Not to be outdone, Doug Koehn, a rancher from eastern Colorado, went out to his fields, paced off that same talismanic name, got on his tractor, and carved it into the soil—in letters 800 feet high, stretching for an entire mile. The name would be visible only from high above, but who knows, Doug thought, maybe Trump would fly out of the Denver airport, see his sign, and stop in to say hi. “I’ll buy him a beer. I’d love to shake his hand,” Doug said, perhaps unaware that Donald Trump’s many vices do not include alcohol.[2]
Maslowsky and Koehn were not alone in their grand ambitions, even if their Trump signs were among the biggest. If you’ve driven through rural parts of the United States in the last few years, you’ve probably seen them: not just Trump signs, but absolutely massive Trump signs, as though with their sheer size, they could cry out over the miles to the man himself and attract his notice as he jets back and forth between New York and Florida. On the side of barns, staked in the ground, built out of hay bales, and flying from flagpoles, they reach ten, twenty, thirty feet high and more, each one a tribute to their maker’s boundless love for a president who was as far removed from their lives and experiences as anyone could be.
Long after the campaign ended, those signs stayed up, testifying to the power of Trump’s movement and the bitter divisions it had made so much worse. Never before in American politics has a single syllable carried so much symbolic weight. “TRUMP” is thrust at liberals, chanted at high school games when the opposing team contains a lot of non-White kids, shouted in the air, and scrawled on the sidewalk, carrying boundless aggression in its percussive simplicity. It says I’m mad and We’re winning and Screw you all at the same time.
How do we explain how a man from Queens with soft hands, one whose greatest life ambition was to be accepted by elite Manhattan society, became the hero of rural America? It’s a complicated story, but one that makes perfect sense in retrospect. And Trump is not alone; other Republican politicians whose claims to represent rural America range from tenuous to nonexistent have pulled off versions of the same trick, albeit not quite so spectacularly.
Whether Trump succeeds in returning to the White House in 2024, his curious appeal to rural Americans is the most important rural political story in decades. Whatever the future holds for Trump, he has left an indelible mark on rural America and, in the process, revealed fundamental truths about the people who find him so compelling.
Whenever someone asks what candidates need to do to appeal to rural voters, the answers are always the same: In rural America, we’re told, people want to know you understand their lives. You know what they go through, what they’ve experienced, how they speak, what they do on Saturday night and Sunday morning. It’s best if you’ve lived it yourself, but at a minimum, you have to demonstrate that you get it. You have to take your time and listen, and show respect.
That’s why we see presidential candidates troop to rural areas—especially in Iowa, where the first caucuses have loomed over the primary race since the 1972 election[3]—to show voters they understand rural lives and the rural lifestyle. They put on casual clothes and tramp across fields. They tour a granary and nod knowingly while being told about recent trends in agricultural commodity prices. And they definitely head to the state fair to wolf down whatever food-on-a-stick is popular that year.
Donald Trump did none of those things. When he came to the Iowa State Fair in 2015, he didn’t try to convince anyone he was “in touch” with rural folks in any concrete way. He made a dramatic entrance in a helicopter with his name emblazoned on the side, attracting extra attention and blowing people’s hats off. The message was not I get you; it was, as ever, Look at me!
This was of a piece with Trump’s entire approach to rural America. He didn’t grasp for “authenticity,” which is always about performing the most convincing simulacrum of the real. He wouldn’t, like George W. Bush, buy a “ranch,” don a cowboy hat, and clear brush for the cameras. He was not going to try his hand at milking a cow; the only reason Donald Trump will bend over is to retrieve a golf ball.
His opponent, for her part, believed naïvely that she could compete for rural votes with a more traditional, substantive appeal. Hillary Clinton had a plan to invest in rural America; she unveiled it in Iowa in August 2015. “America’s rural communities lie at the heart of what makes this country great,” she said, but “despite their critical role in our economy, too many rural communities are not sharing in our nation’s economic gains.” So, she proposed a suite of initiatives to change this, including loan guarantees, education for beginning farmers, and public-private partnerships to create investments in rural areas.[4]
How much credit did she get for it? Zilch. “A lot of us in rural areas, our ears are tuned to intonation,” said Dee Davis, founder of the Center for Rural Strategies. “We think people are talking down to us. What ends up happening is that we don’t focus on the policy—we focus on the tones, the references, the culture.”[5] This becomes an all-purpose excuse that has almost nothing to do with reality; Clinton could have gotten down on her knees to beg, and they still would have accused her of having the wrong “tone.” But Trump, who couldn’t tell a combine from a corn dog? Does anyone actually think he’s tuned in to “the references, the culture”? Of course not.
This is the reality Trump exposed: White rural voters don’t actually demand that candidates be like them, come from where they come from, have a deep appreciation for their lives and their concerns, or sincerely want to help them. All that doesn’t hurt, but it isn’t enough, and you may not need it at all if you can offer something else—even something dark and ugly—that they’ll respond to.
Not only was Donald Trump not the kind of person who could relate to rural folks, but you couldn’t imagine any candidate less capable of relating to them. A lifelong New Yorker, Trump is a walking repudiation of every value rural Americans claim to hold. They say they prize integrity and straight talk; he’s the most corrupt president in American history and can barely open his mouth without lying. They say they pull together and care for one another; he’s the embodiment of selfish narcissism. The only thing rural folks say they put ahead of country and even family is God; asked on TV to name his favorite Bible passage, Trump couldn’t come up with one.[6]
He’s never worked with his hands. He brags about his penthouse apartment. His professions of piety are laughably phony. He cheated on all his wives and seems to barely know his kids, except the daughter he talks about with a profoundly disturbing sexual interest. He wears makeup and spends hours on his hair. Neither he nor anyone in his family served in uniform.
And yet, rural voters don’t just like him, they worship him.
This devotion can be traced to some key features of Trump’s personality, which we’ll address in a moment. But Trump also had a message for those who felt the world was leaving them behind. First, he told them they were right: American society is rigged against you by people who aren’t like you and who wish you ill. Second, he let them know that the appropriate reaction to social changes that made them uncomfortable is rage—not quiet acquiescence, not accommodation, not an attempt to understand others’ point of view, but rage. And best of all, they should take that rage and shove it right in the liberals’ goddamn faces.
