Interesting trends are taking over the United States.
Manufacturing and production plants are shutting down or gone. It varies by region and industry.
The United States had about 25,000 malls in the 1980s. We’re down to about 1200. Many rural malls have shut down. Stores like Aldi and Dollar General or Dollar Store have replaced them. Some are being successfully repurposed by turning stores into churches. Some areas turn to casinos to counter the loss of malls and manufacturing.
Rural movie theaters are closing, as are rural hospitals, which is creating healthcare deserts.
These are anchor industries. As plants, malls, movie theaters, and hospitals close, jobs are lost, along with local revenue streams. Income drops; spending drops. Local restaurants and service industries suffer. That ripples into the local area’s ability to maintain public buildings, schools, and infrastructure. As these effects are felt, more people move away. People lack incentives to move there. The population shrinks.
With fewer students, rural public schools close. Small community colleges and universities feel it as enrollment drops. Falling enrollments force them to cut programs and raise tuition to fill the gaps, but factors have changed, and the loop of falling tuition and less classes grow.
Railroads, which used to be a rural lifeline, have cut way back in the United States. Small-town passenger train service is mostly gone.
Meanwhile, Data and AI Centers are being built fast. They’re being built in rural areas where there used to be mining or manufacturing. While they’ll provide temporary economic stabilization and add some revenue from construction, these places don’t typically employ many people. Automation takes care of many service needs. Such centers also don’t produce products that can be taken to a store and sold.
I was thinking about all of this because those kinds of economic and service declines in rural areas were a meaningful part of the political environment that helped Donald Trump gain support. He frames his attacks on ‘narco-terrorists’ as a war on crime and drugs. The war in Iran is part of his America First agenda. They build on the same themes of strength, distrust of elites, and national priority that resonated politically in earlier elections.
All those rural trends have been causing a youth drain. Educated young citizens are moving out of rural areas. Those left behind tend to be older and less educated and are more likely to be Trump supporters. For me, then, what Trump is now doing will do little to ameliorate the polarization affecting United States politics.
Long-term rural revitalization isn’t just about economics or infrastructure. It’s deeply tied to political will, governance, and coalition-building. Without bipartisan or broadly supported political action, even the best economic initiatives struggle to take hold.
Trump’s style, though, is exactly the opposite; he goes it alone instead of building coalitions, demonizing political opponents. At the end of the term, we’re likely to see many of the same problems affecting rural areas that we now see. The polarization will remain, but there will be less voters in the rural areas to support people like Trump.
They may have won some short-term victories by putting Trump in office, but the problems remain.
A war in Iran does nothing to help.
Michael Seidel, writer 