Rural Idaho has been let down by our congressmen. Time for change | Opinion

My wife and I along with our dog Leku live on a small dry farm outside of Ashton, in the southeastern part of the state.

It’s a bucolic life. In late summer, when the wheat and barley have ripened and the Tetons are shimmering above the forested foreground, you’d think you were stepping into a Monet painting.

Leku is Basque for Spot, an apt name for a Great Pyrenees with a touch of St. Bernard. Ashton’s slogan is “Adventure Starts Here,” also apt if you happen to be heading east to Jackson Hole, or north to Yellowstone National Park, or west to the Arco desert and the Lost River and Sawtooth ranges.

Go south, however, and adventure noticeably weakens at St. Anthony (presumably named after the patron saint of lost items and once known as “Little Chicago” because of its murder rate) and peters out entirely at Rexburg, home to BYU-Idaho and, more notoriously, Chad and Lori Vallow Daybell, whose delusional religious beliefs resulted in the murder of Chad’s wife and the murders and dismemberments of Lori’s two young children. Rexburg bills itself, apparently without irony, as “America’s Family Community”.

Contradictions abound here.

We disdain government but gladly accept taxpayer-funded crop subsidies and the federal water that fuels our farms. We shun all things Marxist, romantically seeing ourselves, I suppose, as rugged individualists in the John Wayne and Clint Eastwood mold, yet spend our Sundays worshipping a history that brought everyone together, in shared work, to make the desert bloom — what Wallace Stegner called the most successful example of socialism in America.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but our mostly teetotaling Mormon farmer neighbors grow the barley that accounts for over half of the beer and alcohol consumed in the United States. I would know. I was born and raised in this country. My family has farmed and ranched here for six generations.

What is most confounding about this part of the state, though, is the disconnect between our belief in education and civic engagement, and our indifference to Donald Trump’s assault on free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, science-based decision-making, history, learning, the undocumented Mexicans who do most of the heavy lifting around here — even democracy itself.

Trump carried Fremont and Madison counties by 86% and 88% in 2016, and by 83% and 80% in 2024.

I lived and worked as an attorney in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Trump crossed the East River to Manhattan in search of development opportunities and tabloid notoriety; 84% of his fellow New Yorkers — those who knew him best and might have even slept with or been fleeced or sued by him — voted for someone else in 2016.

Back then, Trump flags flew from nearly every farm tractor, truck, hay baler and grain combine in sight. This is no longer the case, and while I would like to believe it evinces disapproval of Trump’s grifting and increasingly unhinged lying, maybe even repulsion over his undeniable link to the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, it’s probably overly optimistic thinking on my part.

Our rules-based government, public health system, 80-year old trans-Atlantic economy (and probably the global economy as a whole), and role as the world’s leading democracy may be crumbling, but we’ve been reluctant to criticize the president, much less our federal representatives — all four of them — who have hitched their horses to the Dear Leader’s wagon and abandoned any pretense of standing up to him. I guess it’s the new Idaho Way.

I didn’t have an opportunity to pass on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Howard Lutnick, Kristi Noem or any of the other empty suits in Trump’s inner circle, nor did I approve Project 2025 or the Trump family’s tawdry monetization of the Oval Office, now estimated at over $1.4 billion. Neither did you, even though you would likely agree that using our foreign policy apparatus to extract golf course management fees from favor-seeking countries or fooling the gullible with crypto and meme coin schemes are filthy ways to make a living.

The trick now, as I see it, is to come to grips with the fact that Trump’s continued bamboozling of an uninformed or disinterested electorate in the name of authoritarianism is tantamount to treason.

No, we didn’t play a direct role in this ongoing madness, but we did elect Jim Risch, Mike Crapo, Mike Simpson and Russ Fulcher to represent us in Congress, and it is they, not us, have directly legitimized Trump’s many assaults on our Constitution and our conscience. They, not us, have aided and abetted his frightening agenda at every turn.

Risch, Simpson and Fulcher are up for re-election in 2026, Crapo in 2028. I think it’s time we remember what we stand for as Americans and as Idahoans, and deny them the opportunity to do further harm.

Douglas Siddoway farms and practices law in Fremont County.