Trump Country

Dissent:https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/scapegoat-country
Scapegoat Country
Since the 2016 election, the American press has fixated on rural communities and created a dubious new genre: the Trump Country Safari.
Sarah Jones ▪ Fall 2019

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………Trump is not the president of just rural America. He won office because his message took root in coastal cities and suburbs, too. But national reporters found few occasions to explore the ascendant conservatism of these places. Consider Collier County, Florida, and McDowell County, West Virginia, two counties that voted heavily for Trump. Despite the fact that Collier County’s voter turnout was more than twice that of McDowell County, only the latter drew national attention. The wealthier, more suburban residents of Collier County did not inspire the derision of liberals—nor did they command the attention of conservatives, who were eager to pin Trump’s success to the reactionary yearnings of the mythologized heartland worker.

This selective interest in a particular type of Trump voter—and the synonymization of white conservatives with rural geographies—reinforced perceptions many onlookers already possessed. Location alters a place’s material needs and shapes the struggles of its inhabitants, but rurality does not make a community simple. To many consumers of the mainstream press, however, rural communities seem to be benighted places where the light of liberalism could not reach.

I had only been working as a full-time journalist for two and a half months by the time Trump became president, but I had been angry at the national press, and its coverage of rural America, for a long time. I am from southwest Virginia. Three generations of my family live there and in neighboring east Tennessee. The Appalachia I read about in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Associated Press was an Appalachia I recognized, but only through a fractured mirror of distorted facets. I felt like I was watching the parable of the blind man and the elephant unfold in real time. My new peers had missed the elephant for his limbs. They had been distracted by….
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………voter turnout is very low in many counties in Appalachia. Perhaps it would be a better use of our time to ask ourselves why—for example, the decline of union membership, or a generalized feeling of disenfranchisement reinforced by poverty—rather than focusing all our attention on the people who did turn out to vote for Trump. see link…….”