Save the Soy! Save the Soy!

What is Trump Doing to US Farmers? Soy and Wheat Farmers Face Another Round of Trump's Antifarming Policies. Why?

We suffer from collective amnesia. Trump’s current behavior isn’t novel—it’s a replay. The erratic tweets, baseless accusations, and bottomless ego defined his first term just as they define this one. The only difference? Fewer guardrails between his impulses and policy.

Which brings us back to a familiar question: why is Trump once again wielding tariffs as a weapon against our own farmers? We’ve lived through this disaster before, yet here we are, watching the same tragedy unfold in slow motion.

Trump has a particular kind of cruelty; it’s the kind that allows him to inflict the same wound twice. One that cost the American taxpayers $28 billion the first time around. Donald Trump didn’t stumble into his second trade war with China. He didn’t accidentally impose tariffs that he knew from bitter experience would devastate American farmers. He walked into this agricultural apocalypse with his eyes wide open, carrying a detailed USDA report that spelled out exactly how his first trade war had destroyed $27 billion in agricultural exports and driven farm bankruptcy rates up 20% during his first term.

He read that report, absorbed its lessons about permanent market share losses and rising suicide rates among farmers, and decided to do it all over again—only this time with the savagery of someone who has perfected his technique.

The numbers that describe Trump’s agricultural assault read like a medical examiner’s report: 216 farm bankruptcies in 2024, up 55% from the previous year, with filings accelerating even faster in early 2025. China hasn’t bought American soybeans since May. Twelve thousand tons of pork orders canceled in the biggest cancellation since 2020. Farm debt projected to reach $562 billion in 2025. And behind every statistic, another family destroyed by policies that Trump knew would destroy them.

“It is a full-blown crisis already,” Peter Friedmann of the Agriculture Transportation Coalition declares, and there’s something almost quaint about his use of the word “crisis,” as if we were dealing with a natural disaster rather than a meticulously planned demolition. Because that’s what this is, isn’t it? Not policy incompetence, but a policy of destruction, executed by a president who spent four years studying the blueprints of his first agricultural fire and decided he hadn’t burned enough the first time.

The precision with which Trump has recreated his original catastrophe suggests a mind that doesn’t forget its successes, even when those successes involve the systematic destruction of American competitiveness. During his first term, soybean exports to China—the farmers’ largest market—plummeted by 77%. U.S. soybean exports fell 94% in 2017, dropping to the lowest levels in 11 years. The human cost was immediate and brutal, measured not just in bankruptcy filings but in the CDC’s grim statistics about rising suicide rates among farmers. Trump’s response was a $28 billion taxpayer-funded bailout that consumed 92% of his tariff revenues, essentially turning the entire trade war into a wealth redistribution scheme from middle-class taxpayers to cover for his policy vandalism.

Even that bailout was rigged with the kind of casual corruption that has become Trump’s signature. The top 10% of recipients—the wealthiest industrial farms—got half the money, while small family farmers averaged just $5,136 each. Nearly $5 million flowed to residents of America’s 75 wealthiest ZIP codes, because apparently even agricultural disaster relief must serve the needs of Trump’s donor class.

But the bailout money, however unevenly distributed, couldn’t undo the most devastating consequence of Trump’s first trade war: the permanent surrender of American market share to foreign competitors. While American farmers were locked out of Chinese markets by retaliatory tariffs, Brazil swooped in with the opportunistic grace of a vulture at a car accident. China-Brazil bilateral trade soared to $100 billion in 2018, establishing supply chains that have proven as durable as they are profitable—for everyone except American farmers.

“The U.S. lost about 20% of our market share, and it never came back,” Todd Main of the Illinois Soybean Association observes with the exhaustion of someone who has spent years explaining the same preventable catastrophe. “Our farmers have spent generations building these export markets, only to have them closed off by haphazard tariffs,” Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar notes, though “haphazard” is far too generous a word for what Trump has done. There’s nothing haphazard about repeating the exact same policies that produced the exact same catastrophic results. This is precision destruction, executed by someone who has learned exactly the wrong lessons from his own failures.

Or perhaps he’s learned exactly the right lessons for his purposes. Because there’s a more disturbing interpretation of Trump’s agricultural sabotage than mere stupidity or stubbornness: What if the systematic destruction of American farming competitiveness isn’t a bug in Trump’s system, but a program goal?

Consider the perverse incentives his tariff disasters create. First, they generate crises that allow him to position himself as the solution to problems he created. The $28 billion bailout during his first term wasn’t just economic policy—it was a massive vote-buying scheme funded by taxpayers and targeted at the rural communities that form his political base. Farmers became dependent on government handouts to compensate for Trump’s trade vandalism, creating a constituency with a vested interest in his political survival regardless of how much damage his policies inflicted.

