Good and hard, and more please

While Trumpflation is actually going to cause temporary residents of the Trump coalition to seek less fashy pastures, it’s also worth considering the stories of people whose livilhoods were directly ruined by Trump but will probably keep voting Republican for generations [gift link]:

Brad Watson, 41, awoke without an alarm at 5:30 a.m., strapped on his headlamp and headed to the barn. Cold air leaked through a small gap in the boards, and he stuffed a paper bag into the hole to block the wind. He knew every detail of the barn in the morning: hay shifting beneath his boots, heat rising off the cows, the way the milking equipment froze against his hands. He walked through the stalls to greet each cow by name and then stopped.

It was Meg, a purebred cow, one of his best. She had flipped over her stall in the night and twisted in her chain, strangling to death. He knelt to touch her head and then kept walking toward the milking parlor. More than 90 other cows still needed to be milked, twice a day, every day, and that work never stopped for a weekend, or a vacation, or a dead cow, or any other crisis during a winter in which his family dairy business was beginning to unravel.

He guided the cows into the parlor one at a time, patting their flanks to help them stay calm. “Come on, girls. Settle down,” he said. He hooked each one to a machine and watched the milk start to flow as he ran through the numbers again in his head. His milk check came every other week, and it never covered his bills. Feed, fuel and fertilizer had nearly doubled in recent months. Lately, he was losing several hundred dollars each day, and without Meg the math would be worse.

Brad attached the next cow to the machine and texted his father, Brian Watson, 62.

“I can’t keep going like this,” Brad told him. “I could make more by picking cans up off the road. I’m done.”

“Don’t think you failed,” Brian responded. “You’re the last Watson milking.”

The Watsons had been dairy farming since before the Civil War — one of dozens of Watson farms that had spread across northern Pennsylvania over the generations, and then, like dairy farms everywhere, gradually disappeared. The number of dairy farms in the United States had fallen to fewer than 25,000 from a peak of nearly 700,000 in the 1970s. Milk prices had barely risen in half a century, held down by overproduction and a handful of large corporations that dominated the dairy market. The costs of running a family farm had skyrocketed by as much as 500 percent.

Brad had supported Donald Trump in 2024 in part because Trump promised to change all that by becoming “the most pro-farmer president you’ve ever had.” Instead, new tariffs had cut into Brad’s potential export market and the emerging war in Iran had sent gas and fertilizer prices surging by as much as 70 percent. He was losing thousands of dollars each month and falling behind on his feed bill, until he made the call he’d been dreading his whole career. He dialed up an auction house to arrange the Watson family’s final dairy sale last month.

“Complete Jersey herd dispersal,” one ad read. “Farm is going dry. Every cow must go.”

One of the overriding theories of the Biden administration was deliverism — the idea that if you provided material benefits to residents of rural areas while the other side was taking it away, you could start winning some of them back. It’s a nice theory, but it’s hard to see much evidence of it on either end.