Every four years, many Americans talk themselves into believing that, starting on Inauguration Day, the country’s new president can magically transform this big, beautiful, broken country into a totally different kind of place. People of faith often cast the president-elect in moral terms. If he is particularly sinful, they believe, then our country must be slipping further into the abyss.
But it’s never been that simple.
With a colossal economy of $30 trillion spread over 50 states, over 15,000 towns and cities, and 335 million people, the most powerful nation in the world does not change easily—or quickly. Many of the forces that have shaped modern America are more economic than political. Unless the United States elects a president willing to curb monopolies and corporate capitalism, Amazon and Walmart and Starbucks will shape the reality of American life as much as the White House does.
This year, it is especially important and interesting to examine how the new administration might change life in rural and small-town America, because those places have formed the backbone of Mr. Trump’s support. Like the rest of us, they lived through the first Trump administration, from 2017 to 2021, when the income gap between rural and urban America widened, the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the country, and new import tariffs did little to revive U.S. manufacturing might.
To see what Trump 2.0’s America could look like, I spoke to people in the small towns that drove his victory about how life might change for them in 2025 and beyond. In Moundsville, a Trump-supporting West Virginia town of 5,000 on the Ohio River, where I reported for America in 2018 and filmed a 2020 PBS documentary, “people were walking with an extra hop in their step on Nov. 6,” said Gary Rider, the town historian, in a phone call. “On that day, people felt they had a hope, they felt there was a chance again, they were happy and exuberant. They feel the economics will improve, because Trump’s going to base things on America first.”
I also returned to Punxsutawney, Pa., where I reported ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
I was curious about people’s perceptions of Mr. Trump this time around. The country is a different place, and voters perceived Mr. Trump as a different candidate, than in 2016. For example, 55 percent of Americans believe that Mr. Trump will keep the United States out of another war, according to Gallup. In 2016, 57 percent “doubted he would keep the country out of war.” Mr. Trump also earned high expectation scores on stopping illegal immigration and controlling the crime rate, while notching negative scores on fixing the health care system, improving education and healing political divisions.
But for people in many small and rural towns, Mr. Trump’s win was an affirmation of support for political arguments, a welcome sign that their image of America is intact, that their dream of America might endure. The election was a cultural statement, not a policy choice.
Return to Punxsutawney
Punxsutawney, famous for its groundhog that appears every Feb. 2 to predict when winter will end, is a town of 5,600 people an hour and a half northeast of Pittsburgh. It’s in Jefferson County, which Mr. Trump carried for the third election in a row. Mr. Trump crushed Kamala Harris here, 18,196 votes to 4,696. In 2020, he won 17,960 votes to 4,527 votes. Republicans easily captured down-ballot races, too. It is exactly the type of place that Democrats used to win handily and that now feels left behind by globalization and coastal elites, as well as overwhelmed by conservative mainstream media, especially Fox News.
My guide for the day was Doug Blose, a 59-year-old Republican school board member I had met on a previous trip. Bald and muscular, he looks like a caricature of a Trump supporter. Mr. Blose joined the Marines in 1985 after graduating from high school in Punxsutawney. He worked as a police officer in North Carolina before re-enlisting in the Marines in 2000. He has done two combat tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq.
Over a three-hour lunch at a Mexican restaurant, we talked about what might change for a small town like Punxsutawney in a second Trump administration.
If anything defined Mr. Trump’s candidacy, it was his insistence on tariffs, which he has called “the most beautiful word” in the English language. Here lies a contradiction. Residents of small towns depend heavily on cheaply made imported goods that they buy at stores like Walmart and Target, or at online retailers.
Mr. Blose said he’s not too worried that prices will skyrocket at the local Walmart. Maybe, he said, “people will have to learn to pay more for goods, and we can afford to pay Americans, which might bring jobs back. This used to be a bustling little town with coal mines and industry.” In any case, he added, it’s good for Mr. Trump to have “tariffs as a carrot and stick.”
Putting a more human face on trade is a widely held desire. As Archbishop Ivan Jurkovic, the Vatican’s envoy to the World Trade Organization, put it in a 2017 speech, global trade “has helped to lift a billion people out of poverty in developing countries and has improved the livelihood in many developed countries.” At the same time, he said, it “can cause dislocation and uncertainty in some sectors and communities.” The benefits of trade, he argued, “have failed to reach as many people as they should.”
But it will be hard to extricate the United States from its deep entrenchment in global trading networks. “There’s no reason to believe Pittsburgh will reindustrialize if you clamp down on foreign production,” said Chris Briem, a regional economist. The United States is one of the world’s pre-eminent trading nations (along with China). The entire global order has been set up since World War II to facilitate free trade around the world. For almost 80 years, the U.S. military has protected commercial trade in goods and commodities. China, once a poor country, has become the world’s second largest economy thanks to the American protection of trade routes and endorsement of free trade deals. In 2024, the United States exported around $2 trillion and imported around $3.3 trillion worth of merchandise.
