Budget would hit rural towns especially hard

[struggle4progress]

By Jenna Johnson
April 2 at 7:43 PM

DURANT, Okla. — At the Boys and Girls Club in this rural city in southern Oklahoma, the director is unsure how he will stay open if President Trump’s proposed budget goes through, eliminating money for several staff positions.

Similar conversations are happening at the Oklahoma Shakespearean Festival’s after-school arts program, which relies on National Endowment for the Arts grants that Trump wants to eliminate. And at the county senior center, which already lost its state funding and could lose all or most of its federal funding, too. And at the Farm Service Center, which supports 1,200 local producers and is staffed with employees whose positions were targeted in the budget.

In this town of 16,000 — located near the Texas border in Oklahoma’s Bryan County, where Trump won 76 percent of the vote — excitement about Trump’s presidency has been dulled by confusion over an agenda that seems aimed at hurting their community more than helping it ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-budget-would-hit-rural-towns-especially-hard--but-theyre-willing-to-trust-him/2017/04/02/51a456d4-12e3-11e7-833c-503e1f6394c9_story.html?utm_term=.351e4c0dbeaa

[hatrack]

1. Aaand who'd they vote . . . yep, that's who they voted for!

75.9% Trump

http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/oklahoma/

Fuck 'em.

[gratuitous]

2. We're seeing the Munchausen-by-proxy presidency

First, a definition: "Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP) is a mental health problem in which a caregiver makes up or causes an illness or injury in a person under his or her care, such as a child, an elderly adult, or a person who has a disability."

In this case, the victim is Durant, Oklahoma. They're in a vulnerable position, but they don't or can't see that their predicament is the product of the man squatting in the Oval Office. Instead, they are "saved" at the last moment by Trump's intervention, and they never quite put it together that it was the same guy who put them in such terrible danger.