Drag Us to Hell

If there's something Trump can make worse for everybody, he will. He thinks that'll help him politically, and sometimes it might.

Photo by SEO Galaxy on Unsplash

There’s a recent study I can’t stop thinking about, and not just because it relates specifically to White Rural Rage, the book I wrote with Tom Schaller that came out last year (available now in paperback!). It points to a broader and disturbing strain in American politics, and the more I think about it the more it seems to explain a great deal of what is happening in the second Trump term. It comes down to this:

Trump is making everything worse for almost everyone. He thinks that will help him politically. Sometimes it actually might.

It doesn’t always help him; we can’t ever forget that he’s deeply unpopular and pretty much always has been. But the degree to which he’s making so much of what affects people’s lives worse — including, and in many cases especially, those of his own supporters — is truly remarkable. And he’s doing most of it on purpose.

I’m not talking about the areas where he’s just doing conservative stuff, even if I happen to think that stuff is bad or even bad for everyone, like the assault on universities. I mean the things everyone ought to be displeased with.

His insanely erratic tariffs are raising prices for everybody, hurting both consumers and businesses alike while offering none of the benefits a narrowly tailored tariff policy might. The GOP budget bill will kick millions of people off their health insurance and dramatically raise premiums for millions more — and most of the people hit hardest will be in places Trump won. The administration has eviscerated FEMA, leaving people across the country without the help they need to recover from natural disasters. And who needs cancer research, anyway?

Trump is waging war on cities, where he generally lost the election, and if you didn’t vote for him he wants you to suffer. But his policies have also been miserable for the rural areas where he won big, whether it’s sabotaging the fiber broadband they were going to get, or dragging them into a ruinous trade war, or cutting funds for rural development.

It’s not that there are no winners in this Trump term. The crypto industry has been relieved of pesky federal oversight, for instance. But in broad terms, nothing about life in America has materially improved.

A depressing case study

Which brings me to the study I mentioned up top. It’s about hospitals closing in rural areas, a nationwide problem (in the last two decades, almost 200 rural hospitals have closed or dramatically cut back the services they offer). Even if the average voter might not understand how dependent rural hospitals are on Medicaid to stay financially viable, given that Democrats have a big advantage on the health care issue, one might think that when the local hospital closes — which is usually a disaster not only for access to care but economically as well — folks would blame the party that seems so determined to cut back on health care wherever it can. But as health policy scholar Michael E. Shepherd shows, the opposite is true:

Rural voters who lost their local hospital were 5–10 percentage points more likely to support Republicans in the subsequent presidential election, even increasing their support [of] state Republican gubernatorial candidates by similar amounts. Mechanistically, I show that these voting trends are explained by rural voters lowering their approval of the ACA, Barack Obama, and state Democrats following closures.

This was true when Obama was president, but it continued when Trump was president in his first term. In other words, people didn’t just blame the president when a hospital closed, they blamed Democrats.

This finding doesn’t guarantee that the same effect will occur when rural hospitals keep closing as a result of the brutal Medicaid cuts enacted in the Republican budget. Those closures have gotten more national attention in the last year than ever before, so it’s possible that voters will clue in to the fact that Republican budget cuts are a direct cause of future closures; they might put blame where it belongs. But I wouldn’t count on it.

Trump wants everything to suck

Trump does like to claim that he solved all the country’s problems, everything is great now, and he made everyone rich — from time to time. But more often, he tells us that “We’re living in hell.” America is a nightmare — violence, depravity, chaos — and the only sane response is to support the turn toward fascism he demands. He might worry about an economic downturn depressing his approval ratings, but in general I think he would see the result of the study on rural hospitals as a validation of his strategy. When everything sucks, people get angry and resentful, so they turn to the president of anger and resentment. If some policy of his is hurting you, at least you can know that somebody else is being hurt too.

And when he doesn’t solve people’s problems — or makes them worse — what happens? They get even more angry and resentful, and it makes even more sense to them (at least some of them) to turn to Trump. Trump doesn’t give them material help, but he gives them the psychological satisfaction of knowing that the guy they voted for is just as bitter and filled with rage as they are.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that there is a large part of the population that does actually want a politics that is about more than resentment and anger. One of the most powerful drivers of Zohran Mamdani’s success in New York is that he and his campaign talk constantly not just about New York’s problems and how they might be solved, but about what’s great about the city — its culture, its food, its people, its diversity, its history. His message is This place is awesome, now let’s make it even better.

That kind of message might be applicable elsewhere — it might even work for rural Democrats — but it hasn’t really been tried. If nothing else, it’s important for people to understand that if they think everything sucks, one person is more responsible than anyone else, and he’s sitting in the White House. Or the part of it he hasn’t demolished to put up his stupid ballroom.

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