For most of the last century, the tiny town of Millersburg, in central Pennsylvania, has been slowly losing its population. Its great economic boom came early in the twentieth century, when anthracite coal from nearby mines was loaded onto barges in the town’s port, on the Susquehanna River, and carried south toward Harrisburg and Baltimore. But anthracite’s fortunes declined as people switched to gas and electric heat, and the 1920 census is the last one that recorded a major influx of people to Millersburg. After the Second World War, some shoe and clothing factories opened, but those plants, along with the last of the big coal mines, closed in the mid-nineteen-seventies.

Millersburg is not in crisis but neither is it thriving. Very few people live below the poverty line, but most make less than fifty-one thousand dollars per year, the national average household wage. Many locals left in the seventies, but then outsiders moved in: Old Order Amish families from Lancaster County came for cheaper land, forty years ago; more recently, the area has become a bit of a bedroom community for people who work in Harrisburg. The locals get older, their children move away, and the tax base steadily shrinks. The school system ranks in the bottom third of the state, and just more than ten per cent of residents, almost all of whom are white, have graduated college. There is little to hold the ambitious. You can see the decline in the once charming wooden structures that have needed a coat of paint for a long time, in the closed storefronts, and in the hasty and unlovely fixes to shops on the town’s main streets.

This past Saturday, President Donald Trump decided to spend his hundredth day in office with people from Millersburg and other nearby and similar towns. He spoke at a rally in Harrisburg, but it was doubtful that many of the seven thousand people who attended were from that city, which Hillary Clinton won decisively. A map of the area’s Presidential-vote results looks a bit like a misshapen doughnut: Clinton blue representing the hole inside, and bright-red Trump support in the surrounding region.

Trump’s speech followed a script familiar from the campaign, though the words took on a different cast coming from the mouth of a President (it was “arguably the most hate-filled presidential communication in modern history,” Michael Gerson, a Republican columnist for the Washington Post, wrote). Trump mocked the media and attacked the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear-weapons deal. He talked about the border wall and devoted time to the scourge of illegal immigrants, who, in his telling, are “bloodthirsty … drug dealers, gang members, and killers.” (Gerson again: “Trump gained a kind of perverse energy from the rolling waves of hatred.”) Almost as an afterthought, Trump referred to the economic challenges facing his central Pennsylvania audience and promised to bring back jobs, “beautiful, wonderful, great American jobs.”

How he would provide those jobs wasn’t clear. The speech capped a week in which Trump tried to hastily push a tax cut for corporations and the very rich through Congress, and to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a plan that would likely leave millions of people uninsured or paying far more for their insurance. Neither bill was brought to a vote. The people attending his speech cheered the President, but it wasn’t obvious to me how tax cuts, border walls, and more expensive health care would improve the lives of towns with shrinking tax bases and aging populations.

I began to imagine proposals that might benefit the people of Millersburg. As it happens, Dauphin County, home to Harrisburg and Millersburg, is in the midst of drawing up an economic-development plan. I spoke with Jerry Duke, who is leading that effort for the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission; Christopher Dietz, the president of Millersburg’s borough council; and Jim Hepler, who was president of a local economic-development group. They explained that Millersburg and its surrounding area—known as Lykens Valley—have economic challenges that would be familiar to people in rural areas all over the country. Hepler (“You want to refer to me as ‘Jolly Jim’ ”) said the region has the typical mix of rural work: farming, some small machine and tool-and-die shops, a few tiny coal mines (“they might have two or four or six workers,” he said), a smattering of accountants and lawyers, a local bank, and a surprising number of pizza places. As in much of the country, the better-paying skilled work is disappearing and being replaced by lower-paying retail and service jobs. Jolly Jim, like the others involved in local planning, made it clear that nobody there wants to lose the character of the area. “We are not interested in overly industrializing,” he told me. Even if it were feasible, they wouldn’t want large-scale manufacturing to come to the valley. Basically, Jolly Jim explained, they want things to stay the same, but just be a bit richer.

At first, this goal seemed ridiculous: Wouldn’t a slowly dying area need a fundamental change to kickstart economic growth? But Duke, the planning official, convinced me otherwise. The solution is not to import something new but to take advantage of what is already there, by adding value to agricultural products that are normally shipped elsewhere. Several local businesses already do this. One Amish farmer, Amos Stoltzfus, built a factory that cuts onions and sells them to McDonald’s. He sold that to build a new business that creates natural remedies and sells them nationwide. (Full disclosure: Amos is a friend of mine.) The Masser family built a small empire around the potato. They buy potatoes from other farmers, in addition to growing their own, and then sort and pack whole potatoes, cut potatoes, and potato flour in a high-tech processing facility. The products are sold to stores and restaurants all over the Northeast. There are also two family-owned sawmills near Millersburg and small factories that turn wood into spindles and bed frames. All of these businesses were created by local entrepreneurial farmers. None of their founders were rich, and most hadn’t attended college, but they all built healthy businesses that now employ dozens to hundreds of workers.

Another possibility, Duke told me, would come from tourism. Lykens Valley is beautiful, defined by two wooded mountain ranges, one of which is part of the Appalachian Trail. There are streams and trails, and while there is plenty of hiking, hunting, fishing, and inner-tubing, few visitors come to the area and few businesses exist to accommodate those who do. The nearest hotels are in Harrisburg, an hour away.

Just under a third of Americans live in small towns or rural areas much like Millersburg and Lykens Valley. These areas—particularly in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—gave Donald Trump his Electoral College win. What is he giving those people in return, in terms of concrete proposals that might turn their conditions around?

To give the President his due, a corporate tax cut—he proposes decreasing the top rate from thirty-five to fifteen per cent—could increase entrepreneurship, giving a bit more incentive for locals to open small agricultural-goods production facilities, hotels, and restaurants. Trump has also promised fewer regulations in general. Any manufacturer would argue that regulations can be a burden, especially for smaller, newer businesses. But we know so little about the President’s vision for tax cuts and deregulation that it’s impossible to calculate how they would impact places like Millersburg. What we do know isn’t promising. The tax-cut outline (“plan” is too grand a word for a single page of a few bulleted items) that his Administration revealed last week cuts taxes for the richest Americans, those earning more than half a million each year. There are few people in that demographic in Lykens Valley. It is true that Trump’s tax ideas could save people in Millersburg an average of around a thousand dollars a year in income tax, but those benefits would be offset by his proposed cuts to a host of programs at the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Interior that currently flow to rural areas. Looked at from the broadest perspective, President Trump’s tax and spending plans would transfer money from rural areas to urban ones, from people below middle-income levels to the very rich.