President Donald Trump has dubbed April 2 “Liberation Day”—the date he’ll unveil his sweeping and controversial tariff package—but behind the scenes, White House officials are quietly admitting it could be anything but liberating for America’s farmers.
Trump’s tariffs are expected to cost Americans tens of billions of dollars annually, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The cost to farmers could be “financial devastation,” The New York Times reported on Monday. And since the White House is mulling a necessary bailout for the American agricultural industry, the ultimate cost of Trump’s tariffs could grow even more expensive.
The Trump administration “is weighing a new round of emergency aid to farmers, who are likely to be caught in the middle if America’s trading partners retaliate.”
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“The early discussions offer a tacit acknowledgment that Mr. Trump’s expansive tariffs could unleash financial devastation throughout the U.S. agricultural industry, a crucial voting base that the president similarly tried to safeguard during his 2018 trade war with China,” the Times reports.
The American taxpayer ended up paying farmers about $23 billion during the first Trump administration’s trade war with China. Trump’s new tariffs could push that number far higher, if he decides to protect the agriculture industry.
This quiet acknowledgement that Trump’s tariffs could be calamitous to farmers, likely requiring billions to offset their losses, would appear to destroy his claims that tariffs will enrich the government’s coffers. A top aide, Peter Navarro, has claimed, in what has been described as “Orwellian” remarks, that tariffs are a “tax cut.”
The Times explains that “an expensive federal bailout threatens to cut deeply into one of Mr. Trump’s signature reasons for pursuing protectionist policies in the first place: a desire to rake in ‘lots of money,’ as the president himself has said. Mr. Trump and his Republican allies say the new tariffs could help pay for their still-forming plan to expand and extend a set of expiring tax cuts, which could cost into the trillions of dollars.”
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Trump’s tax cuts are expected to disproportionally benefit the rich, some say.
Meanwhile, critics are blasting the news.
“Farmers feed the world,” noted Wisconsin Democratic state Senator Brad Pfaff, a former acting agriculture secretary. “But Trump’s tariffs will hurt farmers and drive up consumer food costs. This is not sound economic policy.”
“Trump’s first government bailout for farmers cost way more than what DOGE has claimed to save,” writes HuffPost senior political reporter Igor Bobic. “Now we’re doing another liberation bailout.”
“He has barely launched his trade war that was gonna make us rich, and it’s already going to cost the taxpayers billions,” adds former Biden and Obama administration official Brian P. McKeon.
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