"Billionaire" Donald Trump presents himself as the populist champion of the MAGA movement and its white working class, rural base of so-called forgotten or “real” Americans. Like the other demagogues, neofascists and various authoritarians around the world who are riding a wave of “populist” rage at “the elites,” the facts and reality are much different than what their propaganda narrative suggests.
Donald Trump and the other neofascists in the Republican Party are not populists. They do not believe in true we the people democracy (or social democracy more broadly). In reality, Donald Trump and his forces want to impose a type of dictatorship and a tyranny of the minority (the plutocrats, right-wing Christian extremists and theocrats, White racial authoritarianism, and uncontested white male elite power) on the American people. As historian Timothy Snyder and other leading experts have warned, if Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and the other neofascists are “populists” then their version of populism is sadistic and is fueled by causing pain and suffering.
The ascendance of Trumpism and the larger antidemocracy movement—whose politics and values are more accurately described as right-wing authoritarian fake populism if not outright fascism—reveal a larger problem with language and how America’s news media and political class and other elites (and the general public) too often (mis)understand the relationship between region, culture, race, class, gender, religion and other identities in American society.
Nicholas Jacobs is an Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College. He is co-author of the 2023 book “The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America.” His essays and other writings have appeared in Politico, the Washington Post, and other publications.
In this conversation, Jacobs reflects on the orchestrated chaos of the Age of Trump and how he is trying to navigate it. He explains how language such as “working class,” “elites,” “real Americans,” and of course “MAGA” have been so effectively weaponized by the right-wing, the moneyed classes and other elites because the definitions are unclear. At the end of this conversation, Jacobs reflects on why so many people in rural America support Donald Trump, MAGA neofascism, and the larger "conservative" movement when the policies they have enacted and support have actually done great harm to such communities.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
How are you feeling? How are you managing the Age of Trump more generally, and the torrent of events these last few weeks?
I definitely have a considerable amount of whiplash – moving between the extremes of obsessively refreshing my phone looking for the live update, to the other end, trying my hardest to tune it all out. I say that in full recognition that I can, to some degree, tune it out. I won’t be deported; there are no laws about my body. But I can’t help that in order to make any sense out of every new development, I find it necessary to just disconnect, and I’m needing to do that more and more.
Given your expertise and critical lens, how are you making sense of the Age of Trump and orienting yourself?
"Maybe we should just stop trying to define someone’s interests from afar, and labeling them as sadists when they make a choice that we find incomprehensible."
I think we are always looking for simple stories to make sense of complex events. I’m always reminding myself that our political system is designed to simplify choices: winners and losers, two parties to choose from, a single president to hold accountable. Arguably, those institutional characteristics—we would say “equilibria”—add a lot of resiliency to our democratic system. But that does not mean that the processes by which we get there, or the reasons people vote one way or the other are necessarily simple. This country is big, and its history is long. We often deal in simple averages and tend to focus on the moment. Sure, there is a risk in making everything subject to historical patterns or failing to acknowledge precedent-shattering trends…but there is an equally disorienting risk in simplifying everything down to the good vs. evil or seeing it all as unprecedented.
I’m reminded that, early on in Trump’s administration, many members of the news media and too many others couldn’t see past the simple story of Trump’s chaos and alleged ineptitude. Thankfully, we are at a point now where so many journalists and academics recognize that the chaos was a smokescreen, designed to cover very well-laid-out plans that had a rationale stratagem. I think we need to ask the same questions when we are given the same simple stories of the electorate.
Language matters. The right-wing and the larger neofascist movement are experts at weaponizing language. For example, “working class,” “elites,” “globalists,” “real Americans,” “patriotism,” “heartland” and the big one “MAGA”. The Democrats, liberals and progressives have been totally outmatched here.
Language is powerful because it is ambiguous. You say, “real America” and what comes to mind? The images in your head are going to be different than mine. That is sort of the rhetorical genius behind a slogan like “Make America Great Again.” Great by what standard? Lots of people with different answers can each buy into it. And it goes beyond political slogans, which are deliberately meant to obfuscate and draw would-be supporters in.
