To the Great Farmers of the United States: Get ready to start making a lot of agricultural product to be sold INSIDE of the United States. Tariffs will go on external product on April 2nd. Have fun!
ACT II
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins says in April:
There's no one that's going to fight harder or smarter or more strategically than @POTUS—for ALL Americans ... we are going to put America FIRST; not China, not India, not beef from Argentina, not dairy products from Canada — but America first.
ACT III
Trump says in October:
The only price we have that's high is beef, and we'll get that down. And one of the things we're thinking about doing is beef from Argentina.
Weirdly, American farmers don’t like this play. The people who most strongly supported Trump in all three of his elections are now crying about it.
“NCBA’s family farmers and ranchers have numerous concerns with importing more Argentinian beef to lower prices for consumers. This plan only creates chaos at a critical time of the year for American cattle producers, while doing nothing to lower grocery store prices,” said Colin Woodall, CEO of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a strongly pro-Trump organization.
Actually, this self-interested industry hack is wrong. Importing Argentinian beef will lower prices. It’s basic Econ 101: more supply means lower prices.
And that’s exactly the problem for America’s farmers—they’re not essential. If food can be produced cheaper elsewhere, we’ll buy it elsewhere.
For decades, blue America and blue cities in red states have subsidized rural America’s inefficiency—funding hospitals, schools, postal service, broadband, and other infrastructure in places with more cows than people. And for that generosity, we’ve been repaid with resentment, bigotry, division, and the election of the man who embodies all of it.
So to hell with all their precious subsidies. There’s a certain poetic justice in watching Trump’s most loyal supporters become his latest victims. Just months after his agriculture secretary promised to protect them from Argentinian beef in the name of “America First,” Trump threw them under the tractor.
That’s the story of Trumpism, really—betrayal dressed up as populism—as he works to help his friends (in this case, Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei) at the expense of his country.
Now, the people who cheered him the loudest are finally learning what the rest of us already knew.
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