Vice President Mike Pence had made it clear he thinks little of Charles Darwin, having thoroughly dissed evolution as “just a theory.” Once again, Pence finds himself on the wrong railroad track of history. And the light at the end of his tunnel — once again — is the oncoming train of Donald J. Trump, his boss. There’s no immediate record of Trump expounding on evolution, but given that he’s embraced “survival of the fittest” with all the ardor of a boa constrictor in heat, one can only assume he’s a big fan. As always with Trump, an unmistakable element of perversity is involved.
I say this because Trump — as has been widely reported — won biggest in communities with the highest death rates among white voters. This demographic cohort in the United States is unique among all westernized industrial democracies: Its members have experienced an actual decline in life expectancy. In fact, this life expectancy decline emerged as the single most reliable indicator of Trump support, even more than political party affiliation. In other words, more dead white people, more Trump votes. Typically, victorious politicians seek to curry favor by rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Trump — strikingly counterintuitively, and yes, even boldly — is doing the exact opposite.
In a morbid way, this makes sense. If Death by Despair — opioid addiction, suicide, gun deaths, and alcohol poisoning — got Trump to the dance, he can stay in the cha-cha line by feeding that despair. Based on the fine print of the repeal-and-replace health-care bill that Trump is trying to ram down the throat of a reluctant Congress this week, that’s exactly what he’s doing. Even with last-minute changes to make the bill more palatable, the Republican health-care alternative will harshly punish the rural white communities that overwhelmingly supported Trump while simultaneously rewarding younger, affluent voters who overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton. Trump is doing this mayhem by making private insurance more expensive for older whites, hacking their subsidies, and pushing them off the expanded public-health-insurance ledge that’s proved to be the single-most-effective element of the Affordable Care Act by far. Feed the despair.