I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to make sense of class politics in contemporary American politics. For so many Americans, class is just taken as a given. It’s not something you spend much time reflecting upon because it is what you are born into—the definition is intuitive. And so, when someone claims to speak on behalf of the “working class,” it might actually speak to folks who have never raked hay, changed their own oil, or done a double-shift. But their life circumstances were not the same as those who have never known someone who has. That is what it means to them, even if it is not the same definition academics or journalists carry around.
There are two sides to this ambiguity—both destabilizing. One is that people don’t see it as a tool for the powerful—that four decades of rhetorical support for the farmer, the worker, and the heartland has left rural Americans and the working class (who live everywhere) in a worse position than ever. But another problem in deciphering our political dictionary exists because so many of us are fixed on one definition. So, when we talk about class politics, analysts on the left are quick to point to trends in income and voting, which seemingly deny the existence of a class cleavage. But if class transcends the snapshot we have of a person’s income at any one time, the truth is we often lack the data or insight to really make sense of why class-laden rhetoric makes sense to a lot of people. We are more or less become hell-bent on pointing out someone’s potential contradictions like a tutor trying to correct someone’s pronunciation—“that’s not how you say it; that’s not what that means!”—rather than trying to understand why it does resonate with a certain individuals or group of people.
What does it mean to live in “rural America”? To be a “rural American” vs an “urban American”?
It means different things. I also believe that the answer to that question is more complex in rural America than urban America. Yes, demographically, “rural America” gives the appearance of scant diversity. But when I travel into urban spaces, it doesn’t matter if I am in D.C. or San Francisco or Madison, Wisconsin. A city is a city. I know what to expect. I can navigate it with ease.
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Living in rural America—and I’m fortunate to have seen many different parts—is wildly different depending on where you are. I’m a transplant to rural Maine. I’ll never fully grasp the ins and outs of a community where most of my neighbors can trace their family roots back four or five (and often times more!) generations. There is an illegible history that you only really learn growing up in a place. Yes, that is true of many urban communities. But urban spaces are celebrated as places where anyone can come and make it. That’s terrific, a real strength. The flip side is that the diversity within rural America is not often appreciated because it is not as visible. It is more closed off and exclusionary. That does not mean it isn’t there.
One of the tensions in my own work, or something that I keep trying to wrap my head around, is the fact that although we use the term “Rural America” quite a bit, I think the last place you would ever hear that phrase uttered is in “rural America.” Yes, rural Americans are increasingly voting in lock-step with one another; the bloc is “nationalized” as we like to say. Therefore, there is a rural vote in America. That category makes sense, but maybe only to journalists and politicos. What tends to make someone rural is hyper-specific to the land and place they tend. And in this way, I don’t think my neighbors are very different from the families that have called Queens, NY home for generations, or the young person that wouldn’t dare think of leaving Chicago.
That said, what we do see, by and large, is that this sense of identification with a particular place is so pronounced in various rural communities that it sort of takes over. It’s no longer just about the food or what football team to support. It is a long communal memory tied to longstanding relationships with the land. Not every rural person is a farmer, rancher, or miner (the vast, vast majority are not). But if you step into a rural community, you cannot deny the intimate connection with the physical or territorial sense of place. You can’t fabricate it. You can’t build it elsewhere. It is unique, special, and distinguishable.
Ultimately, it is the foundation for deep polarization, because an identity with a place can become so strong. The story you tell about the space and the land is a personal story and the evidence seems to suggest that it crosses over other important identities: profession, income, maybe even race. When politicians lean into it, we’ve seen it become a powerful source of divisiveness, even if the initial attachment is not negative to begin with.
What of rural Americans and how they supposedly cling to “guns and god”? What do we actually know empirically about (white) rural America vs the stereotypes about the region(s) and people(s) who live there?
The 2022 Cooperative Elective Study out of Harvard University shows that 51% of rural households have a firearm compared to 24% of those living in an urban area; 47% of rural residents support a ban on assault rifles while 68% of city residents do. The same survey shows that 68% of rural Americans say that religion is very or somewhat important in their lives compared to 60% of urban residents. 33% of rural residents are agnostic, atheist, or “none” compared to 38% of urban residents.
There are four or so data points there and a thousand different stories you can tell with it. Over twice as many rural people than urban people own guns! But there are nearly as many gun owners in urban America as in rural America. What are they doing with all those guns, if not hunting (something 60% of rural gun owners report doing)?
