McDowell County, West Virginia—the birthplace of the food-stamps program—is watching its security internet collapse resulting from President Donald Trump’s home coverage regulation.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy despatched his agriculture secretary at hand out meals playing cards to a miner’s household in Welch, launching the pilot that may change into the fashionable Supplemental Vitamin Help Program, or SNAP. At this time, lots of the county’s 17,000 residents depend on SNAP. Greater than half of the kids are enrolled within the Kids’s Well being Insurance coverage Program, and one-third of seniors rely on Medicaid.
Now the Related Press experiences that new eligibility restrictions embedded in Trump’s new regulation will tighten entry to SNAP, hitting counties like McDowell particularly exhausting—locations the place a 3rd of the inhabitants lives under the poverty line. Nonprofits that had been already on the brink are shedding workers or burning by means of reserves simply to remain afloat. As Rosemary Ketchum, the manager director of the West Virginia Nonprofit Affiliation, instructed the AP, “These federal cuts are starving people.”
Final yr, Trump received 79% of the vote in McDowell County.
West Virginia isn’t simply one of many poorest states within the nation—it’s additionally one of many reddest, and it’s the third-most depending on federal help. It’s a real triumph of conservative culture-war politics that the individuals who most rely on authorities companies are those voting for the celebration that destroys these companies. These persons are voting for their very own demise, cheering the most recent assault on a transgender child whereas their meals help vanishes.
And since West Virginia depends so closely on federal cash, it’s absorbing the total weight of Trump’s insurance policies. Coal jobs vanish, Medicaid shrinks, meals applications dry up, catastrophe aid disappears—and but MAGA devotion stays untouched. Republican governors in pink states, pleased with their rock-bottom tax charges, at the moment are privately begging Trump to not lower the federal support they will’t dwell with out. In West Virginia, federal {dollars} make up practically 50% of the state price range. However that doesn’t cease them from ranting about so-called socialism in California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Washington—the very states subsidizing them.
Coal miners wave indicators as then-candidate Donald Trump speaks throughout a rally in Charleston, West Virginia, in Might 2016.
And but we liberals by no means complained about that association. We had been blissful to assist the much less lucky—sure, together with white folks in dirt-poor Appalachia. And the way did they repay that generosity? By voting for the man who’s now gutting the very applications retaining them alive.
West Virginia isn’t alone, in fact. As I famous in my story on how pink counties rely on the very authorities they hate, that is the nationwide sample. Us coastal elites have been subsidizing these salt-of-the-earth, bootstrap varieties for many years. And McDowell County would be the clearest instance but: The place is completely reliant on federal {dollars}, and it’s now being crushed by the insurance policies of lawmakers it helped elect.
The folks of McDowell County helped create SNAP. Now they’re prone to lose a lot of it—not as a result of it failed, however as a result of they voted for leaders who see federal applications because the enemy, not the answer. And people cuts aren’t theoretical. They’re meals skipped, hospitals closing, and seniors going hungry.
Don’t fear—most individuals in McDowell will nonetheless discover a method to blame Democrats like Joe Biden or Barack Obama for his or her distress. The MAGA cult is tough to flee, and West Virginia is all in. All we are able to do is shake our heads and marvel at this ongoing, breathtaking act of self-destruction.
