President Donald J. Trump applauds the crowd prior to delivering remarks in support of the Farmers to Families Food Box distribution program Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, at Flavor First Growers and Packers in Mills River, N.C.
President Donald Trump is accusing Democrats of being “communists” and “socialists,” but as a former Republican National Committee chair pointed out on Monday, he supports socialist policies… as long as they benefit Republican constituencies like farmers.
“People fundamentally do not understand socialism,” MS NOW commentator and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele said on Monday. “They do not understand communism. What is it — the median grade level in the United States is eighth grade. Okay?
We're not teaching civics. We're not teaching world history. We're not teaching the fundamentals of how all of this comes together. So these terms from the '30s, '40s, and '50s are being thrown out into the ecosystem.”
He then mentioned Trump’s proposed $17.3 billion bailout to farmers, a group that has been disproportionately economically harmed by his tariffs, his mass deportations and his war against Iran.
“Y'all know the Farm Bill is socialism; y'all know that, right?” Steele said. “I mean, when you start talking about socialism, it's socialism for you. It's not socialism when I'm accessing the system and I'm getting that SNAP check, and I'm getting that welfare check, and I'm getting that free lunch program, and I'm getting those things that, because I cannot afford it, are part of a safety net. And I wish we would just fundamentally get off our lazy behinds and start understanding how this government uses all of those tools to provide for its citizens.”
Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist and professor of cognitive science at the University of Bristol who has written about the psychology of MAGA voters, spoke with AlterNet about the double standard used by pro-Trump farmers who insist on a bailout for themselves but oppose welfare for other groups.
“There's so much tied up in this,” Lewandowsky told AlterNet when explaining farmers who only believe that a social safety net should exist for themselves. “There's latent racism. There's religion. There's the general conservative idea that poor people are — it's their fault, they're just lazy, everybody is responsible for what happens to them… except me, because I'm a farmer, and therefore I'm not lazy, and I've tried everything, and I deserve a subsidy.”
Ultimately he attributed it to “an angle of racism that I think is underlying pretty much all of this, and misogyny” in terms of how they view who should and should not receive benefits. “If you sort of give an instrument to people that measures their racism and misogyny, well, it tells you about who they're going to vote for and all that kind of stuff pretty well.”
Speaking with AlterNet in June, economist Ed Gresser — Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at the Progressive Policy Institute — pointed out that farmers’ current economic woes can be specifically and largely linked to Trump’s tariffs.
“Tariffs have been quite bad for farmers in two ways,” Gresser said. “One is that they have led to reactions against American products overseas, sometimes by governments and sometimes by public opinion. In a typical year, American agriculture exports about $180 billion worth of stuff that typically makes up about one-fifth of US farm income. So it's quite a lot: half the exports go to, or at least historically went to, China, Canada, and Mexico.”
Because of Trump’s tariffs, farmers have been harmed in all of those markets, which is why they now need a bailout.
“The exports to China have shriveled up because the Chinese retaliated very hard and hit back again directly against American farmers,” Gresser told AlterNet. “Mexico has kind of held up. Canada is off, not so much because the government of Canada has taken any particular steps but because Canadians have looked for American goods so as not to buy them.”
He concluded that “the tariff program has badly screwed over American farmers” and said "farmers are definitely in trouble."
"I mean, they've lost a lot of income,” Gresser said. “There's been a big increase in farm bankruptcies. The idea that the US government would respond to that in the abstract is not a terrible one in my opinion.”
Despite the impact of tariffs on farmers’ livelihoods, most still support Trump and instead have pivoted to lobbying for the $17.3 billion bailout.
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