Trump Approves Fresh Round Of Farm Bailouts To Repair Damage Of Trade War He Continues To Describe As Historic Triumph

The Filing

WASHINGTON. The Trump administration announced a fresh round of federal bailout payments to American farmers this week, citing the urgent need to repair damage caused by a trade war that the President continued to describe, in the same announcement, as the most successful economic policy in the history of the world.

The payments, which administration officials declined to total but acknowledged would run well into the billions, are intended to offset losses suffered by farmers whose export markets collapsed after foreign governments responded to Trump tariffs with retaliatory tariffs of their own. It marks the second consecutive Trump presidency in which the administration has imposed tariffs, watched other countries tariff American crops in return, and then directed the Treasury to compensate farmers for the resulting harm. During his first term, the administration distributed roughly 28 billion dollars in similar payments.

"We are winning so big on trade that we have to send the farmers money just so they can survive all the winning," said Trump, who characterized the bailout as a gift rather than a refund. "Other countries are paying us tremendous amounts in tariffs, billions and billions, and we are taking a little bit of that and giving it to our great farmers, who got hurt very badly, through no fault of mine."

Officials within the administration described the arrangement as a closed and self-sustaining system. "The President places tariffs on imports, which raises prices for American consumers. Foreign countries retaliate against American crops, which wipes out American farmers. We then use tariff revenue, also ultimately paid by American consumers, to reimburse the farmers," said one senior agriculture official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "At every stage, an American is paying. The genius of it is that it never has to stop."

Agricultural economists noted that the policy had succeeded in its narrowest objective, which was to ensure that the farmers whose livelihoods were destroyed by the trade war did not also lose the means to keep voting for the man who started it. They added that much of the export market surrendered to Brazil and Argentina during the first trade war had never come back, and that the second trade war was now performing the same service on whatever remained.

At press time, the President was reviewing a proposal for a third round of payments, to be funded by a fourth round of tariffs.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who converted the predictable wreckage of his own trade policy into a recurring act of presidential generosity, and who secured the continued political loyalty of farm states by mailing them back a portion of their own losses.
§Farm-state Republican officeholders, who were able to deliver federal relief checks to constituents while continuing to vote for and praise the tariffs that made the checks necessary.
§The People's Republic of China, whose retaliatory tariffs cost American farmers their single largest customer while costing China only the minor inconvenience of buying the same soybeans from a different hemisphere.
§Brazilian and Argentine soybean producers, who absorbed the export market American farmers lost during the first trade war, kept it through the second, and now regard the United States as a supplier of last resort.
§Large industrial-scale agribusiness operations, which capture the majority of trade-war bailout payments, since the funds are distributed by volume of production rather than by degree of need.
§Commodity brokers and crop insurers, for whom every new round of tariffs, retaliation, and federal compensation generates another profitable cycle of billable volatility.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment