Would You Like Some Cheese with Your Whine?

Farmers voted against their own best interests. Again. The pronouns made them do it.

As expected, Trump voters, to quote the querulous-acting Senator Susan Collins, are now “concerned” with the rapid (or rabid) and destructive policy changes by the president and his unmuzzled attack dog (read DOG-E) and chain-saw wielding father of the Unlucky 13, Elon Musk.

I’ve been anticipating their buyers’ remorse since, well, this past January 20, when the dictator on day one commenced signing executive orders with his unreadable black signature that resembles an Afib patient’s wonky EKG.

Am I sympathetic to Trump supporters? Hardly. Does it make me feel kind of smug and giggly inside? Affirmative. Would the MAGA mob vote for Trump in 2028 and 2032 for an unconstitutional third and fourth term? Oh, absolutely.

After all, if four previous years of Trump chaos, followed by multiple convictions—including sexual abuse—an attempted coup and maintaining a friendship with Kid Rock, were not enough to make them jump off the Trump bandwagon in 2024, I do not know what will.

So, it was with this I-told-you-so cockiness that I relished the recent Washington Post article concerning a multi-generational Iowa farm family who was oh-so worried that the Trump tariffs (again) would sort of wreck their international exports of soybeans and corn, and would cause the costs of inputs such as potash fertilizer (90 percent of potash fertilizer comes from Canada) and machinery parts to soar.

Get out the box of Kleenex dear readers.

The article, “With Multiple Tariffs Looming, Farmers Who Support Trump Grow Nervous,” features Suzanne and Joe Shirbroun, who farm, appropriately, in Farmersburg, Iowa. Clayton County, where the Shirbrouns farm, went all in on Trump last year. According to the Post, two-thirds of voters approved of the convicted felon in the 2024 election. Trump won the state by 13 points.

So why did farmers again support Trump after the beatdown they received from his first term when tariffs led to a huge loss in ag revenue? “I think farmers are pretty down to earth people that maybe don’t agree with a lot of the far-left ideology. You have a lot of pretty meat-and-potatoes people around here,” said Adam Rahe, a local agronomist and farmer. “This is rural Iowa. You’ve got a male, and you’ve got a female. We don’t have pronouns.”

Ah, the good ole culture war. Will it ever end? By the way, this Chicago-born, far-left, totally woke liberal eats meat (medium rare) and potatoes (love the little red ones with a lot of butter and sour cream).

(Can I just insert a comment here? Answer me this dear reader: How does someone who uses the pronouns they/them/it/ affect an Iowa farmer? Why does anyone care what someone calls themself or what gender someone identifies with? Who cares if Jeff marries John, or Alice divorces Matt and marries Beth? Good grief good people of Iowa. Don’t we have bigger problems to address? I don’t know, like, CLIMATE CHANGE! Or THE END OF 250 YEARS OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY!)

Ok, back to our story. Last time Trump was president and stuck it to our American meat-and-tater farmers that don’t have pronouns with his 25 percent tariffs on $360 billion worth of Chinese products, guess what happened? The Chinese imposed their own exorbitant tariffs on good ole Midwest soybeans. Brazilian farmers, who we taught how to grow soybeans through the research at our land-grant universities—specifically the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—filled the orders that Midwest farmers such as the Shirbrouns used to fill. The Post reports that, “Chinese purchases of American soybeans fell from $12.2 billion in 2017 to barely $3 billion in 2018.”

But never fear. Somehow, in those golden pre-DOGE years, the Trump administration scrapped together $28 billion to bail out the same farmers that they just screwed. As the Post reports, that $28 billion was, “more than three times what the federal government spent to rescue the auto industry during the 2008 financial crisis.” (And please do not call it “welfare.” Or “buying votes.” How cynical of you.)

Now with co-President Musk on the scene, wielding his angry chainsaw, farmers face another huge slap to the face. The elimination of USAID (less than 1 percent of the federal budget) would mean that the $2 billion in annual payments farmers receive for sending food (and immeasurable goodwill) to the poorest of the world’s poor might end up on the cutting room floor. More precisely, the money saved from taking it out of the mouths of the poor would go directly into the jolly jowls of the wealthiest Americans when they get that big beautiful tax break, the likes of what you’ve never seen before.

Additionally, with the Agriculture Department’s cost-sharing “Climate Smart” grants on shaky ground, the $9 million owed by the feds just to Iowa farmers alone has a possibility of vanishing into the DOGE ether.

Despite all the economic pain to be inflicted on his loyal farm-belt supporters, President Trump had the gall to bellow that, “the last administration hated our farmers, like, at a level that I’ve never seen before.”

One can bet that the administration will again magically pull a fat furry money rabbit out of a top hat (or from cuts to Medicaid) for some kind of sweet bail out for farmers to ensure that their votes, if not their balance books, stay firmly in the red.

Buried in the Post article is this wonderful bit of irony: “They [the Shirbourns] prospered in the years leading to Trump’s first term, before he imposed tariffs of up to 25 percent on $360 billion worth of Chinese goods.”

Hmm, now who was president in those years? What was his name? And what political party did he represent? Follow the pronouns y’all.

END

Sources:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/21/trump-tariffs-farmers-trade-war-iowa/