During the 2016 election campaign, unhinged sociopath and malignant narcissist Donald "Rump" Trump infamously claimed that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose any support, so impervious to reality and decency they were believed to be. That observation has been proven numerous times, as his cult followers -- from farmers losing markets over his destructive trade wars to the declining coal industry -- support him despite his policies that are ravaging them and their communities.
One sad example of this phenomenon comes via the New York Times from Franklin, in Johnson County, IN, where voters cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Rump. Rump's roll back of regulations covering trichloroethylene (TCE) will have a deadly impact on the county, which has suffered with TCE contamination and caused glioblastoma, Ewing’s sarcoma, and acute lymphocytic leukemia among the children in the community. Rump's Environmental Protection Agency has been pushing to weaken TCE restrictions. Apparently, the Rump voters didn't bargain for increased cancer rates:
"Declaring TCE “carcinogenic to humans by all routes of exposure,' the Obama administration had sought to restrict two of its riskiest uses, as a stain remover and as a degreaser, and had marked it for further review, potentially to ban the chemical altogether. It had also moved to strengthen cleanup rules for hundreds of sites nationwide believed to be contaminated.Not paying attention to the dangerous policies of the person you vote for can be deadly. But Rump's voters in Johnson County, IN are likely to stay with him through thick and thin, even though he's just shot them in the middle of 5th Avenue.
But at the urging of industry groups, the Trump administration has stalled some of those moves. In 2017 it indefinitely postponed the proposed bans on risky uses, leaving as many as 178,000 workers potentially exposed. It also scaled back a broad review of TCE and other chemicals so that it would exclude from its calculations possible exposure from groundwater and other forms of contamination — the problems present in Franklin." (our emphasis)