This is what rural people mean when they say that Trump “speaks our language,” something we were told more than once during our travels. It’s not that he understands their culture in any substantive way; instead, it’s more visceral. Trump stroked people’s darkest impulses and said: You deserve to feel this way. You have been wronged and cheated and mocked. Now I will be your wrath. Look at everyone you hate—those overeducated liberals and Hollywood elites and arrogant city people and social justice warriors trying to make you feel bad for being White and being a man and being American. They despise me just as much as they despise you. Let’s show them who this country really belongs to.
And so, they did. And in 2024, it is entirely possible that Donald Trump will win back the presidency, due in no small part to the support he gets from rural Americans who could not be more different from him, but who love him all the same.
As he took over the Republican Party, Trump taught a cadre of other politicians how they could appeal to rural Whites and that authenticity was beside the point. Perhaps no one’s transformation makes this clearer than that of Elise Stefanik, whose rapid rise in Trump’s remade Republican Party shows just how far a politician can go by applying Trump’s lessons to the new rural political landscape.
To run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2014 from New York’s most rural and sparsely populated district, Stefanik established residency in Willsboro, Essex County, in the Adirondack North Country, which we visited in Chapter 1. But she did not grow up there: Willsboro is where her parents bought their summer home. Stefanik grew up in the suburbs of Albany, where she attended elite Albany Academy prep school. From there, she went to Harvard, the crown jewel of the Ivy League and a place conservatives and Republicans routinely mock as a breeding ground for out-of-touch elitists.
Stefanik has no stories to tell about milking cows or baling hay; she spent her career in politics and government. After college, she worked in President George W. Bush’s administration, staffed some political campaigns, and then began preparing her first run for Congress. A liberal Democrat with Stefanik’s bio who ran for her seat would have been pilloried as a privileged, inauthentic, carpetbagging poseur.
Stefanik presented herself to Adirondack voters as a fresh-faced, likable moderate who would keep her head down and get things done. She pledged to protect the environment and gay rights, and her pitch worked. Despite her outsider status, and thanks to eight hundred thousand dollars from the Koch brothers and the backing of former Bush adviser Karl Rove,[7] Stefanik won the 2014 Republican primary by twenty points. That November, she won the general election in the Twenty-first District, which includes Essex and other rural counties reaching westward to the St. Lawrence Seaway. Her victory made her the youngest woman to that point ever elected to the House of Representatives.
Running for re-election in 2016, Stefanik initially distanced herself from Trump and continued to portray herself as a results-oriented centrist, which may not be surprising given that in 2008 and again in 2012, Democrat Barack Obama carried several counties in her district, including her adopted Essex County. Besides, she insisted, Trump would never win the Republican nomination for president. Stefanik cruised to re-election by more than thirty points.
But Trump won the nomination and the election, and carried her district. Voters there flipped from Obama to Trump at some of the highest rates not only in New York but nationally. In fact, eighteen counties in the state voted twice for Obama but flipped to Trump in 2016. Six of those—Essex, Franklin, Saratoga, St. Lawrence, Warren, and Washington—are counties partly or wholly contained in Stefanik’s district.
Stefanik quickly seemed to realize she did not fully understand or even recognize the dark underbelly of her own constituency. Nor did her mentors within mainstream Republican circles, Tim Pawlenty and Paul Ryan, both of whom were vocal Trump critics. “Voters made their voices heard very strongly,” Stefanik said. “They wanted someone who’s not traditional, who’s going to break up the status quo.”[8]
If that’s what they wanted, then Stefanik was ready to give it to them, and by the end of Trump’s term, her transformation was complete. During Trump’s second impeachment, the new Elise stood alongside Rep. Jim Jordan complaining that the president and his supporters were the real victims of the January 6 attacks. The new Elise refuses to dispute the so-called Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. And two days after the mass murder of African American grocery shoppers in her own state, the new Elise issued a tweet echoing “great replacement” theory, warning that “Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote.”[9] The new Elise is a vocal, aggressive populist who fits what Essex County never used to be but may soon become: a hotbed for angry White voters whose devotion to Trump supersedes their commitment to democratic values.
Not all her constituents appreciate Stefanik’s transformation. Karen Edwards is a professor of math education nearing retirement at Paul Smith’s College in Franklin County. But she isn’t a liberal transplant who parachuted into the Adirondacks to teach at a liberal arts college. She grew up on Keese Mills Road, a few miles from the college, and attended a two-room elementary school where she was one of just three kids in her grade. Her family made ends meet by boarding and feeding out-of-town hunters every autumn, and in summers her mother took in laundry from the nearby exclusive lodges that catered to rich visitors. (She remembers her mom having pillowcases sent back because her ironing didn’t meet one local lodge’s exacting standards.)
Edwards knows which of the county’s vast forested tracts are or were owned by the Du Ponts, Rockefellers, Marjorie Merriweather Post, or, more recently, by Alibaba billionaire Jack Ma or Texas real estate baron and Clarence Thomas benefactor Harlan Crow, whose huge spread in Keese Mill is a stone’s throw from Edwards’s childhood home. “We had all these rich people, so I suppose I was exposed to inequity early on,” she admits. “I saw that kind of stuff as a kid, and you don’t know what you’re internalizing, but you are.” Edwards was infuriated when Stefanik justified the behavior of the January 6 insurrectionists. “Locals here will say, ‘Elise backs the blue, and we back Elise,’ ” Edwards told us. “But police officers were killed [on January 6]. She doesn’t back the blue. She just says she does.”[10]
Judging by election results, this opinion is a minority one among Stefanik’s constituents. After seeing which way her party and her district were moving, Stefanik successfully morphed into a Republican who opposes not only big-D Democrats but small-d democrats, too. Trump has few more vigorous defenders in Congress, and with each step she took down into the dark heart of authoritarian politics, Stefanik’s stock rose with the GOP. When Rep. Liz Cheney turned against Trump over the January 6 insurrection, House Republicans replaced her as conference chair, the third-ranking position in party leadership, with Stefanik. And Stefanik got a prime-time speaking slot at Trump’s 2020 convention. People began suggesting that she could be Trump’s running mate in 2024. “Man, is she moving fast. That means at this rate she’ll be President in about six years,” Trump himself said about her at a 2022 fundraiser. “She goes to Washington as a young beautiful woman who took over and all of a sudden she becomes a rocket ship, she’s the boss.”[11]
Elise Stefanik’s story shows the reach of Trumpism in rural areas, and she is hardly alone. Politicians are attuned to nothing so much as their own fortunes, and if you have a White rural constituency, survival means standing behind Trump. Do it with enough skill and enthusiasm, and you might thrive.
