West Virginia Voted Overwhelmingly for Trump but his Actions Crush Them

Trump and his administration are installing people into power whose goal is to destroy the agency they are running. Trump and his administration have and will continue to institute policies that directly harm tens of millions of Americans. These policies and the people in power are causing enormous, disproportionate harm to Trump voters.

That last point may be the most incomprehensible to both Democrats and "never-Trump" Republicans, none of us able to grasp why working-class voters continue to support him despite breaking every promise. No where is this more apparent than in the state of West Virginia, which went to Trump by 40 percentage points, second largest margin only to Wyoming.

What did West Virginians think they were voting for?

West Virginia supported Trump because he promised he could bring back the well-paying coal-mining jobs. Coal is a dead industry with only about 52,000 people employed in the country. For comparison sake, 16 million work in retail, an industry that has lost 100,000 jobs in the past year. Said differently, twice as many people have lost their job in retail in just one year than the total number employed by coal.

Coal isn’t coming back; these days, West Virginia’s biggest source of employment is health care and social assistance. How many of those jobs would survive savage cuts in Medicaid and disability benefits?

Despite Trump's vow to put coal miners back to work, coal plants keep closing. Since Trump took office, at least 17 plants have said they'll be shutting down.

Trump seeks above everything to destroy a healthcare system that benefits West Virginia immensely:

[West Virginia] benefits immensely from federal programs: 29 percent of the population is on Medicaid, almost 19 percent on food stamps. The expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare is the main reason the percentage of West Virginians without health insurance has halved since 2013.

What would happen to West Virginia if all these Trump policies went into effect? Hundreds of thousands would lose health insurance; medical debt and untreated conditions would surge; and there would be an explosion in extreme poverty, including a lot of outright hunger.

...more than 4 percent of the population, the highest share in the nation, receives Social Security disability payments.... partly because a high fraction of the population consists of people who suffer from chronic diseases, like diabetics — whom Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, thinks we shouldn’t take care of because it’s their own fault for eating poorly.

As recently as October 17, 2017, Trump told Fox News Radio that his efforts have "turned West Virginia around," a lie so bold straight to the face of people he is harming more than most. A lie so bold it was given the highest possible rating of falsehood, four Pinocchios, by the Washington Post on November 1st.

The truth is not difficult to summarize, even if difficult to fathom:

So many of the people who voted for Donald Trump were the victims of an epic scam by a man who has built his life around scamming. In the case of West Virginians, this scam could end up pretty much destroying their state.

But at least there's the Republican tax plan with its signature repeal of the estate tax to save the wealthiest Americans a half a trillion dollars.