The Rural Power Behind Trump’s Assault on Blue Cities

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 the residents, of their mayors, and of their governors. Here's JB 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 gonna straighten them out one by one. And this is gonna 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 didn't I'd do that. If people were being kill killed and, courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I do that. I mean, I wanna 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 nineties, 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. Reversing it isn't gonna be easy, but it begins with understanding it and taking seriously the resentments that fuel it. Rural versus 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 …