Exploring the MAGA 2025 Political Landscape–Part 1:
Public Health Challenges in Four Key US Regions–Today: Ohio and New Jersey.
Donald Trump (far left, with his right hand raised) is sworn in as the 47th US President in the US Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., on January 20th, 2025. The photo is courtesy of Saul Loeb and REUTERS.
NOTE: Nazia Saeed, a human resources professional living in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, contributed significant research and writing to this article.
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There could not be a more appropriate name for the village of East Palestine, Ohio, if—like we here at Public Health Policy Reviews—you wish to contemplate the confluence of national political events and international policy decisions that have led to the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) current sorry state.
East Palestine is a village in Northeastern Ohio that suffered a devastating ecological disaster on February 3rd, 2023, when an industrial chemical transport train crashed in the town.
The Israel-Hamas ceasefire, believed by most people across the world to have finally been pushed over the finish line by President-elect Donald Trump, is happening as he takes his triumphant oath of office today.
Moreover, these historic events are happening on the hallowed birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King (1929-1968) and after fifteen months of the outgoing Biden-Harris administration’s shameful complicity with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the mass slaughter and displacement of Palestinian civilians.
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Doron Steinbrecher, 31 (left, in pink), Romi Gonen, 24 (middle, in black), and Emily Damari, 28 (far right) were the first three released Israeli hostages reunited with their mothers on January 19th, 2025. The photo is courtesy of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
The first period of a three-phase ceasefire is currently occurring between the warring parties of Israel and Hamas, the radical Islamist terrorist organization that rules over what remains of Gaza after its military decimation by the IDF.
Israel and its border regions of Gaza and the West Bank sit on land that was “once upon a time” known as Palestine and is the ancestral homeland of both the Semitic Jewish and Palestinian Arab peoples. The country of Israel is a Western European and American colonial facsimile of the ancient Greek warrior state of Sparta.
In 2023, thirty-eight freight cars owned by the Norfolk Southern Railway Corporation overturned and spilled hazardous chemicals into the environment. The deadly chemicals contaminated the soil, water, and air of East Palestine as the spill burned for more than two days after the freight car crash.
The release of hydrogen chloride, vinyl chloride, and phosgene into the air, groundwater, and soil also forced a mass evacuation of residents in East Palestine.
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An aerial view of a mushroom cloud after authorities performed a “controlled release” of chemicals following a massive train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3rd, 2023. The photo is courtesy of Orlowski Designs LLC, Shutterstock.
Norfolk Southern emergency crews and environmental experts from Ohio and the federal government initiated a series of so-called “controlled burns” of the railcars to manage the size and time duration of the disaster.
East Palestinians and Ohio residents in the rest of the state certainly noticed when then-candidate and former President Donald Trump quickly paid a 2023 campaign visit to the village and surrounding regions when it was safe to return to the area.
Contrast Mr. Trump’s eagerness to “stump” for votes in Ohio with the reluctance of then-President Joe Biden or anyone from his administration to recognize the environmental disaster. President Biden did not land “Air Force One” in East Palestine until one full year after the train derailment disaster.
Mr. Biden’s Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, visited the region a day after Mr. Trump. Still, Trump, national Republicans (GOP), and the media harshly criticized him for his passive administrative approach to the train crash.
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It was as if Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Mr. Buttigieg wanted to give the Trump-supporting East Palestinians and other Ohioans within the radius of the 2023 railcar crash a deliberate impression of benign neglect and political indifference.
Benign neglect is the shameful domestic policy prescription that Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003), a former “moderate” Democratic Party New York Senator and administrative advisor to former GOP President Richard Nixon (1913-1994)–recommended for the issue of racism in the United States in 1970.
The cancerous neoliberal policy of benign neglect has metastasized over the past fifty-four years to encompass the DNC’s international diplomatic policies. Given my limited understanding of the nearly eighty-year-old Palestinian land dispute, one of Public Health Policy Review’s readers defined the current situation in Gaza and the rest of the Middle East better than I can.
