Purely partisan

There was a time, not so long ago, when a crisis like a cyberattack on a state’s water infrastructure would draw a president toward the bully pulpit with words of reassurance and resolve. Instead, when hackers hit more than 30 municipal water systems in Minnesota late last month, including Tower-Soudan’s, President Trump used the moment, as usual, to take cheap shots that any thinking person knew instantly amounted to nonsense.
Standing before cameras at Camp David, the president brushed aside a federal warning that Iran was the likely culprit and instead pinned the blame on Minnesota itself, calling the state “grossly incompetent” and Gov. Tim Walz “corrupt.”
He said he doubted that Iran was responsible. It was, to his mind, just another example of what happens when Democrats run a state, even though federal investigators say they believe that water systems in at least a dozen states were affected by the recent cyberattack— states run by both Republicans and Democrats. They had all apparently been probed by a hostile foreign actor, and the president of the United States chose that moment to wage his usual partisan warfare rather than provide the steady and calming leadership the country required.
This is who Donald Trump is as president, and by now it should surprise no one. He does not govern as the president of a nation of 330 million Americans. He governs as the head of an increasingly frightening and dystopian movement, known as MAGA, dispensing praise, protection and, increasingly, public money according to how a state voted in the last election. For the roughly half of Americans who live in states he considers hostile territory, there is little pretense of even-handedness — just suspicion, insult and, when the moment allows, retaliation.
That pattern is no longer deniable. Indeed, it is now a matter of public record. Lawyers for the administration have told federal courts, in writing, that grant terminations at the Department of Energy were based “solely” on the fact that a project sat in a state that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. Nearly $8 billion in clean-energy funding was pulled — every dollar of it from blue states, not a penny from red ones — despite the administration’s own internal review having recommended cuts spread across all 50 states.
The Department of Justice made a similar admission in a separate case. The Trump administration has also frozen billions in child care and welfare funding aimed at five Democratic-led states, cut $600 million in public health grants to four blue states, including Minnesota, and left blue-state disaster aid requests sitting unanswered while red-state requests moved forward. None of this has been disguised as anything but what it is. Administration lawyers have argued in court filings that playing political favorites when handing out federal money is “constitutionally permissible.”
Let that sink in. The government that collects taxes from every American, in every state, is now openly arguing it has the right to spend that money as a partisan reward system.
Contrast that with the last several presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, all of whom made a concerted effort to keep federal dollars flowing on the basis of need, formula, and law rather than electoral loyalty.
Whatever one thought of Joe Biden’s policies, his infrastructure and clean-energy laws sent a disproportionate share of new manufacturing investment and jobs into red states, many of them represented by members of Congress who had voted against the very bills that funded the projects. Biden made a point of it. He wanted Republican governors cutting ribbons on projects paid for by legislation their own delegations opposed, because he understood that a president serves the whole country, including the people who didn’t vote for him.
Trump doesn’t view those who voted for someone else as his constituents. He doesn’t even view them as Americans. He views them as opponents who must be punished, using the power and resources of the federal government to wage a quiet war against half the country.
That approach is devastating to us here in Minnesota, particularly in the North Country. We know that the federal-state partnership is incredibly important for communities like ours, which rely heavily on federal resources to pay for water and sewer infrastructure, disaster relief, and economic development.
A president who cannot bring himself to reassure the residents of a state hit by a foreign cyberattack — who instead uses the moment to call its governor corrupt and its people incompetent — demonstrates beyond a doubt that he has no understanding of the job of President of the United States. Regardless of their party, or how they vote, Americans deserve a government that shows up for all of them, not just the ones who cheer for it.