To understand Donald Trump, you have to start with Barack Obama. Trump’s successful candidacy would not have been possible in the wake of any other presidency; it was the backlash against America’s first Black president that pushed Trump into the White House. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in 2017, Trump was “the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president,”[12] and no successful presidential candidate had made Whiteness so central to their campaign. It’s no accident that during the 2016 campaign, at times the only liberal commentators who seemed to take seriously the idea that Trump could win were Blacks and feminists, both of whom had an intimate understanding of the politics of backlash and who knew what it was like to be on its receiving end.
After the election was over, the results revealed something remarkable: 206 counties around the country that had voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012 swung to Trump in 2016. While they included some more urban and suburban counties—Suffolk County on Long Island, Macomb County in Michigan—most of them were exurban and rural counties. Of the 206 counties, 137 are classified by the census as “nonmetro,” places like Quitman County in Georgia, Traverse County in Minnesota, and Sargent County in North Dakota.[13]
These weren’t just swing counties going with whoever was the ultimate victor. In 2020, only 25 of the 206 swung back to Joe Biden, despite all that had happened in the prior four years. In other words, these aren’t swing counties flipping back and forth from election to election. Most of them turned Republican and will probably stay that way for a long time to come.
It is puzzling to see these kinds of places vote for the nation’s first Black president and then turn around and vote for someone running a nakedly bigoted campaign in the way Donald Trump did. But it makes more sense when you consider how unique both of Obama’s campaigns were. In 2008, he ran at a moment of economic cataclysm piled on top of an unpopular war and the departure of an incredibly unpopular Republican president. Many Americans were eager for any kind of change, no matter how radical it might have struck them to elect someone like Obama.
Four years later, Democrats ran a ruthlessly effective campaign against Mitt Romney that played on many of the themes that would be effective for Trump. Romney was a living caricature of the wealthy capitalist who was responsible for moving jobs out of small towns and rural areas across the country. You could see it in his history, his manner, and his approach to politics and policy. And it was how Democrats successfully portrayed him; one brutal ad aired by a pro-Obama PAC featured a man named Mike Earnest recounting how his bosses had him and his co-workers at a paper factory in Marion, Indiana, build a makeshift stage and how, days later, a group of men climbed that stage and told them that Bain Capital, Romney’s company, was shutting the plant and that they were all fired. “Turns out that when we built that stage, it was like building my own coffin,” the man says.[14] But Obama won reelection by half his margin of victory from four years earlier, and in 2012 rural turnout rates dropped more than twelve points, from 67.2 percent in 2008 to just 54.9 percent in 2012.[15]
Angst over the effects of late-stage capitalism remained a powerful theme in 2016, but now it was the Republican nominee arguing that the places where deindustrialization had hit hardest had been exploited by an “establishment” that included both parties. But Trump’s election wasn’t just a reversion after the two unique elections that preceded it. In many places, 2016 marked White rural voters’ final break with the Democratic Party.
The capsule history goes like this: After the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was the enemy of White southerners for a century, which meant that in many places in the South, every White voter was a Democrat, whether they were liberal or conservative. For decades, the Democratic Party suppressed its more liberal impulses on race in order to keep together a coalition that included southern segregationists, but the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s changed that for good. Southern conservative Whites began fleeing to the Republican Party; many of the most prominent archconservatives of later years, including such figures as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, had started their careers as Democrats.
This process, which political scientists call “realignment,” took a few decades to play out completely, and in some places, particularly where union membership had been strong, it took longer than in others. It can be seen most vividly in West Virginia, which is politically unique in many ways; like much of the South, it retained an affection for the Democratic Party as a legacy of the Civil War era, but unlike other southern states, it is almost entirely White and native born. According to the census, West Virginia was 91 percent non-Hispanic White in 2021, compared to 59 percent for the country as a whole. And while 13.5 percent of American residents were foreign-born that year, in West Virginia the figure was just 1.6 percent, smaller than that of any other state in the union. On those measures, Mingo County is West Virginia, but even more so: In 2021, the county was 95.7 percent non-Hispanic White and 0.3 percent foreign-born.
The long hold of the Democratic Party in West Virginia is also a function of its (formerly) high union representation. But as unionization faded—today, fewer than one in ten West Virginia workers is a union member—so did the Democratic Party’s fortunes. It happened in Mingo County even more starkly than in the state as a whole. Although Bill Clinton in 1996 was the last Democratic presidential candidate to take the state, Democrats kept winning Mingo County until 2004, when John Kerry beat George W. Bush there by thirteen points. But with every election since, the Republican margin of victory has grown, and just twelve years after Kerry’s comfortable win, Donald Trump beat Joe Biden in Mingo by a remarkable sixty-nine-point margin, 83–14. Out of fifty-five West Virginia counties, Kerry’s third-best performance in 2004 came in Mingo; just twelve short years later, it was Trump’s third-best.
How much did West Virginians and residents of Mingo County hate Barack Obama? In 2012, a man named Keith Judd paid the $2,500 filing fee to appear on the West Virginia Democratic primary ballot, despite his residing at the time in a Texas prison, where he was serving a 210-month sentence for extortion. Judd beat Barack Obama in Mingo by 60–40, even better than his 41 percent showing statewide.[16]
The swing from Democratic to Republican victories wasn’t as dramatic elsewhere in the country, and in many rural areas, the immediate reaction against Obama was tempered by the unique circumstances of his two elections. But when one looks at many of those Obama-Trump counties, one is tempted to ask, “What took them so long?” The answer seems to be that they were waiting for someone like Trump to redefine politics for them in all the ways he did—but especially when it came to race. And it helped that as much as there was racist rhetoric swirling through the political ether in 2008 and 2012, both McCain and Romney took pains to keep it at arm’s length, making it difficult for anyone to see them as the vehicle for a reassertion of White identity. Trump did just the opposite.
