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These West Virginians love Trump and food stamps—but they can't have both



McDowell County, West Virginia—the birthplace of the food-stamps program—is
watching its safety net collapse due to President Donald Trump’s domestic
policy law.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy sent his agriculture secretary to hand out
food cards to a miner’s family in Welch, launching the pilot that would become
the modern Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Today, many of
the county’s 17,000 residents rely on SNAP. More than half of the children are
enrolled in the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and one-third of seniors
depend on Medicaid.

Now the Associated Press reports that new eligibility restrictions embedded in
Trump’s new law will tighten access to SNAP, hitting counties like McDowell
especially hard—places where a third of the population lives below the poverty
line. Nonprofits that were already on the brink are laying off staff or burning
through reserves just to stay afloat. As Rosemary Ketchum, the executive
director of the West Virginia Nonprofit Association, told the AP, “These
federal cuts are starving people.”

Last year, Trump won 79% of the vote in McDowell County.




 



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West Virginia isn’t just one of the poorest states in the country—it’s also
one of the reddest, and it’s the third-most dependent on federal support. It’s
a genuine triumph of conservative culture-war politics that the people who most
depend on government services are the ones voting for the party that destroys
those services. These people are voting for their own demise, cheering the
latest attack on a transgender kid while their food assistance vanishes.


And because West Virginia relies so heavily on federal money, it’s absorbing
the full weight of Trump’s policies. Coal jobs vanish, Medicaid shrinks, food
programs dry up, disaster relief disappears—and yet MAGA devotion remains
untouched. Republican governors in red states, proud of their rock-bottom tax
rates, are now privately begging Trump not to cut the federal aid they can’t
live without. In West Virginia, federal dollars make up nearly 50% of the state
budget. But that doesn’t stop them from ranting about so-called socialism in
California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Washington—the very states
subsidizing them.




 



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And yet we liberals never complained about that arrangement. We were happy to
help the less fortunate—yes, including white people in dirt-poor Appalachia.
And how did they repay that generosity? By voting for the guy who’s now gutting
the very programs keeping them alive.



West Virginia isn’t alone, of course. As I noted in my story on how red
counties depend on the very government they hate, this is the national pattern.
Us coastal elites have been subsidizing these salt-of-the-earth, bootstrap
types for decades. And McDowell County may be the clearest example yet: The
place is utterly reliant on federal dollars, and it’s now being crushed by the
policies of lawmakers it helped elect.

The people of McDowell County helped create SNAP. Now they’re likely to lose
much of it—not because it failed, but because they voted for leaders who see
federal programs as the enemy, not the solution. And those cuts aren’t
theoretical. They’re meals skipped, hospitals closing, and seniors going hungry.

Don’t worry—most people in McDowell will still find a way to blame Democrats
like Joe Biden or Barack Obama for their misery. The MAGA cult is hard to
escape, and West Virginia is all in. All we can do is shake our heads and
marvel at this ongoing, breathtaking act of self-destruction.



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