Trump's Rural Base Is Starting To Crack— Congressional Republicans Will Pay A Price In The Midterms

Is Trump really losing support among his rural base? Martha McHardy asserts he is. His support grew to 63% last year from 60% in 2020. A new poll shows him at just 46% approval. Tariffs and inflation seem to be the culprits. There’s plenty of room for his approval numbers to go down. Recession will do it. Measles? Another pandemic? Musk? Broken promises to rural communities in FEMA disaster funds are already doing it.

And Trump’s and the GOP's war on science, is hitting rural communities especially hard. Yesterday, CNN reported that “The National Weather Service is in worse shape than previously known, according to interviews with current and former meteorologists, due to a combination of layoffs, early retirements and preexisting vacancies. The nation’s forecasting agency is in tatters as what could be a destructive hurricane season nears. Several current and former agency meteorologists told CNN they are concerned forecasts and life-saving warnings are not going to be issued in time. Responsible for protecting life and property from severe weather impacts, the National Weather Service is headed into hurricane season with 30 of its 122 weather forecast offices lacking their most experienced official, known as the meteorologist-in-charge… Already, multiple offices have reduced or eliminated daily weather balloon launches and more are likely to follow suit following a wave of early retirements taking place this week, the NOAA employee said. The balloons provide critical data for computer models that forecasters use to predict the weather, raising the likelihood that projections will be more unreliable. One NWS forecast office, in Goodland, Kansas, is no longer operating 24/7, with about a dozen more likely to shift to non-24-hour operations if action isn’t taken this month. These offices include several in the Plains states and stretch into the Pacific Northwest. Such a change is virtually unheard of in the absence of an extreme weather event, such as a hurricane or tornado, that either threatens the lives of the forecasters themselves or knocks them offline… Radar outages during tornado and hurricane seasons could cause forecasters to miss hazardous conditions till after they strike. The NWS has lost more than 550 people all told, since the start of Trump’s second term, according to tallies kept by sources inside and outside of the agency. That’s about the same number as the agency lost in the 15 years between 2010 and 2025, according to Tom Fahy of Capitol Meteorologics.”

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote that “Many of us have long noted the growing hostility of the GOP to science. But my experience was that many people viewed those raising the alarm— like Chris Mooney, who wrote a 2005 book titled The Republican War On Science— as over the top scaremongers. But at this point, can we acknowledge that MAGA is indeed waging war on science? Not just ‘woke’ stuff, but science in general. Nature tells us that National Science Foundation funds have been frozen, and that even if some money eventually flows again, funding will be heavily politicized:

Staff members at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) were told on 30 April to “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice,” according to an email seen by Nature.

The policy prevents the NSF, one of the world’s biggest supporters of basic research, from awarding new research grants and from supplying allotted funds for existing grants, such as those that receive yearly increments of money. The email does not provide a reason for the freeze and says that it will last “until further notice.”

Earlier this week, NSF leadership also introduced a new policy directing staff members to screen grant proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities”. Proposals judged not “in alignment” must be returned to the applicants by NSF employees. The policy has not been made public but was described in documents seen by Nature.

“In effect, NSF, if it supports research at all, will only support research that tells MAGA what it wants to hear. Add in RFK Jr.’s savage cuts at theNational Institutes of Health budget cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Trump administration’s attacks on research universities, and we’re looking at a near-collapse of U.S. science. I don’t mean a hypothetical collapse a few years down the road, but the destruction of large parts of the American scientific enterprise— the envy of the world just a few months ago— this year.”

Why should those who aren’t scientists care? In the 21st century, science isn’t some esoteric intellectual affair. It’s the foundation of social and economic progress. And no, we can’t expect the private sector to fill the gap left by loss of government support. Basic research is a public good: it generates real benefits, but those benefits can’t be monetized because everyone can make use of the knowledge gained. So government support is the only way to sustain science. And that support is being rapidly ended.

But why do our new rulers want to destroy science in America? Sadly, the answer is obvious: Science has a tendency to tell you things you may not want to hear. Medical research may tell you that vaccines work and don’t cause autism. Energy research may tell wind power works and doesn’t massacre birds.

And one thing we know about MAGA types is that they are determined to hold on to their prejudices. If science conflicts with those prejudices, they don’t want to know, and they don’t want anyone else to know either. So they really want to destroy science.

Again, this isn’t hyperbole, and it’s not about the long run. American science is being gutted as you read this.

The conservative war on science didn’t begin in the 20th century— it stretches back centuries, to when Galileo was threatened with torture for pointing his telescope at the heavens and insisting that truth could be found through observation rather than dogma. Ever since, reactionary forces— whether religious institutions, monarchies, or even modern corporations— have viewed science as a threat whenever it undermines their authority or profit. In the U.S., this hostility found fertile ground in right-wing movements that saw scientific inquiry as a challenge to biblical literalism, fossil fuel profits and deregulation. What began as theological resistance evolved into a political weapon— denying climate change, undermining public health, discrediting evolutionary biology— all in service of preserving a fragile status quo.

Under Trump, this centuries-old campaign has mutated into something even more dangerous: a full-scale assault on the institutions of science themselves. He’s turned the conservative suspicion of science into active sabotage. Ironically, it’s rural communities— so often misled into cheering this crusade— who are now paying the highest price. Their crops are threatened, their homes are flooding, and their warnings come too late— because the machinery of science they depend on has been systematically dismantled by the very man they were told would save them.

We shouldn’t forget that the modern conservative movement’s war on science has deep roots, stretching back decades to when empirical evidence began clashing with corporate profits and religious dogma. From denying the dangers of tobacco in the 1960s to undermining climate science and evolution education, the right has consistently targeted scientific institutions that threaten its ideological or economic interests. What began as a cynical alliance between corporate lobbyists and reactionary politicians has hardened into a worldview: science is suspect when it contradicts conservative orthodoxy. 

And many congressional Republicans don’t want the stench of DOGE on their reelection campaigns which is giving the White House a problem because they plan to ask Congress “to formally enact a share of DOGE’s damanging agenda into law” this week. Some are delighted to sign on— but generally, not the ones from swing districts and swing states. “The White House,” wrote Devon O’Connor, “is in a bind of its own creation. The executive branch cannot legally cancel funding on its own: Congress decides how much money is made available and how it can be used. The administration can only lawfully delay the spending of that funding after it sends a ‘special message’ formally proposing that Congress rescind— in essence, take back— those funds. And the delay can only last for a short time while Congress considers the proposal. Of course, in the roughly 100 days since the Trump administration started illegally impounding funds, it has sent no such messages.”

Trump has illegally impounded at least $400 billion and there are already 40 impoundment investigations by the Government Accountability Office under way. Even some of the most bloodthirsty Republicans are nervous boy voting for some of the DOGE cuts that have “already taken myriad harmful and capricious actions: from making it harder for people to to get their Social Security benefits and ending programs that provide food assistance to schools android banks by letting them buy goods directly from farmers, to dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and canceling or freezing billions of dollars for medical research…  More than 100 days since the White House began illegally impounding funds, it seems that no one wants to publicly own DOGE’s actions that continue to hurt people across the country. But try as Republicans might to hide the results, the Trump administration has shown that even without producing a lot of budgetary savings, it is possible to do a lot of harm.”