Christy Ratliff is sitting in a folding chair in a public school gym in Grundy, Virginia, waiting for her number to be called. She arrived at 4 a.m. on this October Saturday to secure her position in line to have eight teeth pulled. Genetic gum disease, she explains, has left most of them rotten or broken. She hooks a finger to pull down her lip and show me gruesome damage—the kind most dentists see only in textbooks.
Ratliff is 29 years old.
Grundy, the seat of Buchanan County, sits deep in the Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia. This weekend, it’s hosting a free clinic courtesy of Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit like Doctors Without Borders, but for places in the United States where the health outcomes are as grim as those in many developing countries. RAM founder Stan Brock once suggested that because Grundy is so inaccessible, his volunteers should literally parachute into town, as he once did while working in rural Africa.
Despite all the faith these locals have put in Trump, his second term is threatening their precarious existence. Few places in America are as reliant on the federal government. According to a recent study, 45 percent of the personal income of Buchanan County residents comes from Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and government disability programs. Federal dollars also account for about 15 percent of the county budget, subsidizing nearly every aspect of local life—education, economic development, disaster recovery, housing, sewer infrastructure. And Trump has succeeded in jeopardizing or eliminating nearly all of it.
“We live in a remote part of the world,” the driver says, declining to give his name. He’s here for denture work because Bradshaw has no dentist. He grew up in a holler, and like generations of his people, worked in the coal industry, including once for a company owned by Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.)—until his paychecks bounced, a chronic problem at Justice’s mines. Now he works in logging. He has no health insurance, he says. Like 80 percent of McDowell County’s voters, he cast his ballot for Trump: “He’s kicking ass and taking names. He’s cleaning up the gangs. He’s doing awesome with the immigrants, too.”
They love him because they think they can just keep collecting money from blue states with no consequence. Time to stop supporting these deadbeats.
I think it’s more they easily fell for the propaganda. If I understand correctly information is still at best local television and radio and unfortunately they are slowly considered obsolete by corporate America, and when it comes to providing tech Silicon Valley doesn’t see much in the way of profit given so little in wealth exists.
And oh would you look at that guess which party is not big on the government funding free and/or affordable communication technology but rather “let the free market figure it out.”
I mean, voting for Trump literally did more to cut them off than anything else. It’s not like you need to pile in on top of the degree to which, say, Appalachians have dicked themselves over.
Did it, though? I want my tax dollars to help the good people in my state, not these window lickers.
So, I’m pretty exasperated with the Trump fans too.
However, I also did do what I could to understand where people are coming from. Bought several books written by political science people talking about the elections and motivations.
Let me put it this way. A lot of people here on the left, on the Threadiverse, would probably criticize Margaret Thatcher because she largely shut down coal mining in the UK.
The coal workers in the article are basically in the same boat as those coal workers. Hillary Clinton once — truthfully, if perhaps not showing a lot of sensitivity — said that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of work”. Those people are right wing, but in significant part, they’re voting for Trump for the same reasons that the coal miners in the UK voted for Labour — because they’re scared of their coal mining jobs going away, want more demand for their labor. For them, Hillary Clinton is their Margaret Thatcher, and Trump at least represents the possibility of salvation.
We have to stop burning coal. We can’t continue emitting carbon dioxide.
I agree. I’m not arguing that we should mine more coal. I think that shutting down coal mining here is the right move (and, for that matter, that shutting it down in the UK was too). But I do think that it’s important to at least understand why people are doing some of the things they’re doing, even if one doesn’t agree with them.
There aren’t that many people employed by the coal mining industry directly, not anymore, but there are companies that support the coal mining industry. Maybe they provide rail or maintenance services. Maybe they’re a restaurant that serves people who get money from the coal industry. Stuff like that. Coal goes away, so do the supporting businesses.
Those people probably aren’t making very good political moves, not by my estimation. But they’re doing it because if the industry goes away, so do their jobs. So do a lot of their villages. I’d say that Trump is lying, yeah, but Trump is promising them hope – a coal renaissance.
Wyoming and West Virginia are our two top coal-mining states. They also had the highest percentage vote share of all states for Trump in the 2024 general presidential election.
And then you have the oil and natural gas industries. Those are a lot bigger in some other states. If you transition to other power sources, those guys are going to be out of a job too.
I’m willing to say “Well, sorry, guys, but that industry just doesn’t make sense any more. You’re going to have to find new jobs, and you are probably going to have to move.” But for those people, that’s going to mean losing towns and stuff that they put time into. Their social network goes away, has to be rebuilt somewhere else. The largest investment that most Americans make is in their home. If people leave en masse, the value of that property falls too. Their net worth falls. I’m just saying that what Trump is dangling in front of them is the prospect of not having to do that. Yeah, it’s not true — he’s giving them a pleasant lie. But I think that it is, unfortunately, a very human trait to readily believe things that we want to be true, especially when someone is working very hard to make us believe them.