commentary
The president’s veto of a bipartisan Colorado clean water project is hurting his own voters
Published
January 3, 2026 6:30AM (EST)
Donald Trump takes questions at Mar-a-Lago on Dec. 22, 2025. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images)
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.
From the start of his second term, the president has used the levers of government to reward loyalty and punish perceived betrayal. Universities that failed his ideological loyalty tests were threatened with investigations or funding cuts. Media companies were sued and harassed. Law firms that represented his opponents were singled out for retribution.
Instead, the president has turned his weapons of revenge on deep-red communities and MAGA diehards who believed — despite mountains of evidence to the contrary — that their loyalty would shield them.
As Salon’s Brian Karem recently observed, there is no indication that Trump plans to slow down in 2026. Instead, the president has turned his weapons of revenge on deep-red communities and MAGA diehards who believed — despite mountains of evidence to the contrary — that their loyalty would shield them. With the first veto of his second term, he is gleefully punishing tens of thousands of his own voters now that he doesn’t need them anymore for personal gain.
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.
In a message posted to Truth Social the same day, the president made clear that the veto was not about policy, as the White House’s official statement about “massive cost of taxpayer handouts” suggested, but a personal vendetta on behalf of “Tina Peters, who is now, for two years out of nine, sitting in a Colorado Maximum Security Prison, at the age of 73, and sick, for the ‘crime’ of trying to stop the massive voter fraud that goes on in her State.”
Peters, a Republican election official from a deep-red county, was charged by a Republican district attorney and convicted by a jury in 2024 — that almost certainly included Republicans — of tampering with voting machines in an effort to support Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen.