Greetings from Winnipeg, Canada.  No, we’re not seeking asylum.  Just trying to get away from the heat and bugs that come with summer in Florida.

Before crossing the U.S./Canada border we spent four days in the Dakotas.  While there, we did not see one Trump sign or one Trump bumper sticker.  Strange, because we thought we assumed we would be in the heart of Trump country.  We stayed off the interstate highways and the largest city we visited was Pierre, South Dakota, population 13,000.

This was in stark contrast to our last trip through rural America last October.  Even in the most royal blue states of Oregon and Washington, there were Trump banners on literally every barn and fence.  When I thought about the voters who would stick with Trump the longest, these were the folks who came to mind.

Now I realize I may have been wrong.  There are still plenty of Trump bumper stickers on cars in my home town. a mostly upper middle class community with many retirees.  Nor have I heard many of Trump’s wealthiest supporters express a change of heart.  Then it came to me.  Deep Throat of Watergate fame was right.  “Follow the money.”

Trump supporters in urban and suburban can continue to cheer his attacks on the establishment and the media without fear of GOP policies.  Our local hospital is unlikely to close regardless whether Trump and the Republican Congress gut the Affordable Care Act.  Most, if not all, of those elder Republicans’ stock port folios are probably higher than they were on election day, even though the Republicans have made no significant changes to Obama economic policies.  And there probably isn’t much in Paul Ryan’s proposed federal budget which will affect their livelihoods.

Not so in rural America.  Farm subsidies are on the chopping block.  In many rural areas, the local hospital, which serves mostly Medicaid recipients, is one of the largest employers.  When the hospital goes away, so do many of the best paying jobs. And so do the retail and service establishments. And they know, without immigrant labor, they cannot harvest all they have grown.

So, while many of us thought the mainstream Republicans who held their noses in the voting booth when pulling the Trump lever would be the first to abandon the pretender-in-chief, they have little or nothing at stake in the immediate future.  It is those rural residents in places like the Dakotas, who believed a billionaire(?) con man unlike themselves would be their voice, are the first to understand that, under Trump, they are being corralled like their livestock and plowed under just like their crops.

One can only hope the Democrats understand the political table in rural America is set.  The question is, “Do they know how to partake of this bounty?”

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP