Rising Bills, Falling Bridges, and a President Unfit to Lead the States That Elected Him
The 2025 FBI crime data, a wave of hospital closures, and skyrocketing electricity costs paint the same portrait: the states most loyal to Donald Trump are being governed against the interests of the people who live in them — and the man in the Oval Office is no longer capable of steering the country away from the wreckage.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation released the most encouraging national crime data in a generation this year — a 4.5 percent decline in violent crime from 2023 to 2024, the lowest rate since 1969, and a nearly 16 percent drop in the murder rate, according to the agency’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. FBI Director Kash Patel called it “the single largest decrease in violent crime and murder since 1937” and credited the change to the Trump administration. That was the headline. The story beneath the headline is not one this White House wants told.
Because when you take the FBI’s numbers and lay them next to a state’s electoral map, its Medicaid enrollment, its rural hospital ledgers, and its residential electricity bill, a very different portrait emerges. The states doing worst on almost every measure of ordinary human security — safety, health, education, wages, life expectancy — are, overwhelmingly, the states that voted for Donald Trump in 2024. And the policies enacted since he took office in January 2025 have made every one of those numbers worse.
This is not a story about ideology. It is a story about arithmetic. And the arithmetic is damning.
I. The Numbers the President Won’t Cite
Every year, President Trump singles out specific American cities — New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. — as symbols of Democratic misrule and violent chaos. Every year, the FBI’s own data tells a different story. An Axios analysis of the 2024 FBI figures found that thirteen of the twenty U.S. cities with the highest murder rates were located in Republican-run states. Many of them are cities with Black mayors trying to govern under state legislatures that actively strip them of funding, gun-control authority, and prosecutorial discretion.
Zoom out to the state level and the picture darkens further. Louisiana holds the highest state murder rate in the country at 15.8 per 100,000 residents — more than three times the national average of 5.0. Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee round out the top ten. Every one of those states voted for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. As the center-left research group Third Way has documented over more than two decades of state-level analysis, the red-state murder rate has been 20 to 40 percent higher than the blue-state rate every single year of this century.
These are not aberrations. They are the return on a governing philosophy. For more than a generation, the states that produce these numbers have been ruled by Republican legislatures and Republican governors who have chosen — deliberately, and against ample warning from economists, epidemiologists, and their own auditors — to underinvest in the things that keep human beings safe: schools, mental-health care, public health, prenatal medicine, drug treatment, housing, and the kind of long, patient, evidence-based public administration that a state like Minnesota or Massachusetts takes for granted.
II. The Business of Being Governed
What red-state governments do spend on, and prioritize, is business. Not small business. Not the family farm. Not the working household. Corporate investment — the largest, most footloose, most tax-shy version of it — has been the organizing principle of state economic strategy across the South and much of the mountain West for two decades. And nowhere is the cost of that strategy more visible right now than in the electricity bill.
Data centers — the vast, power-hungry warehouses that run artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency — are the most capital-intensive industrial buildout in recent American history. Governors of both parties are eager to attract them, but the states rolling out the deepest tax exemptions and the most permissive siting rules are almost uniformly red. Virginia, whose “Data Center Alley” in Loudoun County now hosts nearly 200 operating facilities and holds 25 percent of all data-center capacity in the Americas, gives the industry roughly $1.6 billion in annual tax exemptions. Georgia is racing to catch up.
The residents of those states are paying for it — literally, monthly, on the electric bill. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, residential electricity prices in areas with high concentrations of data centers have risen by up to 267 percent over the past five years. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, in announcing federal legislation to protect ratepayers, put the projected damage plainly: the average household in the 13-state PJM grid region will see energy bills climb $70 a month by 2028 — $840 a year — due entirely to data-center capacity costs.
“Because of data centers, consumers in the mid-Atlantic grid region — the nation’s largest electric grid, serving 67 million Americans in 13 states — have paid or will pay over $21 billion in capacity costs in the last three capacity auctions alone.”
— Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), June 2026
In Georgia, state Public Service Commission analysts warned that Georgia Power’s proposal to add 10,000 megawatts of new generation by 2030 — driven overwhelmingly by data-center demand — would raise residential customers’ bills by at least $20 a month, and that ratepayers would be exposed to enormous stranded-cost risk if the projected load never materialized. Their advice was to approve only a third of what the utility had asked for. The commission, appointed under a Republican governor, is expected to approve significantly more.
This is the shape of the bargain being struck across the states Trump won: the profits accrue to Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft; the risks and the bills are transferred to the household. It is the same bargain that gave Louisiana the highest cancer-alley pollution burden in America, that gave Texas an electric grid that collapses in cold weather, and that gave West Virginia one of the shortest life expectancies in the developed world. It is not incompetence. It is the plan.
