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.
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.
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.