It's a big frickin' mess but someone has to clean up Donald Trump's trade meltdown in the Midwest and Mike Pence is just the man for the job. Good luck, Mikey! He'll need it as he swings through Kansas City, Cedar Rapids, and Chicago where Politico reports he is "quietly" setting up one-on-ones with major GOP donors, many of whom aren't actually feeling the pain real farmers are.
“The cost and impact is being felt by farmers for several weeks now. It’s real. It’s a fact. It’s happening,” said Kirk Leeds, Iowa Soybean Association CEO. [...]
Pence is expected to make his pitch from a position of strength, highlighting President Donald Trump’s choice of Brett Kavanaugh for the next Supreme Court justice and the tax cuts that have benefited top-tier brackets and large-scale employers, a Republican operative with knowledge of the meetings told POLITICO.
Forget about the guys and gals who just lost a harvest's worth of income and may face losing their entire livelihoods. Instead, focus on the upper-crust donors who are cashing in on the stock market, the GOP tax giveaway to the mega-wealthy and are likely willing to trade the livelihoods of other Americans for the benefit of a reliably conservative Supreme Court justice.
In the meantime, GOP Rep. Rodney Davis in IL-13 won't say whether he voted for Trump and recently admitted Trump's trade war is “devastating to our agricultural sector.”
In Tennessee, the AP is reporting on how Trump's trade war is "changing minds" in the Senate battleground state as the GOP candidate, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, goes from full-throated support for everything Trump to calling the trade war a "grave concern."
And in South Carolina, the BMW plant that's a major driver of the regional economy said Wednesday it would build more of its SUVs overseas due to Trump's trade war.
Not all midwestern, but those are just several very recent examples of stories centering on the tariff impact. And then there's Pence, focusing on the 1 percent instead of the folks losing jobs and livelihoods—counting on the GOP war chest to fuel an ad campaign that brainwashes Republican voters into thinking everything is just peachy.
Pence isn’t super concerned about Bret Davis, the Ohio farmer and director of the American Soybean Association who observes, “Since the announcement of the tariffs: we’ve lost 20 percent of our income in soybeans, that’s nationally.”