Farmers who voted Trump badly hit by Trump’s tariffs

by Gabriele Bonafede

MAGA is turning from Make America Great Again to Make American Growers Alarmed. Trump’s’ tariffs are spelling disasters for the very farmers who voted him.

US Agriculture sector is not in a good shape since long and last few years have been very difficult for all farmers, especially for small producers and family-run businesses. Bankruptcies in the farming sector have been still on the rise for the first quarter of 2025, especially in Iowa.

But the real ordeal is yet to come. The US farming sector is export-driven particularly toward China. With tariffs in place, China has accelerated import diversification. It is now importing massively from Brazil most of soybeans and other crops once being shipped from US.

At the same time, key inputs of productions are now more expensive to import from Canada and Mexico, making farmers’ life almost impossible.

Farmers who voted Trump badly hit by Trump’s tariffs

Ironically, a large percentage of farmers voted for Trump in past elections despite troubles caused by the previous round of Trump’s tariffs in his first presidency.

A report from Investigate Midwest published on November 24, shows that US counties economically dependent on farming have overwhelmingly voted for Trump in last elections.

Many of these counties voted massively for Trump, ranging from 60% to 95% – especially in Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Texas. Those are the very farmers who are being badly hit by current tariffs.

Indeed, as Farmers who voted Trump made their bed so, they must lie in it…

Make agriculture devastated again

Current productions register substantial increase, but crops meet no exporting demand. Food and Water Watch reports that “Small and medium farms have struggled to survive in unfair, volatile markets for years. Trump’s trade war worsened this trend. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of farms earning $500,000 or more grew while all other categories of smaller-earning farms saw losses. With its trade war, the Trump administration knew it had manufactured a crisis for U.S. farmers. But its response most benefited the biggest and richest operations.”

“The trade war – continues the small farmers advocacy group – also led the U.S. government to purchase goods from farmers directly to help fill in where exports had fallen. However, millions of dollars of these government purchases went not to struggling small farmers, but instead to multinational corporations.”

Current Trump policy risks to yield even worse impacts on small farmers. But this time, larger farmers might get hurt as well because of the numbers involved, looming recession and an ill-conceived global trade reset implemented by Trump for no credible reason.

On cover, photo by Laura Seaman on Unsplash, kindly modified.