When one looks to the places where Trump’s support was most intense, again and again one arrives in majority-White rural areas. Consider the one hundred counties where Trump’s vote margins were widest in 2016. Almost all of them are rural counties, where Trump got anywhere from 85 percent of the vote (in Clinton County, Kentucky) to 95 percent (in Roberts County, Texas).
Trump’s support was most intense in some of the least-populated counties in the country. At the smallest end, there’s Loving County, Texas, which in 2020 had a population of 64, according to the census. Most of the rest have populations measured in four figures; only three of these top one hundred Trump counties have a population over 50,000. The largest is Cullman County, Alabama (population 88,000), whose county seat was a notorious “sundown town” during Jim Crow, where Blacks were not allowed to linger after sundown lest they risk being lynched. While Cullman County contains a small Black enclave called Colony, in the 2020 Census it remained 89 percent White, down from 94 percent ten years before.
To repeat, Cullman is the largest county on Trump’s 2016 Top One Hundred list. The rest are more sparsely populated, many significantly so. After four years of watching Trump in action—including all the scandals, the coronavirus pandemic, the collapse of the economy in 2020—what happened? The affection for Trump among people in these places, at least as expressed in their votes, only deepened.
In fact, in a year in which Trump lost to Joe Biden by 7 million votes in the country as a whole, Trump gained ground in these Trumpiest of counties. In a remarkable ninety-one out of those one hundred counties, he improved his vote percentage from 2016 to 2020. And in the nine remaining counties, his percentage declined by only a tiny bit (in seven of the nine, it went down by less than one percentage point). Raw vote totals are even starker: In ninety-eight of his one hundred top-performing counties in 2016, Trump got more total votes in 2020 than he did four years before.[17]
You can find these places of near-unanimous Trump support dotted across the country, places like King County, Texas (where Trump got 95 percent of the vote in 2020), Garfield County, Montana (94 percent), Wallace County, Kansas (93 percent), and Grant County, Nebraska (93 percent). All are rural, none had more than a thousand voters, and in every one, Trump did better in 2020 than he had in 2016. The smaller the community you lived in, the more likely you were to vote for Trump.[18] The smallest places are the backbone of “Trump Country.”
In these places, voters weren’t carefully judging Trump’s performance in office and then voting accordingly—or, if they were, it was only if we think of “performance” not as a matter of improving the practical circumstances of their lives or those of the country but as providing the “psychological wage” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about. He may not have done much to help them, but he provided them an emotional benefit few other politicians had.
By most traditional measures, Donald Trump is not a smart man. (People who are actually smart don’t go around saying, “I have a very good brain.”[19]) But he does have an instinct for marketing, and like any good comedian or performer, he spent a good deal of time trying out material on his audiences, which helped him understand what appealed to them. And when he hit upon the slogan “Make America Great Again,” he struck gold, especially with a certain kind of voter.
The most effective campaign slogans synopsize for voters what the problem is, what the solution is, and why the candidate is the only one who can get us from the first to the second. “Make America Great Again” does that. The problem is that America was once great but is great no longer, and Trump, the champion of everything loud, large, and covered in gold leaf, is the person to make it great again.
The slogan’s most important word is Again, because it emphasizes a past greatness that could be regained. This is a three-part story, beginning with a lost time of glory, followed by the fall, and ending with the restoration. It’s a very different story from the one liberals tell, especially Trump’s predecessor. Through his most important speeches, Barack Obama built a narrative of inexorable progress, of an America always heading in the direction of its noble ideals and becoming better all the time.[20]
That is not Trump’s story, nor is it the story that most rural Americans tell. The rural mythos is saturated with nostalgia, the idea that in an earlier time things were better than they are now. And sometimes, this is true: If someone in a small town walks down Main Street and sees boarded-up stores, they know that at one time those stores were open.
The GOP has long been the party of backlash: It takes whatever recent social change is most salient, tells voters to cultivate resentment and a sense of alienation about it, and then offers empty promises that all that unsettling progress can be reversed. Rural Whites are a particularly fertile audience for this kind of appeal because so much of their identity is infused with nostalgia. There are people everywhere who believe that things were better in the old days, but in rural America, one’s entire environment may be an embodiment of “the old days,” an environment that in its idealized form is fragile, if not doomed.
As political theorist Corey Robin wrote in his book The Reactionary Mind, from its beginnings, conservatism was at its heart about “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”[21] As much as Republicans worried in 2016 that he might not be a “real” conservative, in this sense Trump was the truest conservative of them all. He promised a restoration, a rollback, a reversion to a prior age, when the right people were atop society’s hierarchy and everyone else knew their place.
Trump never specified when this lost period of American greatness was. Some might have said the 1950s, but for many, the time of greatness came down to “when I was younger.” That’s when the world was simple, when things made sense, when you felt like anything was possible and you were the hero of your story. If you’re a middle-aged man who lacks the economic security you feel you deserve, and the country is changing and you feel alienated from popular culture, the idea that America might revert to the time when you were at your peak sounds awfully appealing.
For those men, watching liberals celebrate all the social changes that caused them distress was particularly galling. Then along came Trump, who said that nothing in America worked anymore, that we had been made into a bunch of losers, that we were living in an absolute hellhole, and that the only way to drag ourselves out was to turn back the clock.
This included a promise of restored dignity through dominance, an idea that could be found in one of Trump’s core promises: to build a wall on the southern border to keep out immigrants. Trump didn’t just promise to build a wall, he promised to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. It became a call-and-response at his rallies, whenever he brought up the wall. “And who’s going to pay for it?” he’d say to the crowd, to which they’d respond, “Mexico!”
To understand where Trump was coming from, you have to remember that his worldview is built on the ideas of domination and submission. As far as he is concerned, nearly every human interaction is a zero-sum contest, and if you aren’t the winner, then you’re a loser. Because of this, Trump understood at a visceral level the way many people, especially men, felt, that in the decline of their communities something beyond income had been taken from them. They had lost some of their dignity, their status, and their manhood. So, he found ways to promise that if he were president, they could regain it.
