I live in deep-red America. Trump’s devastation is all around me.

Trump’s policies hurt the very people he’s claiming to help. I know because they’re my neighbors.

By Marilyn from Home of the Brave

I’m from a red area of a red state. My city in Missouri voted for Trump by more than 58 percent in the last election. My friends, neighbors, and even some family members have turned so hard-right that talking politics is basically off limits for me now, as a rule. If you’re going to say anything these days, you do it under your breath. It’s not that I worry that I’ll offend somebody—I stopped caring about that a long time ago—it’s just that most days, it’s not worth the hassle.

Which is a real shame, because as I look around my community, I see the damage that Trump’s policies are causing every single day. Here, in deep-red Trump country, it’s Trump’s own voters who are feeling the pinch. I don’t know what it would take to break his hold over them. But I do know that when he promised to look out for the little guy, America’s “forgotten men and women,” it was all a lie. All I have to do is look around.

My husband and I have been married for 54 years. Today, we both rely on Social Security, something we’d long planned for ourselves in our retirement. We worked all our lives and paid into the system, and drawing from it always figured into our retirement portfolio. Now, Trump has slashed the agency’s budget, shuttered offices—especially out here in rural states—and caused the quality of service to go way down.

We also rely on Medicare, which Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill will slash by up to $500 billion over the next decade. Even more cuts could be coming down the pike, too. To people like us, who worked hard and played by the rules our whole lives, this feels like a wholesale betrayal; like the rug is being pulled out from under us at the last minute. And all of this coming from a president who promised to “love and cherish” Medicare.

I know a thing or two about health care. Starting at age 19, I worked as an operating room nurse for 27 years. I saw every imaginable thing the human body can go through. This was before Roe v. Wade, so I also sometimes saw illicit abortions. During one two-week span, we saw two young women come in because they’d attempted to perform their own abortions. I’ll spare you the grisly details, but one didn’t make it through, and the other would never be able to carry a child again.

This is what I thought of when Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court majority decided to overturn Roe. With this move, Trump single-handedly scrapped half a century’s worth of settled law and thrust women back into the bad old days that I thought we had left behind for good. Now, we’re seeing more and more women go through the same kinds of things I saw back in those days, including many who have died because they couldn’t access the reproductive care they needed.

My husband and I also spent time working as farmers, with more than 1,000 acres here in Missouri. That’s why it was so disappointing to see that so many of America’s farmers helped put Trump back in office. Now, to repay them, he’s screwing them over with pointless tariffs that make it impossible for them to do business or plan their futures. I have sympathy for what these people are going through, but I can’t for the life of me understand why they chose to put the country—and themselves—through it.

I’ve seen members of my family struggle as well. My son runs a machine shop, and deals everyday with proud pro-Trumpers. Now, thanks to Trump’s tariffs, he’s seeing his costs creep higher and higher, and he’s having to pass those increases on to his customers. It’s pretty simple to see why: The tariffs make anything with imported parts more expensive, and American companies have to raise prices or risk going out of business. This is the kind of thing that keeps small business owners like my son up at night.

These are serious, immediate, real-life harms that Trump’s policies are causing in our community every day. Meanwhile, he’s trampling on people’s freedoms, violating their rights, and making a mockery of the constitutional inheritance that our forefathers fought for.

My husband and I are both 74. My dad, father-in-law, stepfather, all of my uncles, and my husband’s uncles fought in World War II to protect our American way of life and stop the march of tyranny and oppression. To know that their sacrifices are being betrayed in this way today makes my heart heavy with sorrow.

Marilyn is a participant in Home of the Brave, an initiative dedicated to exposing this administration’s corruption, cruelty, and lawlessness.