The Rural Power Behind Trump’s Assault on Blue Cities

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2025

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard from red states into blue cities isn’t just a partisan attack; it’s also a geographic one. In the 2024 election, Donald Trump won rural areas by 40 percentage points. And you could see what’s been happening in Washington, D.C., and Chicago as a rural political coalition militarily occupying urban centers. The rural-urban divide in America has become so big it’s dangerous — for our politics, and for democracy. And yet, just a few decades ago, this divide didn’t exist. Urban and rural areas voted pretty much in lockstep. And for Democrats to gain power again, they’ll need to figure out how to win some of those voters back. So how did the Democratic Party lose rural voters? And what could they do to win their votes back? Suzanne Mettler is a political scientist at Cornell University and the co-author with Trevor E. Brown of the new book “Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy.” Mentioned: Rural Versus Urban by Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown Four Threats by Robert C. Lieberman and Suzanne Mettler Book Recommendations: The Politics of Resentment by Katherine J. Cramer Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver Devotions by Mary Oliver Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Will Peischel. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Michelle Harris, Marina King, Emma Kehlbeck and Jan Kobal. Original music by Isaac Jones, Carole Sabouraud, and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The I think there's a particular lens worth using right now
0:34.0	as we watch the Trump administration deploying the National Guard from red states into
0:39.1	blue cities. We are watching a rural political coalition militarily occupying urban centers. It is moving
0:46.7	armed troops in over the objections of their residents, of their mayors, and of their governors.
0:52.7	Here's J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois.
0:55.5	Let me be clear.
0:56.8	Donald Trump is using our service members as political props
1:01.9	and as pawns in his illegal effort to militarize our nation's cities.
1:07.7	The Trump administration is doing this while describing these cities as something like
1:11.8	enemy territory. They need to be liberated, recaptured, taken back. Trump said this to a room of
1:19.1	America's top military leaders. It seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats,
1:25.2	what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles.
1:31.6	They're very unsafe places, and we're going to straighten them out one by one.
1:35.6	And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room.
1:38.8	That's a war, too. It's a war from within.
1:41.2	Trub also said that the people in these cities resisting this occupation, these deployments,
1:45.7	that they should be understood as insurrectionists.
1:50.1	We have an insurrection act for a reason.
1:52.5	If I had to enact it, I'd do that.
1:54.7	If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding
2:00.8	us up, sure, I mayors were holding us up.
	...

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