Making Mexico pay for the wall was not about money; we have far more money than Mexico does. It was about domination, like Michael Corleone in Godfather II telling Senator Geary he expected him to pay the fee for the Corleones’ gaming license personally. The point was that Mexico would have to kneel before us, take out their thin wallets, and hand over the money to fund their own humiliation. And humiliation was precisely the point: By forcing them to submit, we would regain our own dignity.
Just after taking office, Trump had a phone conversation with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto in which he begged Peña Nieto not to say publicly that Mexico would never pay for the wall. “You cannot say anymore that the United States is going to pay for the wall. I am just going to say that we are working it out,” Trump said, to which Peña Nieto replied, “This is an issue related to the dignity of Mexico and goes to the national pride of my country.” Which, of course, was precisely the point.[22]
While Trump eventually stopped talking about Mexico’s paying for the wall, the notion did its job during the campaign, thrilling his supporters with the dream. They surely knew it was never going to happen, but just the idea was enough to make them laugh and cheer. Trump offered this kind of wish fulfillment again and again, his campaign an exercise in fantasy that allowed his supporters to indulge their desires.
It’s hard to know how many rural Whites, especially men, knew how false his promises were. Trump couldn’t make all the immigrants disappear or force China to give us back our jobs; nor could he undo decades of social advancement for women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ+ Americans. At the end of his time in office, no fewer people were speaking Spanish down at your local grocery store than had been before he was elected, kids today were no less infuriating and inscrutable, and the societal hierarchies that had once put certain people in an advantageous position had not been reinforced. The clock did not turn back. But there was no evidence that his rural supporters held him responsible or blamed him for these failures. The fact that he had given voice to their anger was enough.Trump’s messages were not intended solely for rural Whites, but they resonated strongest in the heartland.
As soon as the 2016 votes were counted, a vigorous debate began on what could have produced the swell of Trump votes among the White working class and in rural areas. Was it “economic anxiety,” as so many in the news media declared? Or was it racism, as many liberals alleged? The real answer is: It’s complicated.
One thing we can say is that on an individual level, economic hardship alone did not seem to push people toward voting for Trump. Instead, his voters were motivated by wider concerns, many of which were not about them personally but about how they saw their communities and their country. What mattered more than whether you had lost your job were things like the perception that in today’s world, traditionally dominant groups were threatened.[23] This was as true for rural residents as for anyone else, if not more so; one study found that a sense that rural people’s way of life was disrespected was a particularly strong predictor of Trump support, even when variables such as party identification were held constant.[24]
This didn’t mean that support for Trump had nothing to do with economic decline, but there is a subtle distinction between what you personally experience and what you see around you. There are plenty of people who are doing okay financially but whose communities are struggling. And it was in many of these places where Trump not only got the most support but increased his party’s vote compared to what Mitt Romney had garnered four years before.
As a further layer of complication, it was places that had seen a decline in fortunes where Trump’s candidacy was often most compelling; they may not always have been in desperate straits, but they are now, and people there still remember what it was like when things were better. As one group of researchers wrote, the places where Trump made the greatest gains compared to Mitt Romney’s performance of four years before “are not all among the poorest places in America (though Appalachia certainly holds that distinction), but they are places that are generally worse off today than they were a generation or two ago.”[25]
But it didn’t play out the same way everywhere. One study of Iowa’s shift to the right in 2016 found that economic distress didn’t affect whether a county moved toward Trump; what mattered was how rural, White, and educated the county was (fewer college graduates translated to more Trump votes).[26] Researchers also found that hostility toward Blacks, Hispanics, and LGBTQ+ people was a powerful predictor of support for Trump—but not of support for other Republicans or for the party as a whole, suggesting that Trump’s bigotry was uniquely appealing to some voters.[27]
All this means that if we ask whether Trump’s appeal to rural voters was “really” about economics or cultural resentments, we’re posing the wrong question. Both were true: His critique of a “rigged” system resonated with people who believed both parties had failed their communities in building prosperity, and his poisonous cultural politics resonated with people who had been waiting for someone to express their own dark feelings in the way he did. As political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck found, “economic sentiments were refracted through group identities.” What mattered was less whether a voter thought they might lose their job than whether they thought their group—that is, White people—was losing ground to immigrants and minorities.[28]
As the literature on rural resentment makes clear, these forces were present before Trump, just waiting for the right candidate to exploit them. And though these sentiments aren’t all about race, race was the inescapable backdrop to Trump’s campaigns. Strange as it is to say, the two campaigns involving America’s first Black president turned out to have been less determined by race than the two campaigns that followed, both of which featured two White candidates.
Race mattered less in 2008 and 2012 in large part because neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney ran campaigns based on White identity. There were certainly other Republicans who did so—and who, during Obama’s first term, did everything they could to race-bait—but when it came to Election Day, White voters were not able to cast their votes for an avatar of Whiteness in the way they would be able to in 2016. In fact, polling showed that a substantial proportion of Whites who voted for Obama in 2012 held views that were dismissive of racism and unsympathetic toward Black Americans’ struggles.[29] Those voters obviously had other reasons to support Obama, but what they didn’t have was a Republican candidate working to elevate the salience of their White identity. That candidate arrived four years later.
The same effect is evident on the related issue of immigration. When Mitt Romney said in the primary campaign that immigration policy should be geared toward “self-deportation” (i.e., making life for undocumented immigrants unpleasant enough that they returned to their countries of origin voluntarily), it created enormous controversy, and Romney was roundly criticized for being cruel and unfeeling. He responded by arguing that his position was more humane than he was being given credit for, repeatedly saying that “we’re not going to round people up.”[30] When Obama challenged Romney in their second debate on his stated support for a controversial anti-immigrant law in Arizona, the former Bain Capital executive insisted that he supported only the part of the law that required employers to verify the citizenship status of their workers.
