The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 19 episode of theDaily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
As of this recording, things are in full-blown chaos in Washington, D.C., as lawmakers race to negotiate a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. And already, there are a couple things we can conclude about the coming Donald Trump presidency. One is that Trump is going to screw over his voters very badly, including rural voters—we’re already seeing the beginnings of that in this shutdown fight. Another is that Trump is going to humiliate Mike Johnson mercilessly going forward, and Republicans are going to have one heck of a time trying to minister to the whims of Trump and Elon Musk, which are already being revealed to be deeply dangerous and crazy. We’re chatting about this with Paul Waldman, who’s the co-author with Tom Schaller of the book, White Rural Rage. Good to have you on, Paul.
Paul Waldman: Thank you.
Sargent: To quickly catch people up, House Republicans thought they had negotiated a deal with Democrats to keep the government open, but then Elon Musk attacked the bill’s spending and then Trump opposed it. Republicans then declared it dead because Trump and Musk are their masters. As of this moment, House Republicans have a new deal which Trump endorsed: a two-year extension of the debt limit until January 2027, a continuation of current government funding levels, extension of disaster aid in the farm bill, and some other stuff. Paul, I don’t know what Democrats are going to do here, but it seems like they shouldn’t support this because it just keeps the debt limit intact. What do you think?
Waldman: Democrats have been talking about getting rid of the debt ceiling permanently for a long time. And over the years, you and I have both written many articles explaining why it’s a terrible thing to have this extra vote that needs to be taken in order to validate the spending that has already been allocated, in order to satisfy this archaic idea that you have to keep coming back again and again and again to allow the government to keep borrowing money. All it is is a tool to create government shutdowns. Democrats have long thought we should just get rid of it—there’s only one other country in the world that has anything like it—and Republicans have been resistant to that because they like the idea that they can force these shutdowns and use it as a tool to extract spending cuts that would be difficult to get otherwise.
Now, you have a situation where it almost seems like Donald Trump just woke up yesterday and realized that the debt ceiling was going to be a problem for him: He’s going to be president, and this could cause shutdowns that he would get blamed for. So he has now demanded that they make a two-year suspension. Not a permanent elimination of the debt ceiling but two years, which would probably take him to the point where the Democrats will take back the House in the 2026 midterms and maybe they can get the blame for that then.
The problem, at the moment, is that Republicans have this razor-thin majority in the House, and you have a group of people in the Republican caucus, some of whom are in the Freedom Caucus, who are real serious anti-government ideologues. They’re not just Trump loyalists—that’s an important distinction here because you have a lot of far-right people in the Republican caucus who will do anything for Donald Trump. You have a group of people, including Chip Roy from Texas, whom Trump now says he wants to find a primary challenger for, who are genuine, committed, principled ideologues who say that they are never going to vote to increase the debt limit without serious spending cuts, that any time we get into one of these situations they want to see the size of government brought down. They’re willing to shut down the government, even if it’s something that is damaging to Trump and the rest of their party. That’s what they’re dealing with right now.
Sargent: I want to talk about the early signs here that Trump is going to really screw over as voters. Trump and Musk killed the first deal, even though it included a lot of direct payments for farmers. The New York Times reports that lawmakers from rural areas were furious that Musk had killed the bill. Paul, your book is all about how rural voters stick with Trump, despite him being really terrible for their material interests. Now we’ve got Trump’s favorite billionaire directly shafting them in the name of spending cuts. Can you talk about this dynamic broadly?
Waldman: This is the essence of what rural politics has become. One of the arguments we make is that voters in rural areas keep electing Republicans and are represented by Republicans at all levels, from president all the way down to dogcatcher, and yet what they don’t give them is material improvements to their lives. They give them a lot of culture-war campaigning, and a lot of emotional satisfaction. That was what Donald Trump really gave them: the feeling that he hated the same people they hated, and he would basically be a weapon against the people they despise. Even if it didn’t change their lives for the better—it didn’t improve their education systems, their economic opportunities, their local infrastructure—it wasn’t as important as the emotional satisfaction that they got from Donald Trump.
Data is still coming in, but it looks like Trump got the votes of rural Americans, and especially rural whites, at about the same rate that he did four years ago. According to the best data that we have, he got about 71 percent of the votes of rural whites in 2020. He’ll probably do at least as well in 2024. And then he comes into office, and he starts talking about all these things that are not just not helpful to rural people but are actually going to be incredibly damaging.
For instance, he says he wants to privatize the U.S. Postal Service. Well, who benefits most from the postal service the way it is now? It’s rural people. He’s talking about promoting school vouchers, which don’t benefit rural people at all because they just don’t have private schools where they live. Mass deportation is going to have a devastating effect on a lot of rural communities; not just because the farmers themselves are employing a lot of undocumented people to pick crops in the fields, but because those people are spending money in those communities where they’re living. The cuts to Medicaid that Republicans are contemplating? That is devastating to rural communities because there have been hundreds of rural hospitals that have closed in recent years, and they absolutely depend on Medicaid funding in order to stay alive.
Then you have the tariffs. This is another thing that is going to be really damaging. We saw this last time when he was president. The story that he tells about the tariffs that he put on is he put on all these tariffs and we took in all this money from the tariffs. Well, do you know where the money from the tariffs went? It went to repay farmers because as a result of the tariffs that he put on China, China responded by cutting off its imports of American agricultural products. That resulted in billions of dollars of losses for American farmers. So the Trump administration took the money that was being brought in by the tariffs, which is being paid by American consumers, and basically passed it right back to the farmers to bail them out. According to one study, 92 percent of the revenues in the tariffs that he put on just went back into bailouts for former.
We’re going to go back into that cycle again. You have all of these ways in which Trump’s most adoring voters are going to get screwed over by the policies, when they thought that he was just going to come back in and make America great again and make eggs cheap.
Sargent: Well, it actually could even be worse if you think about Elon Musk’s role in all this. You mentioned that you guys found, in the writing of your book, that Trump had essentially offered rural voters this cultural comfort. Somehow, Elon Musk has now become a cultural champion for MAGA voters too. I’m just not sure how that happened. And with Musk being given all this influence over spending, it’s almost profoundly insulting if you really think about it. My initial thought was that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was just going to be a plaything for him with no real influence, but now it’s not so clear. It looks like his drive for serious cuts is going to be taken more seriously. And as you say, those voters are the losers from these types of spending cuts. On what planet is Elon Musk a warrior for these people? How on earth could they come to see him that way?
Waldman: A lot of it has to do with this fundamental orientation against institutions and establishment power. People have a lot of anger at not just the government, but other established institutions like news media, big business. There’s a lot of free-floating anger at the establishment. And looking at a figure like Musk, it looks like the establishment hates him. He’s so disruptive and erratic in his way, and he insults people all the time. He has some of that same characteristic that Trump has: He pisses people off, and he looks like he’s just changing everything willy-nilly.
If your feeling about all the established institutions, including government, is that they just need to be torn apart and made uncomfortable, then you can look at him and say, He seems like he’s a hero. He seems like he’s on my side. But where the rubber actually meets the road, things get a little more complicated because the people who feel that actually depend on government in a lot of different ways.
Musk comes out during the campaign and says, I think we could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. And when people who know what they’re talking about actually look at the federal budget, they say, Well, if you set aside Social Security and ...
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