One big obstacle to the redevelopment of manufacturing in small towns is the lack of a strong, young labor force. Ambitious young people tend to leave their rural communities. “For a lot of young people, their America is I can do whatever I want, and the government’s going to take care of me,” said Mr. Rider in Moundsville. “Fortunately, there are still some young people with good sense and good values, but we need to give them opportunity to keep them here.”
Immigration crackdown
Another key element of the Trump agenda is restricting immigration, and he has targeted both those who have entered the country illegally and those who have temporary protected status. Mr. Trump has promised to deport millions of people. In Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants, many with temporary protected status, still fear deportation and have already started fleeing to larger cities where they believe they may be less visible, or even to Canada. In small towns, immigrants are often well-integrated, but the strength of Mr. Trump’s voice and political power is such that many people are prepared to go along with his plans.
“There are people around here who don’t have papers. I’ve met some at the library,” said Mr. Rider, the Moundsville historian. “They’re very nice people, and nobody feels challenged by them.” But if Mr. Trump orders them deported, “people would accept that, although there would be some pushback.”
Mr. Rider is not worried about the threat of an authoritarian government, especially after his interviews of 1,500 veterans for a book. “People tell me they fought against oppression and wouldn’t allow it at home,” he said. “If Trump goes too far, he’ll get a kick back.”
Mr. Blose, too, thinks that enforcement of deportation orders might cause him to oppose the new administration. “I’m a strict constitutionalist,” he said. “I don’t think the federal government should have too much power, no matter who’s president.” It doesn’t take long speaking to Trump supporters in small towns to realize that many are not willing to back him at any cost, and that people of opposing political points of view on immigration can still forge friendships. “My biggest fear about Trump is that he values loyalty over the constitution,” said Mr. Blose.
Fighting the culture wars
Where Mr. Blose really sees the potential for change is in the culture wars. Mr. Blose thought about running for Congress but decided that he would have a bigger impact on his fellow citizens’ lives if he joined the school board, and he was elected in 2023. Local politics had not been on his radar, but he was motivated by Covid-19 politics.
“People were mad about masks and vaccines,” he said. “They didn’t want kids to be forced to vaccinate.” He also didn’t like that the high school was teaching critical race theory and allowing the student-run Gender and Sexuality Alliance Club to make rainbow “Safe Space” stickers that teachers could place on their classroom doors. The stickers declared “Support and Allyship for LGBTQ+ Students.”
After Mr. Blose was elected, he and his fellow members of the school board did two things. They voted to broadcast school board meetings on the internet, and they banned the use of cellphones in class. The school board decided to hold off on more conservative ideas, like banning the use of alternative pronouns and instituting prayer in schools, until they saw who won the election. The Trump election victory gives them cover, because now they feel certain the U.S. Department of Education won’t sue them.
One of Mr. Blose’s opponents in the school board race was Sally Villella. There are a lot of people like Ms. Villella in places like Punxsutawney. She is 66 years old and a Democrat. She moved away from western Pennsylvania and then came back. (“Like a pigeon,” she said.) She is a Democrat and differs from Mr. Blose on issues like abortion, gun control and immigration.
Ms. Villela has worked in social services and was motivated to run for school board because Republicans in town opposed the “Safe Space” initiative. Conservatives were concerned that it would “encourage kids to be gay,” and Republicans also wanted to institute more Christian education, including prayer, in school. So teachers asked her to run, she said.
The two candidates have become friends since running against each other. “In fact, Doug and I have become friends because of our disagreeing over politics,” Ms. Villela said. Mr. Blose will stop by her house to have a chat. “He’s stood in my kitchen and told me he’s thrilled with Trump appointing Robert Kennedy to his cabinet,” she said. “And I’m embarrassed to have Trump as my president.” But she’s found herself supporting Mr. Blose’s moves to broadcast school board meetings and ban cellphones in school.
Though her preferred candidate, Kamala Harris, lost the election, Ms. Villella said her concern is still with the poverty levels in the town. “The average income in Punxsutawney is poor, and it’s going to stay poor no matter who the president is,” she said.
Herein lies the biggest contradiction in the support of rural and small-town America for Mr. Trump. Poverty rates are higher and per-capita income is lower in rural regions. But in his second term, Mr. Trump has brought along ideologues insistent on cutting government programs that help people in small towns. The president-elect has asked the tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which is meant to slash $2 trillion from the federal government’s annual spending. That would mean cutting programs like food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare and other programs that people in poorer parts of the country depend on.
Those poorer places are usually also the parts of the United States with the oldest populations, where the Boomer generation still runs town governments. People in their 70s can still get a lot done, but things will be more difficult for Rust Belt towns when their leaders are all in their 80s.
Luckily, people who get involved in small-town politics often have an easier time getting along than those in Washington. What’s Ms. Villella’s secret, I asked, to maintaining a friendship while disagreeing about politics?
“Respect,” she said. “It’s OK to have different political opinions. Doug’s a good person. We share a lot of values. We just see things through different eyes.”