The net effect was to communicate to voters that Romney was kind of anti-immigrant, or at least opposed to illegal immigration, but he certainly was not crusading to re-Whiten the country. Four years later, Trump was unequivocal in portraying immigration as a source of nothing but cultural infiltration, economic misery, and horrific crime. He told a lie about Muslim Americans in New Jersey celebrating the September 11 attacks. He proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States. He told a series of lurid stories about “beautiful” White women—it was always very important to stress that the women were physically attractive—being murdered by undocumented immigrants. He said an American-born judge with Mexican heritage presiding over a case in which Trump was being sued for fraud couldn’t be fair to him because “He’s a Mexican.”[31] When his supporters set upon a Black Lives Matter protester with punches and kicks at one of his rallies, he responded with “Maybe he should have been roughed up,”[32] just one of many times Trump encouraged his supporters to engage in mob violence.[33]
For many years, it was assumed that successful racial appeals had to be offered subtly, to provide voters a kind of internal plausible deniability, so that they could tell themselves they weren’t being racist when they responded to such appeals. By the time 2016 came around, this was no longer true.[34] White identity had become important enough that Trump could succeed by wearing his bigotry on his sleeve.
So, not only were both economic and identity appeals effective in the aggregate, but in many cases they were doubtlessly present in the same individuals. There’s nothing about being upset at the decline of manufacturing that prevents you from also being upset about immigrants or the changing ideas about gender. The point is that questions of circumstance and questions of identity combined in intricate ways to make rural America the most fertile ground for Trumpism to grow. In the end, even the Trump campaign itself was surprised by how much support it got from rural voters. “Trump supporters are more rural than even average Republicans,” said the campaign’s digital director after the 2016 race ended. “What we saw on Election Day is that they’re even more rural than we thought.”[35]
Right-wing populism has always combined resentment toward an “elite” with anger at immigrants or racial minorities, painting a picture in which the supposedly truest citizens are assaulted from both above and below. Both halves of this appeal resonate in rural areas, the first because it’s largely true (rural areas really have been screwed over by rapacious capitalists) and the second because it activates the distrust of outsiders and fears of racial diversification common in places that were homogeneous for so long.
In earlier elections, Republicans had trouble fully exploiting resentment toward the elite, because Republicans so obviously were the elite, both personally and in their economic agenda. While they tried to encourage this resentment in various ways, especially by working to define the elite in noneconomic terms as college professors and Hollywood celebrities rather than CEOs and venture capitalists, it was always a complicated argument to make.
Like no Republican in memory, Trump offered the entire right-wing populist argument with no hedging and no weasel words. Immigrants, he said, were rapists and murderers. The economic powers that be stole your jobs and sold them to China. His contempt for intellectuals was unapologetic, and he gloried in their contempt for him, which was highly appealing to his rural supporters. As one study found, those with a strong rural identity are more anti-intellectual than the larger group of people who just happen to live in a rural area but who may or may not see rurality as central to who they are. Intellectuals may be seen by strong rural identifiers as both inherently urban (and therefore alien) and threatening to rural people.[36]
There were some false notes in Trump’s rhetoric, few more jarring than those arising from his desperate desire for acceptance into the sphere of the very elite upon whom he heaped scorn. His whole life, Trump wanted nothing more than to be welcomed by the Manhattan brahmins who saw him as a vulgar Queens climber, and he was as apt to whine about their personal affront to him as the hardship they had imposed on the working classes. “I always hate when they say, well the elite decided not to go to something I’m doing, right, the elite,” he told the crowd at a rally in Charleston, West Virginia. “I have a lot more money than they do. I have a much better education than they have. I’m smarter than they are. I have many much more beautiful homes than they do. I have a better apartment at the top of Fifth Avenue. Why the hell are they the elite? Tell me.”[37]
One might have expected the audience of West Virginians listening to this riff to be puzzled at this expression of Trump’s personal resentment, but if they were, it didn’t last. And critically, Trump never suggested any kind of systemic change to correct the predations of the elite; his solution to everything was he himself. If trade agreements had decimated manufacturing in the heartland, it was because they were “bad deals” agreed to by people who lacked his brilliant negotiating skills; he’d fix everything by negotiating “great deals” instead. “Draining the swamp” turned out to mean not eliminating corruption and influence peddling but replacing the existing set of corrupt influence peddlers with his own collection of crooks and cronies. “I alone can fix it,” he promised at his 2016 convention speech, and if he didn’t get around to fixing it…well, too bad.
From the beginning of the primary campaign, Trump offered a vivid contrast to the rest of the field, in ways that were bound to appeal to people naturally suspicious of existing power structures and everything we put under the broad heading of “the establishment.” He had never held public office; he didn’t speak in the careful and practiced cadences of a politician; for all his dishonesty, he often displayed a shocking brand of candor (as when he happily admitted to getting politicians to give him favors by donating to their campaigns); and he was contemptuous of everything about politics.
His candidacy thus exposed a profound division between the Republican Party and the base of voters upon whom it relied, making clear that the base and the elite are different people with different priorities. This division can be seen in any number of ways, but one vital way is the personal comfort most Republican elites have with the kind of social changes they themselves exploit for votes. A group of researchers used surveys of Michigan voters and insiders around the state government in Lansing to demonstrate that “aversion to social change is strongly predictive of support for Trump at the mass level, but not among political elites.”[38] The study showed not just that elite Republicans supported Trump regardless of whether they were resistant to social change, but that they as a whole were not nearly as resistant to change as Republican voters were.
As people in Washington know, plenty of elite Republicans attended Ivy League schools, have gay friends, and are eager to hire Black or Latino conservatives, yet craft messages and campaigns that are saturated with anti-intellectualism, race-baiting, homophobia, xenophobia, and a rhetoric of anger over supposedly lost American greatness. Those elites are giving the base what they think it wants, and while they’re usually not wrong, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that much of the GOP elite views its base as a bunch of easily manipulated rubes.
Across the country, people looked at Trump’s personality and either loved or hated what they found there. But what was not so apparent in 2016 was that so much of what liberals hated about Trump actually endeared him to rural Whites.
