And if Democrats need help finding the victims of Trumpian chaos, there’s an app for that: your news browser. At TNR, putting a human face on the policies imposed by Washington lawmakers is part of our bread and butter. In recent weeks, my colleague Grace Segers has tracked the impact of the Trump administration’s policies on public health, rural economies, and food prices, to name a few. The Washington Post recently featured a story about a park ranger who, having voted for Trump after hearing him promise to make her desperately needed IVF treatments free, was fired by his administration instead.
As the Columbia Journalism Review’s Lauren Watson wrote last week, some of the stories about the damage of Trump’s slash-and-burn policies are finding their way into local newspapers all across the country. While the DOGE story may have taken root in the public consciousness because of “the experiences of federal workers in and around Washington, D.C.,” she writes, “over 80 percent of the federal workforce lives and works outside the greater DC area, doing jobs from monitoring nuclear facilities to researching plant diseases, which means that the fallout from DOGE has been a local story, too.”
In other words, this is a good time for Democrats to get outside their Capitol Hill bubble and seek out the people and the communities who have been most affected by Washington’s Trump-minted chaos. Republicans are certainly doing a lot of damage close to home—and they’re planning to gut the District of Columbia’s budget at the same time that they’re putting the local economy under strain through mass government layoffs, but there are less resilient economies beyond the Beltway that are being hit just as hard, and too many stories that too often don’t get told by the national media.
