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)
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The old phrase, “cutting off one's nose to spite one's face” comes to mind. Republicans are going to be shown a lot of hard lessons and find out they've been played. They are going to see what it's like to be a bargaining chip and a pawn in a bigger game in which they are disposable.
If the economy slows down, these blindly loyal miners, farmers and other rural voters are going to feel an even bigger pinch. And when they can't sell their crops because other countries have found other sources and the water supply is too contaminated to use for safe consumption, and the medical facilities are shut down, maybe they'll understand that votes have consequences. Maybe they'll learn, probably they won't. They are such a brainwashed group that they'll blame the Democrats somehow because FOX told them to.
But the facts will be there. And they have only themselves to blame.
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