It’s one of life’s sick ironies that many of the people who’ll suffer most under Donald Trump‘s policies are his most passionate supporters. But then, this shouldn’t be surprising, as rural Americans enthusiastically voting against their interests has been the bedrock of Republican success for decades.
Deep red Trump counties in deep red states have the highest poverty, lowest standards of living, and most reliance on social security in the nation. If this were a logical world, you might expect these people to support candidates with social policies designed to benefit them. You might have noticed we don’t live in a logical world, so these people are turkeys turning out in droves to enthusiastically vote for Thanksgiving.
That’s precisely what happened in Pemiscot County, Missouri. As reported by The Guardian, the people of Pemiscot County overwhelmingly voted Trump, with him scoring 74% of the vote in 2024. For their reasons, we have local pharmacist Jim Brands, who claimed that the people here were desperate to “weed out the fraud”.
Well, bad news. The fraud is worse than ever, and Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” just doomed the local hospital. Pemiscot Memorial Hospital has been open for 74 years, with residents for miles around relying on the 115-bed institution in cases of emergency. Its emergency room regularly handles shootings, overdoses, and road accidents – with the nearest alternative a drive across the Mississippi River to Tennessee.
Krissy Cunningham, a nurse on the hospital’s board, said the hospital saved her severely allergic daughter’s life after she had a bad reaction: “There is no way I would have made it to one of the farther hospitals, if it wouldn’t have been here. Her airway just would have closed off, and I probably would have been doing CPR on my daughter on the side of the road.”
“We need some hope”
The hospital was already struggling due to high rates of uninsured patients and heavily relies on Medicaid funding to function. Trump had repeatedly vowed not to cut Medicaid, but did so anyway in his Big Beautiful Bill, which mandated the largest Medicaid funding reduction in history.
All of which means Pemiscot Memorial Hospital is counting the days until closure, with its chairwoman, Jonna Green, sounding a miserable note: “If Medicaid drops, are we going to be even collecting what we’re collecting now? We need some hope. … Our community cannot go without a hospital. Healthcare, employment, industry – it would devastate everything.”
Then there are the fates of hospital workers. Mayor of nearby Hayti Heights, Catrina Robinson strikes a similarly gloomy tone on this topic: “Half of those people that work at the hospital, they’re my residents. So how they gonna pay their bills? How they gonna pay their water bill, how they gonna pay their light bill, how they gonna pay rent? This is their source of income. Then what will they do?”
What they’ll do is sink into even deeper poverty as the already fragile town cracks around them, then slowly die off from preventable causes. And, all the while, they’ll be blaming liberals for their woes rather than the guy who lied to their faces about cutting Medicaid and then dropped a hammer on their beloved hospital.
Published: Jul 28, 2025 07:37 am