This morning, Americans in cities will wake up to a country they can't understand and don't recognize. They will see that a reality TV star was elected President of the United States. A man who made outlandish promises he will never be able to keep, and maybe never will try to keep. They will struggle to understand how this happened, and the answer they will come up with is that rural Americans overwhelmingly elected this loudmouthed, blowhard overgrown child. Will he bring steel mill jobs back to Youngstown and Pittsburgh? No. Will he overturn the economics of shale gas and bring coal jobs back? No. Will he dismantle Obamacare and make a dysfunctional health care system even more dysfunctional? Yes. Will he allow Republicans in Washington to run wild with tax cuts and social spending cuts? Yes. Will he continue to be a complete buffoon? Certainly.
If Republicans do push forward their tax and spending plans, rural Americans will suffer. Even worse, whenever the inevitable backlash against Trump and Republicans come, there will be no interest in helping out rural areas which need help but obviously don't want it. Do not expect the heroin epidemic to let up. Do not expect the rural economy to improve. As the farm economy tanks, do not expect help to come from Washington. People in cities just aren't going to care. They see hateful assholes who gave them the finger and celebrated doing it. Rural Americans did a stellar job choosing the worst possible candidate, and the worst possible legislature, and all Americans will suffer because of it. Don't expect the Democrats in the House to bail out the Republican leadership when the do-nothing idiot Freedom Caucus holds out against the budget. The Republican Party owns everything that happens from here on out, and it won't be glorious. Sure, the statistics showed that the Bush administration was horrific, but you couldn't tell a Trump voter that. Going forward, they have no one else to blame. Patent medicine salesmen loved to move from town to town and rip off the rubes. Trump continued that long tradition. It's morning in America. We'll move on. We won't improve, at least for the time being.
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