Tolkkinen: Rural Minnesota Trump supporters stand by their guy

PARKERS PRAIRIE, MINN. - It was a beautiful Friday evening, and at the Parkers Last Stop bar the open doors let in the sunshine.

Not far away, the high school varsity baseball team, the Panthers, was busy shutting out the visiting team from Pillager.

Rachel Rustand, a retired chef, was at the Last Stop visiting with old friends, drifting out to smoke and back in to drink. They were all supporters of President Trump and they were all very happy with his first 100 days in office.

“He’s thinning out useless government spending and he’s securing the border,” said Rustand, from Parkers Prairie, in the southeastern corner of Otter Tail County. “Trump is making America greater and he doesn’t give a [expletive] who he offends.”

And there’s something else Rustand wants from Trump: Equal health care for everybody.

If you’re like me, you just did a double take. Universal healthcare from the man who tried to kill Obamacare in his first term? What?

Rustand explained that she has no health insurance. She’s not old enough for Medicare, and she lost her private plan after undergoing major surgery. So she understands the pain of having to foot the bill for your own medical care.

Mike Keller, a retired firefighter visiting from Bismarck, also hopes Trump will help the working class. He liked Trump’s promise to end taxes on Social Security — although the IRS says those whose income is solely Social Security generally do not pay taxes — and hopes he delivers a better retirement for working people.

“That’d be such a boost,” he said. “Not everybody had a job where they could put all this money into a 401(k). They lived paycheck to paycheck.”

They and their friends trust Trump to do what is in the best interests of the American people. Like others in the bar, they feel deceived by the U.S. government, that the government wastes taxpayer dollars, and that only Trump is bold enough and powerful enough to put an end to it.

The people at Parkers Last Stop might not think of U.S. history this way, but our government is riddled with malfeasance in the past 100 years alone that, to me, set the stage for government mistrust of today. There was the Tuskegee syphilis study, the forced sterilizations of Indigenous and Black women and prisoners, the secret bombings of Cambodia, and the discovery that there were no weapons of mass destruction, which cost the U.S. an estimated $3 trillion and the lives of 147 U.S. soldiers.

Over and over our government has lied to us or hidden what they were doing, whether at home or abroad.

Without a strong counter-narrative touting government successes, such as the development of ethical research rules after Tuskegee, these failures create fertile ground for distrust.

It’s no wonder that people don’t trust their own government, an idea perpetuated by advocates of limited government. It was President Ronald Reagan who said, in 1986, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

His supporters trust Trump. They love what they see as his openness and transparency. MAGA is a mixture of political ideologies all fixing their hopes on one man. The contradictions are well-reported and frustrating. How can you cheer on the layoffs of tens of thousands of federal workers and potential cuts to programs that benefit all of us, like Medicaid, and then want a program like universal health care that would require massive federal investment? The answer is likely complex and nuanced, and I don’t have it.

What I do know is that the people I spoke to at the bar care, and care deeply. They want things we should all want from government: transparency, efficiency, responsiveness. They are tired of the political pivoting from politicians mindful of how their messaging plays in different quarters. They want someone to tell it to them straight, in simple, blunt language, someone who gets things done, and someone who champions their values, which, yes, include disdain for immigrants and people on government assistance. But they also feel such connection to him that they trust him to ease their struggles.

At 100 days, Trump’s approval rating is the lowest for any American president at this point in their terms. Even some of those I talked to weren’t thrilled about everything he’s done. Keller, for instance, wasn’t impressed that he boasted he could end the war in Ukraine quickly when it continues to slog on more than three months after he took office.

But in Parkers Prairie, where the old Minnesota flag flies over the new Veterans Memorial Park, and where bar customers are quick to buy each other a drink, best friends Cody Masog, 27, and Jeff Hall, 29, nodded quickly when asked if they would vote for Trump again in 2028 if he’s allowed to run.

“It’s a good thing he’s finding all this money that’s disappeared,” Masog said.