Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack entry for June 10, entitled "Breaking the Heart of the Heartland," in which Krugman tells how the rural vote has shifted against Trump.
In 2024 Donald Trump narrowly won the popular vote, with only a 1.5 percentage point margin. But he won rural areas by 30 points.
Trump
won rural areas by such a large margin because farmers were wildly
optimistic about what he would do for them. The Purdue/CME Ag Economy
Barometer, which is basically an index of farmers’ economic sentiment,
surged with Trump’s victory:
Today,
the rural Trump bump is nowhere to be seen. In fact, white rural
voters’ views about Trump’s economic policy have turned astonishingly
negative. Normally, partisanship strongly colors economic perceptions.
According to a recent Fox News poll, only 29% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 71% disapprove. Yet 60% of Republicans still approve.
Remarkably,
however, rural white voters are no longer behaving like non-rural
Republican voters. They are almost as negative on the economy as the
population as a whole, with only 32% of rural whites approving of
Trump’s handling of the economy, and 68% disapproving. Trump has made
the rural economy so bad that reality has overridden Trump voters’ usual
tendency to make excuses for him.
Farmers, who are highly dependent on imported inputs -- farm machinery, chemicals, fertilizer -- have been hit hard by Trump's tariffs and trade war; rival agricultural exporters like Brazil (soybeans) have taken over market share. In 2025 there was a 46% rise in farm bankruptcies; Krugman says it looks worse in 2026, especially with the Iran war raising the price of gas, diesel, and fertilizer in particular.
Recent polls
show that the Senate race in Iowa, which Trump won by 13 points in
2024, is now effectively a tossup. The heartland may be awakening to
reality, with immense political consequences.
Click here for Robert Reich's substack entry for June 10 entitled "The Senate Should NOT Confirm This Person" -- Todd Blanche, for attorney general.
Let me get right to the point. The Senate should not confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general.
Blanche,
who used to be Trump’s private lawyer, has treated the Justice
Department as Trump’s private law firm. He still believes that Trump —
rather than the United States — is his client.
At the very least,
the Senate should insist, as a condition of confirming Blanche, that the
May 19 deal Blanche devised to immunize Trump and his family from all
future prosecutions — which Blanche alone signed — be nullified.
The
purpose of that immunity deal — which resulted from Trump’s own bizarre
lawsuit against the IRS — should by now be clear. It’s to prevent any
future government inquiry into the corrupt dealings of Trump and his
family.
The breadth of the so-called “settlement” agreement between Trump and, well, Trump is staggering. Take a look at it, here.
Here's Reich's list of salient points:
Trump is the most corrupt president in American history. Since
being in office for a second time, he’s so far increased his wealth by
an estimated $4 billion, and his sons’ and daughters’ wealth by billions more. Some examples:
Trump
and his family have created multiple crypto businesses — World Liberty
Financial and the $TRUMP meme coin — that have received favorable
deregulatory treatment and reportedly generated at least $2.3 billion in income for Trump and his family since he won the presidency.
Six
days after a company backed by Eric and Donald Jr. took a 20 percent
stake in an American mining group, the group’s parent company received
$1.6 billion in federal financing. That’s because the president of
Kazakhstan granted the company the right to mine the world’s largest
known undeveloped deposit of tungsten, an element used in
semiconductors, lightbulbs, and warheads.
In late
2025, Don Jr.’s firm 1789 Capital acquired an equity stake in critical
minerals company Vulcan Elements. Shortly after, the White House and the
Pentagon awarded Vulcan a $620 million federal loan without competitive procurement or independent technical review.
Eric and Don Jr. have conducted numerous undisclosed meetings with foreign government officials
(including representatives from Hungary, the UK, Vietnam, and Qatar)
while simultaneously negotiating global real estate deals for the Trump
Organization.
Don Jr. serves as a strategic advisor or investor in prediction market firms Kalshi and Polymarket, which have received favorable, deregulatory treatment from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Don Jr. is on the board of prescription drug platform BlinkRX, which will benefit from the administration’s promotion of direct-to-patient medicine sales.
Presumably, someone has made a fortune trading stocks and bonds on the basis of insider knowledge
of decisions that Trump would announce — about tariffs, his war in
Iran, and other news that moved stock and bond markets. The trades
occurred just before the announcements.
In May,
Trump disclosed that his trust was actively trading individual stocks,
an unprecedented practice for a sitting U.S. president in the modern
era.
Trump has pardoned some of the most brazen
financial criminals in American history, and one can only wonder what he
received in return. They include Philip Esformes, convicted in what Trump’s own Department of Justice described as the “largest health care fraud scheme ever charged”; Joseph Schwartz, convicted for a $38 million fraud scheme; and reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, convicted for multimillion-dollar bank fraud. He’s granted clemency to Lawrence Duran after a $205 million fraud conviction. He commuted Jason Galanis’s sentence and pardoned Devon Archer, both tied to tens of millions in fraud.
