So often portrayed as stuck in the past and lagging in the wake of cultural and market currents, rural communities are frequently the first to feel the sting of economic instability. This makes their circumstances a useful portent of the future that Trump is creating. Rural workers have been hurt by automation; more jobs do not necessarily result from productivity gains in sectors like mining and manufacturing. Rural economies, often less diversified than those of cities, are more exposed to the tempos of market booms and busts. Trump is set to escalate these bitter patterns with his characteristic mix of regulatory rollbacks and false promises. People living in rural areas will be the first to suffer from trade wars, as reciprocal tariffs hit crops and other commodities, driving steel prices upward and making machinery more costly.

Natural resource industries were supposed to thrive under Trump. On the campaign trail, he touted an array of sketchy plans to restore “beautiful” coal, break U.S. dependence on Chinese metal mining and processing, and increase petroleum production. But these promises were hollow, their payoffs dubious. Since retaking office, Trump has ordered his government to prop up coal, even though that industry was killed not by eco-friendly policy, but by the market’s turn to another fossil fuel: natural gas. The president has encouraged extensive logging of national forests adjacent to towns that have moved on from timber and lack the infrastructures and workforces to resurrect the industry. And his trade war bluster has sent per-barrel oil prices plummeting — pushed down by flagging consumer confidence, higher input costs, and OPEC+’s scaling up of production. In early April, shortly after Trump’s tariff hikes were announced, an oil field worker from Oklahoma told me that if prices stay this low many companies will simply shut down or walk away from their wells until drilling became lucrative again. Already, the oil field was quieter, he said. “Spooky.” 

For some rural areas — like the Wyoming and southwestern Montana towns dotted around Yellowstone — proximity to nature, national parks, and public lands has enabled a pivot from natural resource extraction to tourism. But this, too, can become a kind of extraction, experiential rather than material. Wealthy visitors demand swank services and exclusive experiences, inflating housing costs and trapping locals in cycles of seasonal jobs. The economic history of Gunnison County, where I live, reflects that of much of western Colorado. In the latter half of the twentieth century, mines closed and wages flatlined; service and retail employment expanded with tourism; and, as increasingly well-to-do people moved in, passive income — such as stock investments, real estate, and rent collection — grew as a share of overall earnings.

The Trump administration’s plans will be no less detrimental to these places than to oil field communities imperiled by tariffs. This spring, national Republicans have explicitly considered sales of federal land as a means of balancing out the president’s massive proposed tax cuts. Privatization of these publicly managed, publicly accessible areas will do little beyond benefiting energy companies, developers, and wealthy people looking to form vast backcountry estates. Meanwhile, mass firings at public land agencies are already hurting small towns across the West and will inevitably degrade oversight and management. This, in turn, will make it easier for Trump and Musk to push for more sales — walling off land on which we could all once walk.

How people respond to deprivation and turmoil is not always predictable or coherent. Rural voters are not the monolith sometimes imagined by mainstream media and commentators. About a quarter of rural residents are not white. Historically, rural residents of color have voted distinctly more Democratic than their white neighbors, though, like most of the rest of the country, notable majority non-white rural areas — such as West Texas — veered toward Trump. But right-wing white, rural residents continue to be an object of fascination. In her new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild spends time in the eastern Kentucky coalfields, where white nationalist movements are gaining popularity and power. Hochschild’s subjects experience a stew of competing emotions; a desire for dignity and embarrassment at local poverty that, in some people, transforms into anger at minorities, city dwellers, and immigrants. “Their beleaguered economy greatly lowered their chance of success,” she writes. “This presented victims with a dilemma: how to respond to unwarranted shame.”

The irony here is that these individuals share similar lives and circumstances with the objects of their resentments, although the mechanisms of their disenfranchisement may be different. From the perspective of predatory capital, certain rural and metro areas look the same: easy to exploit. Payday lenders have been shown to target both poor small towns and vulnerable urban neighborhoods. Dollar stores employ a similar practice. A recent study from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that chains like Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Family Dollar “single out communities that have been marginalized economically and politically,” regardless of where they’re located geographically. “They blanket Black and Latino neighborhoods” in big cities, often “opening multiple outlets near one another.” But these companies “also target rural towns, many already struggling from the effects of corporate consolidation and globalization.” 

With urban and rural voters alike trending towards Trump, a national political movement based on shared economic conditions seems farther away than ever. At the local level, though, discrete examples provide scraps of hope. Groups like Down Home North Carolina are doing the slow, incremental work of organizing rural communities, winning anti-eviction policies in small towns, helping to pass a Medicaid expansion, and helping to reverse the 2024 GOP electoral wave in six counties where the group was active. In Missouri last November, voters approved a minimum wage increase — with a majority in some rural counties that voted for Trump. Even while acknowledging the conservative views held by much of today’s rural working class, it’s possible to see in these developments the seeds of political coalitions that can emerge out of shared immiseration.

The market is constantly widening the gap between economic winners and losers in America, thanks in large part to the policy consensus embraced by both parties. As Hochschild’s research shows, the punishment many rural Americans have received has fueled reactionary hatred and resentment that spoils potential economic alliances. The mistake — and it’s a common one — is to take electoral results as definitive, to regard rural people as possessing fixed, unchanging political attitudes. Their attitudes, like political attitudes everywhere, are products of history, shaped by the distinctive structural forces of the places where they live. Many references to the urban-rural divide are attempts, at times imprecise, to have a conversation about the rift between places that attract capital, talent, and investment, and those where resources are removed, where investments dry up, and where populations dwindle. This is the divide that matters.