Whenever we spoke to liberals in rural areas, they’d tell us that something changed in 2016. Before then, while it may not have been particularly comfortable to be outnumbered, politics didn’t have the kind of hard edge it took on once Trump came to dominate the political environment. Afterward, these liberals felt threatened in a way they hadn’t been before, as a new anger came bubbling to the surface, directed at them. Trump’s presence, and eventually his election victory, gave rural Whites permission to let out the sentiments they had formerly suppressed either under pressure from a culture they resented or in the demand of simple civility. It was a demand they no longer felt obligated to respect.
We were hardly the only ones who noticed. One researcher found a secret group of Hillary Clinton supporters in rural Texas that formed just after the 2016 election, whom she described as “women so afraid to speak openly with their community that they met by nightfall.” One of them described a friend visiting from out of town who “was run off the road by some guys in a truck pointing at the Obama sticker on her windshield. And then other people have had their stickers pulled off their car and vandalized. You know, it’s pretty hostile.”[39]
Black Democrats we interviewed in Eastern North Carolina shared similar stories. State senator Kandie Smith told us about how hard she works to visit as many of her constituents as she can, but when she knocks on doors in the rural parts of her district, “I have to be very careful. Because where have I seen the most Confederate flags or more Trump stickers? In the rural areas. More so than you see it in the other areas, because [some people in suburbs or cities] believe it, but they don’t want their neighbors to see it…. But you go to the rural areas? Man, everywhere. And you got to be careful.” Smith emphasized that it wasn’t all the White people in rural areas, but enough of them. “I’ve been out there. I’ve had some have been very nice, and some will listen to me. And then some, I know I need to get off their land before I get shot.”[40]
Geneva Riddick-Faulkner, a county commissioner in Northampton County, told us that on multiple occasions she has received envelopes mailed to her home containing blank pieces of paper; she believes White Republicans are sending them in the hope that the letters will be returned to the post office as undeliverable and that they can then use this to say that she doesn’t actually live at her address as a pretext for removing her from office. This technique has roots in Republican attempts to purge voter rolls of Democrats. “How many letters are you going to send with a blank piece of paper in it? I live in my house,” Riddick-Faulkner told us with a barely perceptible hint of anger under a resigned laugh. “And there are people who still have Confederate flags flying and Trump 2020 flags flying.” Riddick-Faulker and many of her constituents are just as rural as their White neighbors. But the bonds of shared rural identities are too often broken by the divisions of race. “That became the new Confederate flag here,” she went on. “The ones who didn’t want to put that up, they put the Trump flags up.”[41]
The Trump flag represents far more than a statement of intention to vote for a candidate; it’s an expression of a worldview and a personal identification with the man. It’s not just belligerent; it’s aggrieved, a way of saying, The world has done us wrong, and this is our response. And no one, despite all he has been given, thinks the world has done him wrong more than Donald Trump.
While all presidents fume at their opponents and believe the media are unfair to them, never in American history did a president spend as much time whining and complaining about his alleged victimization as Trump did. “Over the course of your life, you will find that things are not always fair. You will find that things happen to you that you do not deserve and that are not always warranted,” he told Coast Guard cadets at their commencement from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in 2017. “Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media. No politician in history—and I say this with great surety—has been treated worse or more unfairly.”[42] In his speech announcing his 2024 campaign, he said, “I’m a victim. I will tell you I’m a victim.”[43]
To most people, this complaint probably seemed utterly preposterous. Who could have less claim to victimhood than Trump, a man born into wealth who spent a lifetime breaking rules and probably laws, skittering away from his debts, and conning people out of their life savings without ever experiencing a moment of accountability?
But to many rural Whites, that’s only another reason to love him. They can see in him an exaggerated embodiment of their own sense of victimhood, even if they, unlike him, may have actual reasons to believe they’ve gotten the short end of the stick. If he can claim that status, surely they can, too. One study published in 2022 found that people who believed they had been victimized by getting less than they deserved were more likely to support Trump, even when controlling for a range of other variables, including party identification and political ideology.[44]
And just like him, they’ve been looked down upon and laughed at by those snooty, self-satisfied elites. Even before the 2016 primaries were over, The Washington Post tallied over one hundred times that Trump said someone—China, OPEC, Mexico, the entire world—was laughing at America.[45] The irony was that Trump, who was so desperate not to be laughed at, wound up being laughed at more than any other human being on earth. Those who feel denigrated and disrespected by popular culture could relate.
If you were looking for someone to say what others only implied, Trump was your man. He was hardly the only culture warrior in the GOP, but what distinguished him was how explicit he was about everything. He didn’t bother pretending to be concerned about abstractions like “equality” or “religious liberty,” or to favor legal immigration but not illegal immigration. He’d come right out and say that White people and Christians are being oppressed, and we shouldn’t let in anyone from “shithole countries.” He made himself the face of the racist “birther” conspiracy theory when other politicians only danced around it in an attempt to encourage it while retaining some plausible deniability.
Everywhere you look, you can find character flaws in Trump that, if understood the right way, might resonate with rural people whose experiences are radically different from his. For instance, people in rural areas, particularly in the rural South, are no doubt aware of in their daily lives what scholars call the “culture of honor,” the idea that interpersonal slights must be answered quickly and decisively, even with violence, lest one lose social standing. This culture of honor has been suggested as an explanation for high rates of homicide in the South and elevated levels of violence in rural areas.[46] While there is some scholarly disagreement about its sources and effects—for instance, some argue that it operates more strongly where structures of authority, including police, are more distant[47]—at the very least it’s something with which people are quite familiar.
Trump enacts his own, very visible version of the culture of honor, in which every slight he encounters, no matter how trivial or from whom, is met with venomous retaliation. Other politicians, celebrities, random citizens on Twitter—if they said something mean about him, he was going to strike back no matter how petty and shallow it made him look. As he said in one of his books, “If you do not get even you are just a schmuck!…When you are wronged, go after those people, because it is a good feeling, and because other people will see you doing it.”[48] One pair of scholars studying different working-class communities found that for many people, Trump’s obsession with those he believes have wronged him is a sign of strength.[49]
Even the common, and perfectly accurate, criticism that Trump doesn’t practice what he preaches likely resonates in rural areas, where you often find a strong moral code that is regularly violated by many of the people who live there. The fact that rural areas have plenty of infidelity and teen parenthood (which occurs at significantly higher rates among rural Americans than city dwellers[50]) doesn’t necessarily make people reject traditional “family values”; it can make them cling to those values all the more fervently, as they consider them under constant, visible threat. Seeing someone like Trump mouth the words of propriety and piety with obvious insincerity made him, if nothing else, deeply recognizable.
