As Ron Brownstein discussed in the clip above, and in his recent article at The Atlantic, ‘Trump Is About To Betray His Rural Voters’, Trump’s agenda from tariffs, to mass deportations, to cuts to Medicaid, to school vouchers will disproportionately harm Americans in rural communities.
And, as Brownstein noted, his article was written before the news broke that Trump and DOGE are eyeing privatizing the US Postal Service:
President-elect Donald Trump has expressed a keen interest in privatizing the U.S. Postal Service in recent weeks, three people with knowledge of the matter said, a move that could shake up consumer shipping and business supply chains and push hundreds of thousands of federal workers out of the government.
Trump has discussed his desire to overhaul the Postal Service at his Mar-a-Lago estate with Howard Lutnick, his pick for commerce secretary and the co-chair of his presidential transition, the people said. Earlier this month, Trump also convened a group of transition officials to ask for their views on privatizing the agency, one of the people said.
Told of the mail agency’s annual financial losses, Trump said the government should not subsidize the organization, the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations.
Trump’s specific plans for overhauling the Postal Service were not immediately clear. But he feuded with the nation’s mail carrier as president in 2019, trying to force it to hand over key functions — including rate-setting, personnel decisions, labor relations and managing relationships with its largest clients — to the Treasury Department.
Here’s more from the discussion with Brownstein on CNN:
BROWNSTEIN: Yes. Look, I mean, Trump’s support in rural America seems to have no, you know, meaningful ceiling. I mean, he approached 70 percent of the vote in the most rural counties, 60 percent of the vote in small metros, even more than he won in 2016. But when you look at the specifics of his policy agenda, there is a lot in there that put rural communities at risk.
You know, in the first term, the biggest losers from Trump’s tariffs were agricultural interests. He ultimately had to spend more than $60 billion in public money to try to basically buy peace in rural communities after foreign nations retaliated against American agricultural products in response to Trump’s tariffs, he’s now proposing even bigger tariffs, mass deportation. The estimates from the Peterson Institute for International Economics is that would reduce the workforce in Ag communities more than in any other industry.
Medicaid is especially important in rural communities to rural hospitals. Fewer people in rural areas have private health insurance, and thus they are more at risk from the cuts that Trump and Republicans have been talking about and Medicaid by the way in particular, treatment for the opioid epidemic is especially reliant on Medicaid in rural areas. And that is something Trump has pledged to prioritize.
And finally, Trump has repeatedly said most recently when he announced his appointment for his nominee for Education secretary, he wants to pursue a universal voucher system. We have seen in state after state rural voters oppose school voucher plans. For example, in Kentucky and Nebraska this year because they recognize that rural schools have even less margin for error if they lose people than urban schools.
By the way, since I wrote that, Jessica, today, “The Washington Post” reported on a fifth major policy area that could disproportionately hurt rural communities, which is the idea of privatizing the Postal Service. It is the provider, the deliverer of last resort in a lot of remote places in the US and a privatization plan would probably have a disproportionate impact on the economies of rural.
So you add it all up, there are a lot of places where the interests of rural communities may collide with their ideological sympathy or convergence with Trump.
That’s a polite way of putting that they’re about to get to their FAFO stage with Trump very quickly.
