In The Great Revolt, Salena Zito and Brad Todd gave voice to the forgotten corners of America’s electoral map (post-industrial counties in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin) where Trump’s unlikely rise in 2016 turned blue states red. The voters they profiled weren’t ideologues or Beltway conservatives. Many had voted for Obama twice. One had backed Bernie Sanders in the primary. Another was a lifelong union Democrat who organised public-sector workers and still kept a framed AFL-CIO award in his hallway. “In his heart, I know he wants to do well,” Ed Harry, a former Pennsylvania labour council president, told Zito. “We knew exactly who he was when we voted for him, tweet and all.”
They meant it. Trump’s style didn’t scare them; it spoke to their sense that the centre had collapsed and politics had to be remade, not managed. Zito and Todd styled this coalition as a new populist axis—part Tea Party, part Perot, part Pentecostal revival. More important than their policy preferences was their emotional disposition: culturally conservative, economically precarious, institutionally disillusioned. They didn’t care if Trump fit the traditional GOP mould. They cared that he didn’t.
Nearly a decade on, that coalition has held. Trump’s 2024 victory confirmed what many suspected: the populist realignment Zito and Todd documented has become the Republican base. But if The Great Revolt was a love letter to Trump’s voters, the second Trump administration may prove to be a betrayal in waiting.
The Cuts Are Real
On 3 July 2025, Trump signed the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, a sprawling 1,200-page law that enacts much of the Project 2025 blueprint. For Medicaid recipients (over 80 million Americans) it is a legislative wrecking ball. Under the new law:
- All able-bodied adults must work at least 80 hours per month or lose coverage.
- States must verify eligibility every six months, a bureaucratic nightmare likely to purge millions.
- New copayments of up to $35 per service will be imposed on those just above the poverty line.
- Planned Parenthood and any provider offering abortion services are banned from receiving Medicaid reimbursements.
- Medicaid reimbursements must now match or fall below Medicare rates, per a June 2025 presidential memorandum targeting “waste, fraud, and abuse”.
The rhetoric is familiar. So is the impact. This is not trimming fat; it’s removing limbs. These mandates disproportionately affect rural communities, the disabled, and the working poor. Precisely the constituencies that powered Trump’s victories in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
Ed Harry, one of Zito’s early interviewees, might not have imagined himself forced to requalify for healthcare in his seventies while his rural hospital shutters. Yet that is the trajectory now set in law.
The Affective State
Why does this not break the spell?
The answer lies in what Zito and Todd understood better than most. Trumpism is not about ideology. It is not even about interest. It is about recognition. Trump’s base believes he sees them, that he’s on their side. Even when he cuts the very programmes they depend on. His betrayal is forgiven because it feels like fidelity. He rants against the elites; he mocks the experts. He picks their enemies and says what they are forbidden to say.
“The press takes him literally but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously but not literally,” Zito famously observed after the 2016 campaign. It remains the sharpest distillation of the Trump phenomenon. A politics driven not by policy detail but affective trust.
What voters get in return is not protection, but performance. The Medicaid mandate becomes a morality tale: the deserving poor versus the undeserving other. As one provision of the Big Beautiful Bill makes clear, all “non-compliance” with work requirements will be investigated as potential fraud. It is not just exclusion. This is criminalisation.
Austerity with a Smile
Trump ran in 2024 not as a saviour but as an avenger. Gone were the vague promises to rebuild the American dream by draining the swamp. In their place came threats: to the deep state, to “illegal invaders,” to liberal cities, to journalists, to transgender people, to dissent itself. What remained was the illusion of protection. Especially for the “Red-Blooded and Blue-Collared” voters profiled by Zito. But it was always an illusion. The machinery of the second Trump term is not populist. It is fascist and austere.
The Medicaid cuts are only the beginning. Social Security is next. Project 2025 proposes raising the retirement age to 69. The administration has already begun closing SSA offices, automating case reviews, and cutting back on appeals. “Entitlement reform” is back on the table, just not under that name. It is branded as fairness, as personal responsibility, as cleaning house. But it is a cut all the same.
The Realignment Is Real—So Is the Risk
Back in 2016, the Clinton campaign believed demography would save them. They didn’t see that culture would trump class, and affect would trump analysis. The Democrats lost not just voters but a whole register of political expression. Trump, for all his chaos, had an answer to despair. It was wrong, violent, and cruel, but it was an answer.
Now, in power again, Trump’s coalition is no longer insurgent. It governs. But governance means consequence. Medicaid isn’t abstract. It pays for children’s asthma inhalers, nursing home care, addiction recovery. In Zito’s Ohio and Wisconsin diners, those services were never luxuries, they were lifelines.
The paradox of Trumpism is that it mobilised the very people it is now beginning to discipline. The Great Revolt saw a movement. What we are witnessing now is the counter-revolution it enabled: one in which cuts come wrapped in caps and slogans, and where revenge wears the mask of care.
