FILE PHOTO: Supporters of Donald Trump gather outside a polling station on Election Day in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 5, 2024. REUTERS/Marco Bello/File Photo
In the latest episode of The New Republic's "Daily Blast" podcast, host Greg Sargent and MSNBC writer Steve Benen discuss how, in the process of trying to screw democratic states, it appears [President Donald] Trump has also screwed at least two counties that heavily voted for him."
Trump, Sargent explains, recently "approved big disaster declarations for Nebraska, North Dakota, Missouri, and Alaska. In two of his social media posts announcing this, he went out of his way to declare that he had won those states."
Most of the relief was for severe weather damage, Sargent says, noting that Trump denied similar requests for relief from Maryland, Vermont, and Illinois.
Benen says this is no coincidence, and that "it’s very hard to imagine we have a set of circumstances in which the president just happens to approve disaster aid for red states and just happens to draw a direct and overt connection between that aid and his performance in those states."
"And then, on the other hand, he says, oh, by the way, these blue states, yeah, I decided they don’t deserve federal disaster aid. I mean, if there was just any variance in this, it would seem less subtle. But it’s not. He’s just being overt about this," Benen adds.
Trump has made no secret of his desires to inflict pain on democratic states. Benen agrees, saying, "We’ve seen Donald Trump repeatedly say that he is the president of red states, exclusively. He looks at blue states as somehow beneath him, as if they are second-class citizens, as if they’re undeserving of his support because they failed to support him in the election—which is ridiculous and it’s un-American—but nevertheless, it has become our life now."
Where the story "takes a weird turn," Sargent says, is in Trump's refusal of aid to Maryland's Garrett and Allegany counties, or, "Trump country," he adds.
"So, in his desire to screw Democratic elected officials in Maryland and blue state voters, he’s hurting his own people. What do you make of that, Steve?" Sargent asks.
"It's so frustrating to see Trump’s overly narrow, myopic perspective here," Benen says. "What he doesn’t appreciate is the fact that there are nuances in states—that no state is this monolithic entity—that there are going to be blue voters and red voters. There’s going to be pockets of liberalism and pockets of conservatism in literally every state in the union."
Sargent notes that the damage to these "Trumpy places" has been extensive, and according to the AP, it was thirty-three million dollars worth of damage to the state—more than three times the threshold for getting federal aid.
"If roads are closed, that means no one can use them. It doesn’t just mean the Democratic voters in the area can’t use them. So Trump’s denial of aid is materially hurting people in Trump country in an ongoing and sustained way," Sargent says.
Benen says that while Maryland did everything right in their request for disaster aid, "the president just said, unilaterally, I’ve decided that that disaster is not going to go to you for reasons that he has not explained. But of course, we don’t need an explanation. We already know what the explanation is, which is that he did it for political purposes."
Sargent notes that while Trump administration officials meant for the government shutdown to punish only blue states, everyone is losing.
"We’re in the middle of a government shutdown in which Russell Vought, who’s Trump’s budget chief and a really sick ideologue, is out there explicitly using the budget and shutdown process in order to punish blue states," Sargent says. "But here again, he’s also screwing over red state voters."
One case Sargent cites is, "one of the projects that Russell Vought cut or shut down, defunded, is called the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub. And that happens to span Oregon, Washington State, and—you guessed it—Montana."
Montana, a very red state, Sargent says, is losing out, too.
"The state’s Republican governor, Montana’s Republican governor, has hailed this project as something that will create good-paying Montana jobs. So here again, totally screwing his own people," he says.
Benen agrees, saying, it's "offensive" that "Trump sees himself as exclusively the president of red states—that his constituents are the people who voted for him, not the people of the country he represents."
Sargent notes that Trump is also hurting red states by standing in the way of extending the Affordable Health Care Act subsidies.
"He’s screwing his own people in many other ways as well. Somewhere in Trump’s head, he probably thinks that by standing in the way of extending the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, he’s screwing blue people, he’s screwing blue states, he’s screwing Obama, right?" he asks. "But his own base is getting absolutely hammered by those premium hikes that we’re going to see."
Benen says that while Trump "wants to cut the CDC," Republicans "get sick too. You know, Republican families rely on CDC programs as much as Democratic families do."
Sargent says that Trump sending troops into blue cities demonizes them for "being blue" and is meant to appeal to his MAGA base.
"The MAGA movement is founded on overt hostility to blue America, not just plain old indifference," Sargent says. "It’s not like, you know, memes on Twitter. It’s not a joke. They really think of us as the enemy, and we just need to accept that and deal with it."
Benen points to Trump's use of certain words that prove this point, saying, "We have an American president — an incumbent American president — who refers to his political opponents as the party of hate, evil, and Satan."
"In Trump’s head, he thinks he’s getting revenge on the elected leaders of blue states because they’re Democrats, and he probably also thinks he’s getting revenge on countless voters who didn’t support him," Sargent says.
Benen says that after five years of Trump, he still doesn't understand much.
"Here we are, stuck in this bizarre conversation about the things that he simply doesn’t understand — about whom he’s hurting and how," he says.
Benen and Sargent agree that this fuels Trump's unprecedented unpopularity, pointing to recent mass protests and a "groundswell that should make Republicans nervous."
"This is a recipe for profound and dramatic Republican failure — that should make GOP officials and GOP candidates awfully nervous about the prevailing political winds," Benen says.