Some insights shared by Arlie Russell Hochschild in her article, “My Journey Deep in the Heart of Trump Country,” reporting from Kentucky’s Pike County at The New York Times:

“In the 2024 election, 81 percent of Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District — the whitest and third poorest in the nation — voted with Mr. Ford for Donald Trump. Once full of New Deal Democrats, the region had suffered losses that its people felt modern Democrats didn’t care about or address. During World War I and II, the “black gold” dug out of their mountains fed industrial America. Then the coal mines closed, and the drug crisis crept in.

…What do things feel like, I wondered, to the people in Kentucky’s Fifth District? Are we approaching a tipping point when they might start to question Mr. Trump — either because of his threats to democracy, or because his economic policies will make their lives tougher? After all, experts predict Mr. Trump’s tariffs will raise prices, and his budget cuts will hit some of his strongest supporters the hardest. Meals on Wheels: cuts. Heating cost assistance: cuts. Black lung screening: cuts. One nearby office handling Social Security has closed. Even the Department of Veterans Affairs may have to pull back on the services it offers.

…These are services people need. More than 40 percent of people in the Fifth District rely on Medicaid for their medical care, including addiction treatment. Now, Mr. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is poised to cut benefits, which could lead to layoffs in the largest employer in eastern Kentucky, the Pikeville Medical Center. Meanwhile, many children in the district qualify for food stamps, and the administration’s chain saw is coming for those, too.

…James Browning, the drug counselor, had a different take on the Appalachian pain threshold: “A lot of people around here are living on the edge. If we start to see Trump policies lead to price hikes and benefit cuts — especially Medicaid and Social Security and food stamps — some people will begin to say, ‘Wait a minute. I didn’t vote for this.’”

…But now after months of Mr. Trump’s fevered talk of migrants “poisoning the blood” of America, the casual association of all migrants with “evil” gang members dispatched by Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, Mr. Ford’s views seemed to have hardened. Noncitizens, he told me, have no right to due process. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was guilty, Mr. Ford told me, of being a member of the vicious MS-13 gang — this, he concluded from the Homeland Security website — and he thought Mr. Abrego Garcia was rightly deported.

…Democrats are deeply unpopular. According to a March poll, only 27 percent of registered voters have a positive view of the Democratic Party, the lowest level since NBC News began asking the question in 1990, and my conversations with voters in the Fifth District distilled just how difficult it will be for the party to break through when Mr. Trump has so powerfully captured the bitterness and pain that has taken root in the hills of Appalachia. The last Democratic state senator from eastern Kentucky just registered as a Republican.

…Rob Musick explained: “Around here, Democrats come off as against this and against that — and not for anything. They need a big positive alternative vision. And they need to understand that in rural areas like this, the deeper problem is that we’re socially hollowed out. That happy buzz of community life? That’s not here. There are fewer meetings of the Masons, the Rotary Club, the Red Hatters. Our church benches are empty. In the mountains, there’s no safe place against drugs. One elderly woman told me, ‘I don’t open my door anymore.’ I’ve heard teens say, ‘There’s nothing to do.’ A lot of kids are alone in their rooms online with Dungeons and Dragons. I think MAGA plays to a social desert.”

…“I think Democrats need to get behind this kind of effort and initiate a campaign of grand civic re-engagement,” Mr. Musick said. Federal funds could support the best local initiatives, he added, and help start ecology, drama and music clubs — “good local things that lack funding.”

…For now, Mr. Trump’s support isn’t fading. So Democrats face a double task. America needs a firm hand on the wheel of democracy — defending the free press, universities, the judiciary. At the same time, Democrats need to begin taking steps to regain the basic trust of voters who once supported them.

That starts with confronting, up close and personal, the circumstances that have led red America into the angry fires of a stolen pride narrative: visit, listen, campaign everywhere, propose policies that could elevate local politicians whose stories resonate nationally and begin to restore the civic fabric of life in towns like Coal Run Village and Pikeville.

…In the meantime, James Browning, the addiction counselor, offered this important warning. “If people in Pike County or elsewhere get socked with higher prices, there might come a tipping point. But what happens then would hinge on how Democrats handle it, what better ideas they have to offer, their tone of voice. If the left starts scolding, ‘You Trump supporters brought this on yourselves,’ or ‘We told you so,’ people around here will get more pissed at the snarky left than they are at the hurtful right — and Trump will march on.”