A key sign that MAGA is losing its grip

A report from Appalachia

Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progress Report.

Tonight I’ve got a feature that takes us to Ashland, KY for a political revelation and the first real indication that Donald Trump’s hold on working class people is finally loosening. The thing about making promises as a politician is that you’ve got to follow through on them, because otherwise, it’ll catch up to you.

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Darrell Chapman isn’t the kind of guy who is likely to engender much political sympathy from committed liberals (or YouTube commenters). If anything, once they hear his story, they’re more likely to nominate Chapman for membership in the Leopards Ate My Face Party. And go ahead, you can admit it: hearing that a lifelong Republican from West Virginia who works in a prison, voted for Donald Trump, and now feels betrayed doesn’t exactly have you reaching for the box of tissues.

All of that is fair enough; these are frustrating and scary times, and voting for Trump helped usher them in. Plus, there are communities experiencing colossal suffering right now who should be at the top of the queue for any distribution of empathy. And yet there’s also an argument to be made that Darrell Chapman’s story is a politically essential one and exactly the kind of narrative that a fledgling opposition movement should embrace and encourage.

Chapman is a blue collar Appalachian conservative, with a twist: he’s also the president of his union local. A shop instructor at the low-security federal prison in Ashland, KY, he was responsible for 200 members of the Council of Prison Locals. The gig includes overseeing disputes, grievances, overtime scheduling, and adherence to the union’s 100-page contract — a contract that Donald Trump declared null and void with a March executive order that stripped bargaining rights from more than a million federal workers.

This is the genesis of his disillusionment with Trump and the Republican Party: Chapman has been a union member throughout his career, and the campaign convinced him that Trump would stand with labor. Like many of his colleagues, all the rhetoric, news coverage, and endorsements from other law enforcement unions even had him confident that Trump would address some of the systemic issues plaguing the Bureau of Prisons, including severe understaffing.

And at the very least, Chapman was under the impression that any swipes at federal unions would include an exemption for law enforcement. And technically, he was right, but the Federal Bureau of Prisons turned out to be exempt from that exemption. So now they’re facing potential devastation: already, management has promised to end seniority, force more overtime, and sundry other threats.

Republican lawmakers also proposed stripping employees of a key retirement benefit, while the threat of prison privatization and a rollback of criminal justice reform also worry him. Not everybody who works in the prison system is in favor of mass incarceration; Chapman teaches skills to inmates and isn’t looking for more punitive policies or prison overcrowding.

“I think there's a lot of people second guessing,” Chapman says of his colleagues, the vast majority of whom voted for Trump under the same pretense. “I've always been with the attitude when it comes to elections, it’s family, country and job. That's my priorities. And when the election time rolled around, he fit right there with all those. But now with the attack on the public workers, that's not only affected work, that's affected the family, it's affected everything.”

Trump’s executive order led to the government refusing to automatically deduct dues from members’ paychecks, and in a right to work state, half of the prison staff has declined to pay themselves, largely out of the fatalistic belief that the union is doomed. It’s bleeding the local dry, another problem that Chapman must face.

His anger at Trump is only exceeded by his frustration with his elected officials in West Virginia, who wouldn’t give him the time of day. Senators Shelley Moore Capito and Jim Justice were particularly frustrating.

“If you get a response at all from 'em, it was ‘Trump put us here, that's what we're here for, to push his agenda.’ But no, that’s not what you was put there for — you was put there to push my agenda,” he says. “I don't have an email to Trump and his staffers, I can't email him and say, ‘Hey, we don't like this. You need to fix this.’ That’s why we have your email. You represent us, not blindly following what the president says, regardless of who the president is.”

Chapman got so frustrated one day that he went and changed his voter registration, from Republican to independent. Now, he says that if he could do the election over again, he’d probably stay home. So no, he’s not suddenly a committed MSNBC viewer, nor is he volunteering for a Democratic candidate any time soon. Then again, not even loyal Democratic are all that excited about the prospect of working for the party under its current leadership.

But the MAGA spell has been broken, and Chapman’s reflections on the desperate situation awaiting him in his working class community on the West Virginia/Kentucky border offers insight into where Democrats should concentrate their efforts.

“If you look around West Virginia, Kentucky, southern Indiana, there's nothing left. The coal fields are gone. Most of your industry's gone from this area. No industries, no factories,” he says. “[The prison] is major income to the people in this area. If I was to leave today, what am I gonna do? Go down to Walmart? We got plenty of Walmarts around. Plenty of restaurants, plenty of bars, because we've got so many colleges in this area, but there's no real job, there's no career, there's no retirement. All that stuff's gone.”

While I don’t believe that the success of Trumpism can simply be explained by “economic anxiety,” I do think that his focus on self-enrichment, boosting fellow crypto grifters, and ongoing destruction of services is wearing thin with working class voters. But they need an alternative — as Darrell shows, Republicans don’t just jump to being Democrats.

History has also shown that political success follows dedicated economic development that puts people to work in good, permanent jobs and restores a sense of purpose to a place and its residents. A populism that honors union rights and delivers real transformative investment — not just announced infrastructure projects that never happen — will be key to any regional political comeback. But even more important will be showing that somebody cares, and actually means it.

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