For as long as we can remember, farmers in the U.S. have both decried federal government help as “socialism” and taken massive subsidies from the U.S. federal government - which logically makes no sense.
Then again, the way many farmers & rural Americans voted in 2024 (and 2020) didn’t make any sense either.
Trump’s tariffs in his first term were a major loser, hurting farmers & rural Americans deeply, and angering many of them by destroying foreign markets they’d spent decades building for products like American soybeans. Yet, when the 2024 elections came around, Republicans & right-wing propaganda convinced many farmers to forget how expensive their mistake in 2016 had been, and vote for Trump again.
Now we’re looking around and seeing another severe farm crisis, once again brought about by the terminal stupidity of Donald Trump. Just walking through the Trump/China/Argentina thread is an education in how terribly farm & rural Trump voters have screwed themselves and all Americans.
China isn’t buying any U.S. soybeans now because of Trump’s tariffs & his trade wars. But China still needs soybeans, so they went to one of our main agricultural competitors, Argentina, and bought a few billion dollars worth. That helped Argentina, a nation having major economic & political problems, because their authoritarian leader, Javier Milei, is an insane right-wing, libertarian nut job, who has rapidly destroyed the economy & government of Argentina. Unsurprisingly, Milei is an ally of Trump, and of some of Trump’s more extremist aides absolutely don’t want to see Milei fail in his extreme right-wing remake of Argentina.
So, because Trump & his cronies stepped up to help bail out & stabilize the Argentine economy, Argentina just dropped their 26% soybean export tax - which caused China to double the amount of soybeans they’re purchasing from Argentina. Meanwhile, China - who bought $12.6 Billion in U.S. soybeans last year - is now buying $0 in U.S. soybeans.
So now, as of Thursday evening, Trump says he’s going to bail out American farmers, with a vague aid package he clams will be paid for with some of the revenue the U.S. gets from tariffs. Of course, the tariffs are paid by Americans, not by the Chinese, or Argentinians, or anyone else. So just like with the billions in Chinese tariffs, or the billions in bailout money for Argentina, American taxpayers are footing the bill for all of it.
That effectively makes the United States the welfare provider for millions of Argentinians and Chinese people - all while millions of already poor & needy Americans are facing food stamp cuts, because Republicans in Congress insisted we didn’t have the money.
So the next time you run into a rural American farmer decrying socialism, yet railing about how the subsidies Trump promised them haven’t arrived in their bank accounts yet, just look at ‘em and tell ‘em not to pee on your shoes and tell you it’s raining. ‘Cause we all know, that ain’t rain.