The Rural Power Behind Trump’s Assault on Blue Cities
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Why does the rural‑urban political divide matter for American democracy?
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I think there's a particular lens worth using right now as we watch the Trump administration deploying the National Guard from red states into blue cities. We are watching a rural political coalition militarily occupying urban centers. It is moving armed troops in over the objections of their residents, of their mayors and of their governors. Here's J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois.
Let me be clear. Donald Trump is using our service members as political props and as pawns in his illegal effort to militarize our nation's cities.
The Trump administration is doing this while describing these cities as something like enemy territory. They need to be liberated, recaptured, taken back. Trump said this to a room of America's top military leaders.
It seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places. And we're going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war, too. It's a war from within.
Trump also said that the people in these cities resisting this occupation, these deployments, that they should be understood as insurrectionists.
We have an Insurrection Act for a reason. If I had to enact it, I'd do that. If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I'd do that. I mean, I want to make sure that people aren't killed.
For years, I have been skeptical of warnings that America was at risk of a renewed civil war. There were all kinds of reasons to not take that particularly seriously. But when I see troops being sent into cities... over the objections of the people elected in those cities, of the people elected in those states, when I hear them talked about this way, I think you have to take those warnings more seriously now.
I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military.
A massive rural-urban divide has opened in our country's politics. Urban and rural voters used to vote pretty much in lockstep. But then, in the 90s, that split. Urban voters became reliably Democratic, and rural voters became overwhelmingly Republican. We treat this as an inevitability in our politics. But it is only a few decades old, and our political future and stability might rest on reversing it. Certainly, for the Democratic Party, any durable political power rests on reversing it. Now, reversing it isn't going to be easy, but it begins with understanding it and taking seriously the resentments that fuel it. Rural vs. Urban, a new book by the political scientists Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown, is the best place I've found to start.
And so I asked Mettler to join me on the show to walk me through how we got here and whether we can get out. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Suzanne Mettler, welcome to the show. Happy to be here. So I think a lot of people who have followed politics over the past 10, 20 years assume the big political divide between rural America and urban America is a constant, an inevitability, just a feature of our politics. Is that true?
No, the rural-urban divide did not exist nationwide in the past in the United States. If we look at how people voted in presidential elections through the middle of the 20th century right up to the early 90s, rural and urban Americans voted almost in lockstep, just a couple of percentage points dividing them.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why does the rural‑urban political divide matter for American democracy?
0:00–7:58
2
How did the United States go from a nation where urban and rural voters voted together to a 20‑point split?
7:58–16:12
3
What historical policies kept rural America aligned with the Democratic Party?
16:12–24:27
4
Why did that historic rural‑Democratic coalition break down in the 1990s?
24:27–33:36
5
How did economic changes like de‑industrialization and trade deals fuel rural resentment?
33:36–41:10
6
What role does perceived elite overreach and cultural resentment play in the divide?
41:10–48:53
7
How can the Democratic Party rebuild genuine connections with rural voters?
48:53–58:49
8
What concrete organizing strategies could reverse the rural‑urban split and protect democracy?
58:49–1:06:42