Trump’s revenge tour on America includes his own voters
By 
For all of the talk about Rust Belt deterioration that surround Trump’s tariffs, Trump’s policies are going to be devastating for the economic engine of a lot of small towns in rural areas, their institutions of higher education:
At Western Illinois University, an empty dorm that once held 800 students is now a police training ground, where active-shooter drills have left behind overturned furniture, rubber-tipped bullets and paintball casings.
Nearby dorms have been razed to weedy fields. Two more dorms are set to close this summer. Frat houses and homes once filled with student renters are empty lots. City streets used to be so crowded during the semester that cars moved at a crawl. No more.
“It’s almost like you’re watching the town die,” said Kalib McGruder, who was born in Macomb and worked 28 years for the Western Illinois campus police department.
Macomb is at the heart of a new Rust Belt: Across the U.S., colleges are faltering and so are the once booming towns around them. Enrollment is down at many of the nation’s public colleges and universities, widening the gap between high-profile campuses and struggling schools. Starting next year, there will be fewer high-school graduates for the foreseeable future.
[…]
Among metropolitan areas especially reliant on higher education, three-quarters of them suffered weaker economic growth between 2011 and 2023 than the U.S. as a whole, according to an analysis by Mark Muro and Shriya Methkupally at Brookings Metro, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C.
In the prior decade, most of these same metro areas grew faster than the nation did.
“It’s just been one financial crisis after another for the past 15 or 17 years,” said Andrew Koricich, executive director of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges and a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. “It starts to accumulate in smaller college towns, especially for colleges that don’t have billions of dollars in the bank.”
College towns are now threatened by federal-funding cuts from the Trump administration, resulting in hiring freezes and layoffs at Ivy League and state schools alike. Administration efforts to cancel student visas might hurt state college budgets, since most international students pay higher, out-of-state tuition.
The jobs that are lost as these schools shrink or outright closed are not going to be replaced by MANLY MAN jobs no matter how many regressive taxes Trump implements, they’re just going to vanish forever. Trump doesn’t care, doesn’t think he will play a political price for it among most voters in this area, and he’s almost certainly right.