In an email response to one of our recent articles, she connected the poverty of the Palestinians to the lack of resources and lack of funding afflicting poor and working-class Americans.
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A statistical poll from October 29th, 2024, shows Donald Trump surging ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris in the “battleground states” one week before the presidential election. The graphics are courtesy of Statista.com.
Among other insights, the reader wrote, “Why is it that the United States of America, in 2025, is prioritizing giving military aid to foreign governments like Israel over funding industry and schooling and medical needs of their own taxpayers?”
Michigan, once a part of the so-called political “blue wall” of Northern DNC stronghold states, flipped to GOP “red” in 2024 because of incandescent Arab American voter anger at Biden and Kamala Harris over their support of Israel’s brutal bombardment and mass slaughter in Gaza.
Ohio has trended “red” for Trump and the statewide GOP since “The Donald” seized control of the Republican Party in 2016. Former President Barack Obama won Ohio in 2008 and 2012.
So, you would think the state should be a “swing state,” much like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – all of which have swung wildly from “red” to “blue” over the last three election cycles. But Ohio is now viewed as a reliably “red” GOP state.
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The video screengrab of an emergency services helicopter dousing the wildfires in Los Angeles, California, with water is courtesy of ABC7.com.
This surge of anti-DNC voter sentiment is a disturbing national political trend of a complete loss of confidence in statewide and national Democrats—even in reliably “blue” states like California, New York, and New Jersey.
Statewide and local California Democrats are currently paying a high political price for their incompetence regarding the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles. Likewise, New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New York Mayor Eric Adams are allowing Republicans to make heretofore unimagined political inroads with working-class and blue-collar voters via their mismanagement of immigration and impotence on crime in the “Empire State.”
In southern New Jersey, Camden is a city defined by urban struggle in a state dominated by Democratic and “moderate” Republican leadership. Camden has a long history of healthcare disparities, with a predominantly low-income population struggling to access quality care.
Initiatives like the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers aim to address these issues, but systemic challenges persist. Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat, oversees a state legislature controlled by his party.
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The graphic image is courtesy of brbridge.org.
Recent Democratic control of New Jersey has facilitated some liberal policies.
Yet, like the DNC elsewhere across the country, establishment “moderate” Democrats in New Jersey are facing harsh criticism from political progressives, left-wing liberals, and Trump’s MAGA acolytes in the state for their myopically entrenched political practices.
Back in Ohio, Youngstown—a city roughly 22 miles north of East Palestine—was once a Democratic Party stronghold. Economic decline and conservative political shifts have created a unique environment where public health issues dominate local discussions in the formerly thriving steel town.
The opioid epidemic has devastated Youngstown, with overdose rates among the highest in Ohio. Harm reduction programs, such as naloxone distribution and needle exchanges, are central to combating this crisis.
Additionally, lead contamination in water and older housing stock poses significant public health risks, prompting calls for stricter environmental regulations and increased funding for remediation. However, Ohio’s Republican Governor, Mike DeWine, leads a state government with both legislative chambers controlled by the GOP.
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Former US President Bill Clinton’s (1992-2000) “three strikes” federal criminal law policy is one of the many destructive domestic legacies of the “moderate” Democratic Party’s “third-way” politics. The image is courtesy of State of the Union History.com.
Unfortunately, MAGA’s fiscally conservative domestic policy approaches to such dire public health challenges are woefully inadequate for solving Ohio’s problems.
The irony for modern voters is that the DNC’s conservative Democratic structure, implemented during the “third-way” Clinton-Gore years, also promotes massive cuts to domestic government spending priorities to approve exorbitant military expenditures and corporate tax cuts.
This political dichotomy does not escape White working-class voters in Camden, New Jersey, and Youngstown, Ohio. Throughout the 1980s and early 2000s, their sentiments trended toward former GOP Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush Senior, and George W. Bush.
After the Arab American, Latino, and East Asian voter revolts against the Democrats in 2024, the only demographic not “hip” to the DNC’s rudimentary, street-level political game of “three-card monte” is African American voters.