III. The Cuts, and Who Pays
On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” into law. Its architects called it the largest tax cut in American history. Its critics called it what the numbers said it was: the largest single cut to American health care and food assistance ever enacted. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois summarized the trade at the bill’s signing: more than a trillion dollars stripped from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, $200 billion cut from SNAP, and roughly 17 million Americans on track to lose health coverage — all to finance permanent tax cuts weighted overwhelmingly toward the highest-income households.
The consequences are no longer theoretical. A March 2026 analysis by Public Citizen identified nearly 450 hospitals at heightened risk of closure — facilities that together serve 6.6 million patients a year and employ roughly 275,000 people. Rural hospitals and hospitals serving Black and Latino patients are disproportionately on the list. The Cecil G. Sheps Center at the University of North Carolina has separately identified more than 300 rural hospitals at “immediate risk,” concentrated in Kansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Missouri, and West Virginia — all Trump-voting states.
The housing side of the ledger is no better. The Trump administration’s fiscal 2026 budget proposed a 44 percent cut to the Department of Housing and Urban Development — including a $26.7 billion reduction in federal rental assistance, an unprecedented 43 percent cut to the programs that keep more than 4.4 million households in stable housing. The Community Development Block Grant program, which small towns across red-state America rely on to repair water lines and rebuild after storms, was slated for outright elimination. HUD Secretary Scott Turner defended the cuts as “reimagining” federal housing policy. Housing advocates called them what they were: “not only untenable, they are unconscionable,” in the words of National Low Income Housing Coalition CEO Renee Willis.
Education is being gutted in parallel. An Education Resource Strategies analysis identified 12 states most vulnerable to federal education funding cuts based on their reliance on federal dollars, share of high-poverty districts, and concentration of low-income students. Every one of the twelve — Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia — voted for Donald Trump in 2024. These are also the states, per World Population Review’s 2026 education rankings, that already sit at the bottom of the country in educational attainment. The math is inescapable: the administration is cutting hardest where children can least afford to lose.
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IV. The Pattern, and the Person
Taken together, this is not a series of unrelated policies. It is a coherent theory of governance, and it can be stated in one sentence: capital is a client, and citizens are a cost. Tax exemptions for data centers. Tax cuts for the top. Cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, HUD, the Department of Education. Deregulation of environmental protections in the states with the worst pollution burdens. Refusal to expand Medicaid in the ten remaining holdout states — all Republican-controlled — even as their rural hospitals close.
The through-line is not fiscal responsibility. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the president’s tax law will add more than $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. The through-line is a simple, brutal ordering of interests: shareholders first, campaign donors second, and everyone else told that the state cannot afford them.
“This blatant tax break for the Mega-MAGA rich has sounded a death knell in the Greater Roseland Community. Safety Net Hospitals are literally facing a Government firing squad while the ultra-rich prepare to add to their investment portfolios.”
— Tim Egan, President & CEO, Roseland Community Hospital, Chicago
What has become clear over the last year is that the president who signed all of this into law is no longer in full command of what he is signing. This is not a partisan claim; it is a medical and political observation that Republican-leaning voters are now making in polls. Reuters-Ipsos found in February that a majority of Americans, including nearly a third of Republicans, describe the president as having become erratic with age. On April 30, 36 physicians — neurologists, psychiatrists, geriatricians, and a Nobel laureate from Harvard, Tufts, Columbia, and George Washington University — sent a formal statement to Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed, entered into the Congressional Record, describing a “rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline” and citing “marked deterioration in cognitive functioning” and “reckless threats of violence.”
These physicians are not partisan operatives. They are the same class of clinicians who, a year ago, described similar signs in President Biden and were vindicated. Their warning about President Trump deserves the same seriousness.
The Founders anticipated this. Congress has the tool. What is missing is the political will.
Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, provides a procedure by which the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet — or “such other body as Congress may by law provide” — may declare that the President is unable to discharge the duties of the office. The Vice President then assumes those duties as Acting President. If the sitting President contests the declaration, Congress may sustain it by a two-thirds vote of both chambers. The mechanism has never been formally invoked in American history. It exists precisely for a moment like this one.
On April 14, 2026, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation to establish an independent Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office — the “other body” the Twenty-Fifth Amendment specifically contemplates. The bill was co-sponsored by 50 House Democrats. Its structure is scrupulously bipartisan: the Speaker, Minority Leader, Senate Majority Leader, and Senate Minority Leader would each appoint four retired senior executive-branch officials — former presidents, vice presidents, cabinet secretaries, and surgeons general — to serve. Four physicians and four psychiatrists would round out a 17-member panel.
