. Red state residents were expected to receive almost double the investment compared to their blue state counterparts.
Paradoxically, this should have greatly appealed to Roger Ford, whose energy start-up aims to combine municipal waste with harvested hemp to create a cleaner aviation fuel for Delta Air Lines. It didn’t seem to; Mr. Ford wants a red version of the green revolution to attract back the young people leaving the Appalachian hills and still ardently supports Mr. Trump, even though he has declared climate change a hoax, deleted the words “climate change” from certain government websites and shut down more than 100 studies investigating it.
But there may be an opportunity to reach out to others who, like Mr. Ford, believe in clean energy: In a stunning new poll by the nonprofit group More in Common, 93 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of Republicans agree that “the U.S. should be a world leader in developing clean energy.” Apart from those close to the coal industry, virtually every Kentuckian I’ve spoken to over the years favored government help in getting the coal slurry out of their drinking water and welcomed the prospect of alternative energy.
For now, Mr. Trump’s support isn’t fading. So Democrats face a double task. America needs a firm hand on the wheel of democracy — defending the free press, universities, the judiciary. At the same time, Democrats need to begin taking steps to regain the basic trust of voters who once supported them.
That starts with confronting, up close and personal, the circumstances that have led red America into the angry fires of a stolen pride narrative: visit, listen, campaign everywhere, propose policies that could begin elevate local politicians whose stories resonate nationally, and begin to restore the civic fabric of life in towns like Coal Run Village and Pikeville.
A few national Democrats have begun this work: Senator Chris Murphy has proposed sweeping plans to address the epidemic of loneliness; Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has crisscrossed the country, electrifying audiences in red states like Idaho. Kentucky’s own Andy Beshear, a two-term Democratic governor, communicates with ease across the urban-rural divide.
Whomever Democrats choose as their standard-bearer, we cannot leave it up to them; to choose wise leaders and strengthen a challenged democracy, we need all hands on deck.
In the meantime, James Browning, the addiction counselor, offered this important warning. “If people in Pike County or elsewhere get socked with higher prices, there might come a tipping point. But what happens then would hinge on how Democrats handle it, what better ideas they have to offer, their tone of voice. If the left starts scolding, ‘You Trump supporters brought this on yourselves,’ or ‘We told you so,’ people around here will get more pissed at the snarky left than they are at the hurtful right — and Trump will march on.”
Arlie Russell Hochschild is a professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “The Second Shift,” “Strangers in Their Own Land” and, most recently, “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right.”
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