12 minutes – Trump’s beef plan is a kick in the teeth for cattle ranchers in the US:

Just as ranchers see beef prices climb due to various factors, including Trump’s unilateral tariff imposition, Trump turns around and kicks the ranchers in the teeth by trying to bring Argentinian beef into the US to lower beef prices. And thus yet another group of Trump supporters learn the lesson many other groups have learned the hard way: You can’t trust Donald Trump!

Another group of major Trump supporters that is once again learning that same lesson on Trump is farmers – especially those who grew soybeans this year. Trump policies have had the effect of closing foreign markets to soy producers. Because of when it happened not only are they not selling this year’s crop, there is little place to store this year’s crop since last year’s crop is still in the grain bins.

As an extra kick in the teeth for soy farmers, Trump’s policies that have resulted in closing soy sales to China have in turn created an opening for other countries to screw the US and sell their soy crop to China. Who was one of the first to step in to fill that void? Argentina, as I am sure you have all heard.

It almost seems as if Trump is trying to Make Argentina Great Again at the very expense of those who voted for him. In a way he is, for in the case of Argentina Trump is trying to bolster their economy so that the extremist right wing leader of the country does not see his party decimated at the polls in the upcoming elections.

Despite what Trump has done to try to make Javier Milei look good, Milei’s extremist right wing economics has ruined the Argentinian economy. Trump’s late game attempted rescue will not be enough to save Milei’s party, but it sure has kicked a couple of his (Trump’s) biggest supporting groups in the teeth. Very hard!

In all the outcry against Trump’s insane policies, we have heard almost nothing from Iowa’s congressional delegation. It appears they fear chastisement from Trump far more than deservedly losing the votes of their constituents. Where is Hinson? Where are Miller-Meeks, Nunn and Feenstra. Anybody heard from Chuck?

I have never understood why a farmer would ever vote for a Republican. All Republicans have ever done for the farmer is to espouse policies that set farmers up for failure. Meanwhile, Democrats have put in policies that have worked to keep farmers on their land, from rural electrification in the past to broadband today.

If Trump continues his shortsighted policies toward farmers, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him try to end ethanol production to bolster oil prices and use in this country. Imagine what that would do to corn farmers?

In his column on Thursday economist and Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman took on the subject of Argentina, beef and agricultural policies. He points out that agriculture’s vote for Republicans have long been against their self interest. Maybe this current kick in the teeth will finally make them realize what is happening to them: 

Policy wonks like me have spent decades pointing out that if rural Americans voted based on their informed self-interest, they would be supporting Democrats, not Republicans. Republicans are constantly trying to eviscerate Democrat-supported programs that benefited rural states like Medicaid spending, SNAP (the supplementary nutrition program formerly known as food stamps), and school lunches. Trump is also cutting subsidies for green energy programs like solar farms and wind turbines – subsidies that disproportionately went to red states. Iowa gets 63 percent of its electricity from wind!

Moreover, these programs in effect subsidize rural areas with dollars earned in urban areas: because rural areas have lower incomes than urban areas, rural Americans pay relatively little of the taxes that finance these programs. So Democratic “big government” is highly beneficial to the heartland.

Yet economic self-interest has been swamped by “rural consciousness.” This consciousness rests on a belief that highly educated urban elites don’t understand or value rural culture and rural lives. And I will admit that this belief contains a grain of truth. Urban elites are unlikely to fully understand the attachment of rural Americans to a particular place and its time-worn rhythms of life. Ensconced in salaried jobs, urban dwellers are unfamiliar with the constant anxiety of being a farmer or a small business owner in the heartland. Decades of being battered by the economic changes — deindustrialization, farm consolidation and corporatization, depopulation, loss of community ties, along with the loss of jobs, particularly “male-coded” jobs – have left rural Americans feeling adrift, marginalized and resentful.

And this created an opening to be exploited by the right wing. Much like how Trump peddled fantasies of a manufacturing resurgence or the return of coal-mining jobs, MAGA leveraged the deep discontent within rural America to inculcate the belief that only Republicans, and Trump in particular, respect rural voters. But this is false: MAGA actually holds its most loyal voters in contempt.

And the reality of this contempt is starting to show through — not, at least so far, via the One Big Beautiful Bill’s savage cuts to health care, which will be especially devastating to rural areas, but via the Trump administration’s bizarre fixation on aiding President Javier Milei of Argentina.

Krugman has much more to say so click on the link.

We can surely hope that the rural folks fixation for the Republicans has finally received a cold dose of reality and farmers and rural folk will realize that Democratic policies are the ones that have been keeping them alive and in some cases prospering for nearly a century while Republican policies have ground them down.