Farm groups have long been reliably conservative. This has just as much, if not more, to do with social conservatism than any economic concerns; while farmers generally tend to oppose new worker safety, environmental, water regulations with a passion, because Freedom, constant Republican efforts to sabotage their workforce have resulted in labor shortages that are making even the biggest corporate farms nervous, these last few years, and Republican tax policies have done them no favors. Readers of the California Farm Bureau's newsletter, to cite one example, may note the increasing sense of concern, now bordering on panic, as new Republican immigration, tax, and trade policies all seem to target farmers with uncanny precision. Oopsies.
But new White House trade policy has gone beyond merely making farmers nervous and are threatening to gut farm communities outright, leading many onlookers to wonder if this is the point where farmers begin to abandon the party, social conservatism be damned, in a desperate attempt at self-preservation. We don't know, but we do know the farm lobby is launching a $2.5 million advertising campaign blasting Trump's tariffs to audiences in Iowa, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
The ad calls out a July 19 remark by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro in which he called the impact of tariffs a “rounding error.”
“America’s farmers and factory workers are not a rounding error,” the ad says.
It's of particular note that the lobby's ads are attacking White House rhetoric directly. This isn't a polite disagreement among friends, this is the farm lobby spending $2.5 million in key electoral markets to punch Trump's White House team in the throat.
The ad is the sort of head-on attack that the farm bureaus have long avoided, and signals just how existential a crisis the farming community believes Trump's tariffs to be. Trump's announcement that he'd be providing $12 billion in new welfare, in the form of government crop purchases, is both a drop in the bucket and rests on a presumption, from the White House, that retaliatory tariffs on American crops will be short-lived enough to solve with a one-time fix. Republican lawmakers and U.S. farmers, both groups with considerably more experience in the complications of international trade than Trump's team of ideologues and weirdos, aren't buying it.
This may be a real pressure point in forcing Trump to abandon the tariffs. He may not be interested in the opinions of experts, lawmakers, or anyone else, but the Republican Party cannot afford to lose rural, farming America, and cannot afford to have backbone elements of those communities blasting his decisions on local television stations. Farmers aren't the only ones for whom Trump's tariffs may represent an existential crisis, this midterm election year.