Where, I often wonder, were the headlines during Biden’s presidency that read: The Democrats are Hurting the Very People Who Elected Them?
Surely it wasn’t because such stories couldn’t be found. Prolonged school closures disproportionately damaged urban students — precisely those whose families turned out heavily for Democrats. Their ambivalence on crime and policing left the working-class and minority neighbourhoods of blue cities to bear the brunt of rising disorder.
And surely it’s not because pundits are reluctant to frame stories in terms of voters being hurt by the very politicians they supported. Quite the opposite. When it comes to rural voters, this genre of storytelling is practically its own subfield. Timothy Noah’s recent column in The New Republic is the latest entrant, warning that Trump’s new tariff proposals will again “badly screw” the very voters who support him. Jennifer Rubin repeatedly paints Trump’s base as a self-immolating mass of misinformed populists. And it is nothing new; this narrative was everywhere during Trump’s first term: “Trump Country Could Be Hit Hardest by His Policies”; “Trump’s Trade War Hurts the People Who Elected Him.”
And yet, this peculiar framing — a mix of self-righteous indignation and condescending schadenfreude — seems reserved exclusively for Trump-supporting rural voters. Why?
It’s not that these pundits don’t understand policy; they do. And I agree with them: Trump’s economic agenda — tariffs, trade wars, the fantasy of decoupling — is bad policy. I believe, without hesitation, that free trade and open markets have lifted more people out of poverty worldwide than any government programme ever has.
But I also know this: those same policies have drained jobs, shuttered factories, and undercut the economic backbone of the rural communities I study and live in. That is why a majority of rural voters favour tariffs on China. According to the 2020 CES, 74% of rural voters supported tariffs on goods from China; 66% supported 25% tariffs on steel, excluding Mexico and Canada. Among Trump-supporting rural voters, the number was higher still: a full 91% of rural-Trump voters supported tariffs on China, along with 90% of the millions more urban and suburban Trump voters too.
If Biden or Obama were that responsive to their constituents (a majority of whom also support tariffs), they would be celebrated for their commitment to democracy and the empowerment of the people. Instead, it’s easier to just overlook the fact that 66% of all voters in households making less than $60,000 per year want to abandon the liberal consensus, hike tariffs on trade partners, and try something new.
You can disagree with these opinions, but to disregard them as “the dumbest idea yet” or that they’d “please voters and damage the economy at the same time,” is just reflexive emoting, passing for analysis in a media ecosystem more comfortable with sneering at discontent than confronting deep, structural inequality. It’s the kind of armchair clarity that comes easy when you’re writing from the winning side of globalisation. And in the name of opposing Trump, many progressives have done a full about-face — defending the very economic order they once claimed was rigged. If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, only Trump could make “neoliberalism” great again.
Personally, as one opposed to tariffs and committed to rural opportunity, I’d welcome a serious reckoning with trade policy — but not one that starts by mocking the people who’ve borne its costs. We could start by exploring all the ways in which free trade hasn’t actually been free — not just for its upwardly redistributive effects (which many, including Noah, lament), but its spatial ones as well.
“I’d welcome a serious reckoning with trade policy — but not one that starts by mocking the people who’ve borne its costs.”
We could start by asking whether free trade was ever that “free” — not just for its upward tilt (as Noah notes elsewhere in his work), but for the way it hit some places far harder than others. American policymakers didn’t just fail to shield domestic workers from unfair practices like Chinese steel dumping or currency manipulation, they actively chose not to in the name of market integration. They embedded investor protections in agreements like NAFTA and the TPP, while stripping out any meaningful enforcement for labour standards in overseas territories, while subjecting American producers to a labyrinth of growing regulations. It created tax incentives that rewarded offshoring, kept the subsidies flowing as agribusiness consolidated, and told displaced workers to learn to code.
If that’s “free” trade, it was free only for the powerful. Everyone else paid full price. So maybe the story isn’t that rural voters want to blow up the system — but that it took them this long.
We could continue the story — that it wasn’t just theory that failed rural America. It was the implementation, the politics, the choices — choices with a blue and red hue, but now which clearly benefit the core constituencies of the modern “Left”.
And yes, Trump and DOGE threaten more than just higher prices; the unravelling of the rural safety net — that patchwork of programmes and services that, while frayed, still holds many communities together. The closure of local USDA offices, the loss of community health centres, and the potential reduction in educational programmes like Head Start have tangible effects on daily life.
But if your experience of government is the extension agent who still has their job when your farm shut down; or your experience is that you couldn’t, in fact, keep your doctor after the hospital closed in the wake of the Affordable Care Act; or that the school bus route has got longer because two towns had to consolidate classrooms — then it’s not crazy to think the government isn’t working. When every programme feels designed for someone else, when the “investments” go to tech corridors and consulting firms, and when your own town hears more from regulators than from repair crews, it makes perfect sense to choose disruption — even knowing, like most of my neighbours do, that it carries substantial risk.
But I doubt that is really what Sargent and others want. Instead, there is a certain glibness in the way they think of rural suffering. But one can believe that rural voters may end up economically worse off under another Trump presidency (I think that’s the likely outcome) and also hope the dividends flowing to New York investors in Cargill, JBS, or Tyson take a bigger hit than the family farms already scraping by. If someone has to feel the pain, let it dent the quarterly earnings call of Dollar General’s board — not the paycheck of a cashier. But even if they don’t, let’s be honest: the damage was done long before Trump came along. Rural voters aren’t choosing tariffs because they think it will make them rich — they’re choosing them because they’ve already lost faith in a system that keeps delivering gains to everyone else. If you’ve already lost the game under decades of “smart” policy, why not flip the board?
Still, the “hurting themselves” genre continues, because it comforts liberal audiences by assigning blame downward. It allows political writers to bypass any reflection on how Democratic governance might also be failing. And it satisfies a deeper urge to feel vindicated, to watch the people who voted the “wrong” way suffer the consequences. Urban, college-educated voters are granted agency — their mistakes are tragic choices seen as complex, morally legitimate, and grounded in values. Rural, working-class Trump voters, by contrast, are seen as emotional, ignorant, even pathological.
But Trump’s voters know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve calculated — often correctly — that the programmes designed to help them are more likely to help someone else. So go on sneering, comfortable in the knowledge that the real problem is out there, somewhere in flyover country. But if you actually care about democracy — and about preventing another Trump presidency — you might ask what stories like these really accomplish. Because they certainly don’t persuade rural voters. They don’t build coalitions. They don’t correct the underlying failures of economic governance. All they do is harden the divides they claim to lament.
