Donald Trump to Trump Country: Drop Dead [View all]

The president told MAGA voters exactly what he was going to do in 2024. Now he is doing it.

by Ryan Cooper October 9, 2025

One of the most baffling themes of Donald Trump’s second term is how he is specifically ruining the cities and lives of his most loyal voters—taking their factories, their jobs, their health care, their hospitals, and their future.

The first knife Trump drove into the backs of red economies was to repeal almost all of the Inflation Reduction Act. As I’ve previously covered, President Biden’s economic and climate program, particularly the IRA, ended up directing the lion’s share of its investment to red states and regions. In part because of more pro-business labor laws like “right to work” in these areas—as well as cheaper land—battery factories, solar factories, EV factories, and much else were mostly going up in Republican districts.

No longer! Most IRA-based future planned investment has been canceled—some of it moving to China or other countries—and some existing investment has been abandoned. The EV transition, on which American automakers had invested tens of billions of dollars, has been driven into a ditch.

SNIP*
Conservative regions are taking the bulk of the bloodletting.

And now, Trump is yanking tens of billions of dollars of yet more red state high-tech investment that had already been approved as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law. Emily Pontecorvo has the details over at Heatmap News. Trump’s Department of Energy is now planning to cancel 659 grants worth nearly $24 billion, mostly from the infrastructure law, including all seven grants for “hydrogen hubs,” all grants for “direct air capture” projects to remove carbon from the atmosphere, every grant to support EV conversions at 13 auto factories at risk of closure, 11 of 15 grants to support green manufacturing in former coal regions, and 10 out of 38 grants for battery manufacturing and recycling.
https://prospect.org/politics/donald-trump-MAGA-IRA-projects-republican-districts/