I’m sure most farmers voted for Trump because of their overarching concerns about transgender kids but they seem to be realizing they made a mistake:
Current economic conditions and Trump administration policies could lead to “a widespread collapse of American agriculture,” a bipartisan coalition of former Agriculture Department officials and leaders of farm groups warned in a letter on Tuesday.
The letter to the heads and ranking members of the House and Senate agricultural committees was signed by 27 influential figures in the farming sector, including former heads of powerful associations representing corn and soybean farmers and officials from the Bush and Reagan administrations. It expressed dismay at the “damage done to American farmers.”
While there are many reasons for increasing farm bankruptcies and decreasing profits, “it is clear that the current administration’s actions, along with congressional inaction, have increased costs for farm inputs, disrupted overseas and domestic markets, denied agriculture its reliable labor pool, and defunded critical ag research and staffing,” the letter warned.
The signatories called on Congress to relax tariffs for the agriculture sector, expand international markets, pass a new farm bill and restore funding for agriculture research and staffing.
Oh heck.
I would assume that every sector of the economy would like Congress to relax tariffs due to exactly the same concerns. But they are whistling past the graveyard because Trump will never, ever give up on them entirely because they are his north star and have been for over 50 years. Sure he might whittle around the edges but he will continue to use them as threats because that’s the main thing he loves about them. And that is what is creating all the uncertainty and the urgent need among foreign nations to find new markets and new suppliers.
As for the other concerns, Stephen Miller isn’t going to give up on his quest to ethnically cleanse the country and Russ Vought isn’t going to give up on starving all government funded research and development in his crusade to turn the nation into a Christian nationalist paradise. And, as we’ve seen, Republicans in Congress are so devoted to their Dear Leader that they are prepared to destroy the country from the inside in order to please him.
The only way to right this will be to thoroughly repudiate this entire movement at the box office and in society and then rebuild from the ground up. It’s going to take at least a few of the people who love the Trump Show and hate people like you and me to get onboard that project. Maybe this is a first step.