Raskin’s letter to White House Physician Capt. Sean Barbabella, sent four days earlier, laid out the case: the president’s public statements had “turned increasingly incoherent, volatile, profane, deranged, and threatening,” and had prompted “tremendous alarm across the nation (and political spectrum) about the president’s cognitive function and continuing mental fitness for the office.” Sens. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), and Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) have separately called for the amendment’s invocation since January.
The barriers, honestly stated
No serious observer believes invocation is politically imminent. Section 4 requires the Vice President and a Cabinet majority — every one of whom serves at the President’s pleasure — to initiate the process. Congressional Republicans still control both chambers. The White House has dismissed each medical warning as partisan theater. The Raskin bill, as its own author concedes, faces almost no chance of enactment before the 2026 midterms.
Why the barriers do not close the case
The purpose of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is not to be invoked easily. Its purpose is to be available. The domestic-policy record documented above — the closed hospitals, the hunger, the electric bills, the housing cuts, the education gaps — is not the record of an administration making bad choices under pressure. It is the record of an administration whose choices are increasingly disconnected from the well-being of the states it governs and the people who elected it. When a president cannot see, or does not care, that his signature legislation is closing the hospitals that will deliver his voters’ babies, the constitutional question of capacity is not academic. It is urgent, and Congress has a duty — moral if not yet mathematical — to preserve the tools for answering it.
V. What the Numbers Require
The 2025 FBI crime data will be used, again and again, by this White House as evidence that its approach is working. It is not. Overall crime declined because a long, structural post-pandemic recovery is underway — a recovery that began years before the current president took office, and one that has been strongest in the very blue states his administration relentlessly disparages. The states most loyal to him remain, by nearly every measure of ordinary human welfare, the worst places in the country to be born poor, born rural, or born with a chronic illness.
What the administration has done in eighteen months is not fix the problems in those states. It is transfer more risk to the residents and more wealth to the corporations siting servers in their backyards. It has done so under the leadership of a president whose own doctors’ peers are now warning, on the record, that he is unfit to hold the office. The 2026 midterm elections are the constitutional response most immediately available. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment remains the response the Drafters wrote for cases in which elections are not enough or not fast enough.
Both responses require citizens — of every state, red and blue — to look clearly at the ledger their government is running in their name.
Editorial Conclusion
The states that gave Donald Trump his 2024 majority are being governed against their own citizens’ interests, on a scale the FBI, HHS, HUD, and the Congressional Budget Office have all now documented. The president overseeing this transfer is exhibiting, in the professional judgment of dozens of independent physicians, the signs of a serious cognitive decline. These are not competing stories. They are the same story.
A republic that cannot tell its own numbers is a republic that has stopped defending itself. Congress, the Cabinet, and above all the American voter still have the constitutional tools to act. The only question left is whether we will use them before the ledger closes for good.
Sources & References
- FBI: Historic Early Look at Annual Crime Data (May 2026)
- OpenCrime / FBI UCR: 2025 U.S. National Crime Rate Statistics
- Axios: “Where homicide rates are highest: Blue cities in red states”
- Third Way: The 21st Century Red State Murder Crisis
- Third Way: The Two-Decade Red State Murder Problem
- The Global Statistics: Crime Statistics by U.S. State, 2025
- Shreveport Times / USA Today: “Louisiana ranked worst state by U.S. News & World Report 2025”
- World Population Review: Least Educated States 2026
- Introl / Virginia SB 253: Data Center Rate Shift Analysis
- Environmental & Energy Study Institute: Data Center Power Demands and Rising Energy Bills
- Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.): Power for the People Act announcement, June 2026
- Yahoo News / AJC: Georgia PSC analysts warn on data-center bills
- Public Citizen: “Trump’s Medicaid Cuts Threaten Hundreds of Hospitals with Closure”
- Forbes / Jesse Pines: 446 U.S. hospitals at risk under OBBB — full list
- Newsweek: Map: Where Medicaid cuts could close hospitals
- CNBC: 3.5 million Americans lost SNAP under Trump law
- Truthout: Trump’s SNAP Cuts Leave States Facing Hunger Crisis
- Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.): Statement on OBBB Medicaid cuts, July 11, 2025
- National Low Income Housing Coalition: FY26 HUD budget request analysis (44% cut)
- Education Resource Strategies: 12 States Most Affected by Federal Education Cuts
- Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.): 25th Amendment Commission bill, April 14, 2026
- The Hill: Raskin bill on 25th Amendment coverage
- Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.): Coverage of 25th Amendment calls (Sen. Markey, Reps. Swalwell, Ansari)
- The Hill Opinion: “Concerns Grow Over Trump’s Mental Fitness” — 36-physician letter
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