Trump's revenge tour leaves MAGA collateral damage

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Trump’s revenge tour leaves MAGA collateral damage
The president's veto of a bipartisan Colorado clean water project is hurting his own voters

By Sophia Tesfaye
Senior Writer
Published January 3, 2026 6:30AM (EST)


(Salon) Donald Trump’s fixation on the “big lie” of the 2020 election is the organizing principle of his political life. After the Jan. 6 insurrection, he campaigned against Republicans who dared to hold him accountable. Since returning to office, he has set out on a revenge tour so obsessive and self-defeating that it is now consuming the very people who carried him back to power.

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On Tuesday, Trump rejected bipartisan legislation to complete the Arkansas Valley Conduit, a 130-mile pipeline designed to bring clean drinking water to farms and homes across southeastern Colorado — an area that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024. Groundwater in these communities is contaminated with salt and naturally occurring radioactive elements. The bill would have shifted more of the cost of completing the project — which has been in the works since the 1960s — onto the federal government, relieving the region’s poor, rural communities of a crushing financial burden. It passed Congress unanimously, but Trump killed it anyway.

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Rep. Lauren Boebert shrugged as Trump’s administration went after Colorado in other ways, including dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in liberal Boulder, telling reporters that “if he wants to go after Boulder and some climate activists, sure.” But since the congresswoman sponsored the Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act, the president’s latest dose of vengeance is a problem. “I must have missed the rally where he stood in Colorado and promised to personally derail critical water infrastructure projects,” Boebert said after Trump’s veto. “I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retribution.”

Boebert, who is infamous for engaging in a lewd act in a theater full of children, was one of four initial Republican rebels who joined Democrats in forcing the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. (The group also included Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom Trump has called a “lunatic” and a “traitor.”) As the president worked to bully the rebels into submission, his top aides even called Boebert into the White House Situation Room. But Trump’s strong-arm tactics reportedly caused Boebert to dig in. Now her constituents are paying the price. “This isn’t over,” she vowed. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/01/03/trumps-revenge-tour-leaves-maga-collateral-damage/