Rural America is the hotbed of traditional religious values. But cities are vastly more religious than often portrayed, with a majority of residents finding meaning in their particular religious faith (rates of church attendance and prayer are also not wildly different). Rural residents oppose gun control, barely, but the vast majority of those who oppose a ban on assault weapons live outside rural areas. Non-believers are just as prevalent, statistically speaking, and are the fastest-growing group in rural America, particularly among the young.
Sure, these are cherry-picked stats. But I selected these not to make a single point, except that the picture between these communities is, yes, more complicated than often portrayed, but actually has a much larger degree of commonality than we like to believe.
Donald Trump and JD Vance with their fake right-wing populist appeals are experts, like other fake populist authoritarians, at mining peoples' pain and suffering while actually doing little to improve it and in many examples making it worse. How do you reconcile this?
To put it more bluntly: Why do individuals living in communities that were already primed for suffering before COVID continue to vote for the person who so mismanaged the pandemic, arguably making it worse?
That’s one I hear a lot. It’s no different from the argument made during the George W. Bush administration that people were voting against their interests when they supported giving billionaires tax cuts. Now they are in an even more vulnerable position, so we give it a new name. Maybe we should just stop trying to define someone’s interests from afar, and labeling them as sadists when they make a choice that we find incomprehensible. I may disagree with it – often in strong terms – but there is a comprehensibility there. Yes, it is rooted in pain and suffering. I might say it is most important to recognize the profound mistrust that shapes the narrative people hold.
Consider, as one example, the tendency to disparage rural communities’ vaccine hesitancy. Nine times out of ten when I get some vitriolic response to my public writing, this makes its way into the message: How could they just blindly follow that man’s advice to refuse the jab? The more astute will point out that rural communities were primed for greater loss from vaccine hesitancy given rates of comorbidities and a weakened healthcare infrastructure. Sadistic, irrational, rage – all the same.
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What if we just explored those correlates as a part of a person’s story of how the world treats them and not just another data point to fit our own politically convenient story? How might living in a community rampant with doctor shortages, hospital closures, and underfunded clinics shape one’s views of the healthcare industry? Do they really have your back? Perhaps more importantly: if, as we just discussed, rural community health is so fragile after a decade of pills pouring into your community, what is one likely to think of pharmaceutical companies who are behind the vaccine development? The idea that these corporations place profit above health is not just a cocktail hour talking point gleaned from some book review – it is deeply ingrained in the community’s memory. We can acknowledge people’s reasons even if we don’t share them.
What would the news media's coverage of "rural America" and the Age of Trump look like if there actually were people from those regions in those rooms—especially at the elite agenda-setting media like the New York Times?
I think there are three things that most frustrate me about rural news coverage.
The first is that it is dominated by politics. Maybe that isn’t a rural thing, but my co-author Dan Shea and I did a content analysis of the Times' coverage of rural America over a two year period. We found that Trump was mentioned in over a third of stories—even non-political ones. It’s important, but when that’s the only prism in which we try to understand communities, the rural-urban divide becomes a self-fulfilled prophecy (or wish to sell more papers).
The second thing is that I think we are too quick to make many issues rural vs. urban. The truth is that many of the same structural or social forces at work in rural spaces are operating in urban ones. They manifest differently and the details are important, but if we are to do more than just reform on the margins, then people need to wake up to the common challenges confronting different types of communities. Perhaps because of our overemphasis on differences – especially political – we’ve lost a sense of interdependency between different communities. Rural policy is, at the end of the day, policy. Few things drive me crazier than when I hear about rural communities getting more of their fair share because of agricultural subsidies—again, usually to prove some political point about self-interest, rage, whatever. Never mind that those policies drive inequality, not just in rural communities, but feed back into the same system of finance and corporatization driving inequality globally. Never mind that those subsidies make food cheaper in urban and suburban communities, while those living in poverty everywhere suffer to find nutritious food.
Finally, there is reason to be hopeful in many rural communities. I know, tragedy sells. But when is the last time you read about anything good taking place in a deindustrialized, depopulating, or aging community? Good news is out there, and a lot of it is stereotype-shattering—the recreation of a youth sports league because of new immigrant families; a new arts festival because young people are returning home; a new clinic on tribal land to replace a broken federal system and empower local autonomy. There is a reason people stay. I’d love for non-rural folks to learn about that.
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