Trump’s view of the world as one made up of winners and losers, where only suckers play by the rules, is also one that can appeal to even those who in their own lives mostly follow the rules. Trump does not offer paeans to the timeless truth of the American dream, which people in rural areas know well is so often a lie. They see all around them people who work plenty hard but who continue to struggle. Even if they assign a strong moral value to the willingness to work hard, they know it is anything but a guarantee of success and prosperity. Trump tells them that to succeed, you do need to work hard, but you also need to be shrewd and ruthless, willing to exploit others and destroy your enemies. Even if they aren’t living his brand of amoral ambition in their own lives, one can see why many would decide he’s right.
After the 2020 election, some rural places became epicenters of the looniest manifestations of the Big Lie, the belief held by Trump’s supporters that the election was stolen from him. In a number of counties, the shenanigans featured local officials allowing Trumpist conspiracy theorists to come into their offices and copy confidential data for the purposes of uncovering phantom voter fraud. In rural Mesa County, Colorado, the county clerk, Tina Peters, was indicted on ten counts related to her allegedly allowing pro-Trump “consultants” to copy data from official computers as part of their wild goose chase in search of voter fraud.[51] Peters then ran for secretary of state, attempting to become the chief elections official for all of Colorado; she lost in the Republican primary.
In Coffee County, Georgia, surveillance video that became public in September 2022 showed a group of “consultants” hired by the unhinged Trumpist attorney Sidney Powell arriving at the county election office on January 7, 2021, being met and brought inside by a Republican official, and then not leaving until 2.5 hours after the office’s closing time. Though Trump won Coffee County by forty points, the election supervisor there said she allowed the men in because she did not trust Joe Biden’s win in Georgia and hoped they could prove “that this election was not done true and correct.”[52]
As shocking as those incidents were, more often it was rural election officials trying to do their jobs and run fair and efficient elections who were being hounded by residents convinced of dark conspiracies to steal the election from Trump. And the most fervid election conspiracies flourish in rural areas, even when the results are exactly what the conservatives who live there hope for. To take just one example, in rural Nye County, Nevada, the county commission voted in 2022 to ditch all its voting machines and count ballots only by hand, after hearing paranoid testimony about counting machines switching votes—even though Trump had beaten Joe Biden in Nye by over forty points. “It just made me feel helpless,” said the county clerk, a Republican who had administered elections there for two decades. She resigned.[53]
Asked why it seemed to happen so much in rural areas, election law expert Richard Hasen of UCLA told us, “Because this is where these folks can have the most impact. They live there and can pressure and in some cases vote out of office these officials. They can show up and dominate local meetings.”[54] A lot of devoted public servants in rural areas are left wondering whether safeguarding democracy is worth the aggravation.
Election denialism isn’t just about the acceptance of bizarre conspiracy theories. It’s rooted in something Trump says often: that your political opponents are not just wrong, they are so evil as to be almost inhuman. (“Our biggest threat remains the sick, sinister, and evil people from within our own country,” he said at one speech in 2022. “This nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you.”[55]) Once you accept this, you must also accept that they cannot possibly hold power legitimately. Any election they win is fraudulent by definition, and therefore, you should have no loyalty to the processes of democracy, as they are merely tools of your own destruction. Abandoning democracy isn’t just something unfortunate you might have to consider; at times, it becomes something you must do in order to preserve your family, your community, and your way of life.
In a speech in early 2023, Trump told a conservative audience, “In 2016, I declared I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”[56] It was an apt distillation of what he had always been about, a bitter sauce of resentment reduced to its viscous essence.
What is retribution, after all? Nothing but the opportunity to see those you feel have wronged you suffer in equal proportion. You will get nothing material from retribution; your struggles will not be lessened, your pain will not be eased, your children will not be granted the things of which you have been deprived. But you will get the momentary satisfaction of watching the distress of someone you despise.
This kind of validation of their resentments was what Trump always offered rural people. Yes, he made a bunch of transparently bogus promises about how he’d turn their communities into a paradise. But the real promise—and the one on which he delivered—was the opportunity to give a giant middle finger to everyone they felt looked down on them, the liberals and the urbanites and the establishment.
Political developments often seem obvious and predictable in retrospect. So, with the phenomenon of Trump’s appeal to rural America, it’s tempting to ask why nobody saw it coming. Why couldn’t Democrats speak to that same sense of anger over lost opportunities and community decline? Maybe they could have, with different candidates and different policy choices. Bernie Sanders blamed NAFTA for shuttered factories just as Trump did, and who knows? Maybe Sanders could have pulled more rural votes than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden did.
But Trump’s peculiar combination of character flaws and venomous impulses is unique, and uniquely suited to the disappointments and resentment so many White rural Americans feel. When Trump supporters are asked what it is about him that they love, they often say, “He tells it like it is.” This means not that he speaks verifiable truths—no politician in American, if not world, history, lies so promiscuously—but that he says things they want to hear, in a way they want to hear them. He does not hedge or shade or speak with care, especially not when he is being vulgar and hateful. He says what he and they believe, without regard to who might scold him for it. Places where tribalism exerts a powerful hold found a hero in the most tribalist of presidents, someone who is forever drawing lines of race, nationality, and belief, with his people on one side and the despicable vermin on the other.
That is what heartland folks find so intoxicating about him. That’s what leads you not just to vote for a man but to paint his name on the side of your barn.
Even if Trump fails in 2024 and becomes nothing more than the laughable two-bit grifter he always has been at heart, his effect on the politics of rural America will be felt for a generation, if not more. He showed every Republican what rural Whites, and the GOP base more broadly, really want and how to give it to them. The result is a politics saturated in bitterness and bile, and a party whose most loyal voters don’t expect their leaders to offer them anything but the ugliest kind of emotional satisfaction. Even when Trump is gone, in rural America he will still be king. And the rest of the country will suffer for it.