Good and hard
By 
Trump voters experience Trump governance, a potentially infinite series:
On a blustery Memorial Day weekend, customers trickled into Seven Points Bait & Grocery looking for fingerling trout and nightcrawlers, for scoops of sweet and salty caramel ice cream and propane refills.
They browsed the racks of tourist sweatshirts, too, most of them emblazoned with “Raystown Lake” across the front.
Judy Norris, 81, has owned the store by Pennsylvania’s largest lake for 49 years, though, and she’s seen enough seasonal Saturdays to know the foot traffic wasn’t adding up as summer unofficially kicked off.
“We’re way off, maybe 40 to 50% down,” Norris said, beside the bait tank. “This is Memorial Day weekend. You normally can’t move in here. The parking lot is usually jammed.”
Just down the road, along the shore of the lake in Huntingdon County, gates to some U.S. Army Corps of Engineers campgrounds were shut, and the hundreds of campsites beyond them sat vacant. The playgrounds were empty. A headline on a local newspaper at Norris’ store spelled it out: “Campground closures impact businesses.”
In March, the Army Corps’ Baltimore office announced that 300 of its campsites on the 8,600-acre lake would be closed indefinitely due to “executive-order driven staffing shortages.” Those staffing shortages would require the Army Corps to focus on “dam operations for flood protection and emergency response readiness” ahead of the 2025 season.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has targeted cutbacks at a slew of government agencies, including the Army Corps.
[…]
Across the street from Seven Points, at Backwoods Smoke Shack, manager Kris Paterson said tourists, including campers, are the lifeblood of the family’s seasonal BBQ business.
“Is this hurting our business? Yeah it’s hurting our business,” she said. “It could destroy us this summer. We get a lot of campers here, all summer.”
Owner Brian Paterson, 37, Kris’ son, said business is down up to 45% from this time last year.
“That’s hundreds of families not coming through here every weekend,” he said. “This will put a hurting on us. If they don’t do anything soon, this summer is ruined.”
[…]
Huntingdon County voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump and other Republicans in the last three presidential election cycles. Norris — who did not vote for Trump — pointed out that no one in Huntingdon County voted for Musk or DOGE.
“We didn’t vote for the Donald Trump who promised to let Elon Musk go on a wave of mutilation through the federal government. we voted for the one we imagined was looking out for us.” Many such cases.
There are some cases where Trump lied about his policy preferences and neither Trump-aligned nor mainstream media was inclined to point out that he was lying. This isn’t one of them — this is a “you absolutely voted for this” situation. Trump spent much of the highest-visibility part of the campaign literally parading around this very state with Elon Musk and promising to give him a major role in government. If you think he cares more about small businesses and non-affluent tourists than his inane libertarian theories about government, I’m not sure what to tell you. At best:
Catholics call this "vincible ignorance." It's ignorance that an individual is responsible for, which could be dispelled by a reasonable effort at seeking the truth.— Joe Stieb (@joestieb.bsky.social) June 1, 2025 at 8:42 AM