How Come Trump Draws Big Crowds?

Here was the headline: “Trump shuts down city in show of strength with first rally since being charged in documents case.”

The city is Pickens, SC where Trump held a rally yesterday.

I lived in South Carolina in the 1970’s, and me and my hunting buddy Sherrill Smith would sometimes drive up and around Pickens in late August or early September, looking for a spot to hunt deer. We usually put up a stand alongside a field which was farmed by two black sharecroppers, Rabbit and Love, with the deal being that in exchange for turning their bean field into shooting gallery, we would give them half the meat from anything we shot.

Pickens had around 3,000 residents back then, and the population today is about the same. According to the 2020 census, the median family income is around $35,000, which is about half the median family income for the entire United States.

In other words, Pickens hangs on probably because the Feds send in enough welfare, disability, and other transfer payments to keep the place alive. The town, which was classified as a village until recently when it somehow got reclassified, I suspect, to qualify for more federal budget pass-throughs, was a shithole back in the 1970’s and it’s a shithole today.