I missed this tidbit in an otherwise judicious report in The New York Times about a town in Florida that was struggling to recover from Hurricane Michael anyway, and is now struggling because there is a federal prison there that got demolished during the storm. Many of the inmates got transferred to a prison in Mississippi. The Florida COs suddenly had a 400-mile commute and now, with the shutdown, they're pretty much making the trip for free.

This is awful enough for the people involved but, as the story makes clear, it's a perfect microcosm of how conservatism so easily morphed into Trumpism, and how impossible it likely is for conservatism ever to extricate itself again, no matter how many Sensible Conservatism vanity publications the sugar daddies are willing to float.

Jim Dean, Marianna’s city manager, said he had already been concerned, even before the shutdown, that the hurricane would prompt public agencies to consider reducing their footprint in the region. What if an extended shutdown contributed to keeping the prison closed indefinitely? “I worry about the government pulling out of rural America,” he said.

This, after all, is one of many towns across the country where private industries are few and the federal government is intimately connected to livelihoods. Wedged near the border with Alabama and Georgia, Marianna’s 7,000 residents depend on the federal medium-security prison to employ nearly 300 people in good-paying jobs with attractive benefits.

And the prison isn’t the only federal benefactor. The United States Department of Agriculture provides crucial assistance to farmers, many of whom plant cotton or peanuts or raise cattle.“The U.S. Department of Agriculture office is currently closed, due to the lapse in federal government funding,” read a printout taped to the door of a local U.S.D.A. office on Friday. “The office will reopen once funding is restored.

OK, sauce for the goose and all that, but there's a deeper element to the story of this town that explains even more how we came to be in this mess.

A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend’s house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton’s 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work. The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things. “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

I'm assuming that Ms. Minton is not referring to terrorists in southwest Asia. The most charitable explanation I can think of is that she is referring to what FDR called "the malefactors of great wealth," but I'm not sure she means them, either. Some of us believe that part of the president*'s job is to hurt some of our fellow citizens.

That is how Donald Trump got elected. And it started long before he'd paid off his first porn star.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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