Second, the chaos provides perfect cover for other policy failures and corruption. While farmers face bankruptcy and mental health crises, media attention focuses on the immediate agricultural disaster rather than investigating why Trump’s policies consistently benefit foreign competitors and his cronies. It’s the perfect distraction: highly visible human suffering that obscures the systematic looting of American economic competitiveness.

Third, and perhaps most damning, the destruction of American agricultural dominance serves the interests of foreign powers—particularly Russia and China—who benefit enormously when American farmers are locked out of global markets. Brazil’s capture of American soybean market share in China isn’t just an economic shift; it’s a geopolitical victory for BRICS nations at America’s expense, engineered by an American president who seems remarkably comfortable with outcomes that strengthen America’s competitors while devastating American producers.

The human cost of Trump’s either spectacular ignorance or deliberate malice becomes clearer with each bankruptcy filing, each family farm sold at auction to pay debts created by their own government’s policies. “This is a five-alarm fire for our industry,” John Ragland of the American Soybean Association warns, watching an industry that exports 43% of its production see those markets systematically torched by the same man twice.

Rob Larew of the National Farmers Union describes families pushed to “a breaking point,” and there’s a terrible literalness to that phrase when you understand that farmers already face suicide rates higher than the general population. “They’re going to see farmers that choose to take their own lives,” Ragland predicts with the grim certainty of someone watching a slow-motion tragedy unfold exactly as it did before.

These aren’t abstract policy consequences. These are American families destroyed by a president who had every piece of data he needed to understand the human cost of his policies and chose to inflict them anyway. Trump had the USDA’s detailed 2022 report documenting every aspect of his first trade war disaster: $27 billion in lost exports, with soybeans accounting for 71% of the damage. He knew that retaliatory tariffs had made American crops uncompetitive while driving up input costs through steel and fertilizer tariffs. He understood that his bailout money had been distributed in ways that favored his wealthiest supporters while leaving small farmers to struggle.

He had a $28 billion education in the futility and cruelty of trade wars, funded by American taxpayers and written in the blood of American farming communities. And he chose to repeat every lesson, only harder.

The most infuriating aspect of Trump’s agricultural assault isn’t just its repetition—it’s his apparent belief that American farmers are too stupid to notice the pattern. Scott Blubaugh, an Oklahoma farmer and president of the Oklahoma Farmers Union, captured the absurdity perfectly: “Ultimately, my bottom line looks about the same as it did pre-Trump trade war, but much of that ‘income’ came in the form of Trump’s bailout. I’m grateful for the dollars to keep my farm afloat, but I’d much rather earn those dollars than be given them.”

That’s the voice of a man who understands he’s been turned into a welfare case by the same politician who campaigns against welfare, a farmer who recognizes that his “income” is really just taxpayer compensation for his own government’s sabotage of his livelihood. The cognitive dissonance would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic: voting for the candidate whose policies are destroying your industry, then waiting for the same government to bail you out with money borrowed from your children’s future.

But perhaps that’s exactly the relationship Trump wants with rural America—dependent, desperate, and grateful for whatever scraps he throws their way after burning down everything their families built. It’s a form of political abuse that creates its own twisted loyalty: the victim becomes invested in protecting the abuser because admitting the abuse means confronting the full scope of what they’ve lost.

Mike Stranz of the National Farmers Union tried to be diplomatic when he observed that “many of the crises that we faced, particularly on trade, were self-inflicted by the Trump administration,” but “self-inflicted” implies accident rather than intent. When someone repeatedly inflicts the same damage with the same tools, accident stops being a credible explanation.

The evidence suggests a president who is either catastrophically ignorant of his own policy failures or deliberately repeating them for political advantage. Neither explanation reflects well on American democracy, but the distinction matters for understanding what comes next.

If Trump is genuinely too stupid or stubborn to learn from his mistakes, then American farmers face years of policy chaos driven by an administration incapable of processing evidence or adjusting course. The damage will continue until Congress intervenes or Trump leaves office, assuming there’s anything left to save by then.

But if the agricultural destruction is intentional—designed to create dependency, generate chaos, or serve foreign interests—then farmers face something far more sinister: a president using their livelihoods as expendable tools in a political strategy that treats rural American communities as acceptable casualties in his war against competent governance and American prosperity.

Either way, the $28 billion lesson Trump refuses to learn is that American farmers deserve better than serving as kindling for the vanity fires of a president who has demonstrated, twice now, that their welfare means nothing to him compared to his own political survival.

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