President Donald Trump was in a self-congratulatory mood as his administration announced a $12 billion aid package to help bail out struggling American farmers. “Now we’re once again in a position where a president is able to put farmers first,” Trump crowed during a roundtable of farmers and lawmakers Monday at the White House. “Unfortunately, I’m the only president that does that.”
“This money would not be possible without the tariffs,” Trump told the group. “The tariffs are taking in, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, and we’re giving some up to the farmers because they were mistreated by other countries, for maybe the right reasons, maybe wrong reasons.”
It’s a remarkable statement for three reasons.
First, in contrast to what the president said, the subsidies to farmers are not actually being funded by the tariffs Trump has championed since returning to office. And the only reason a bailout was needed was because of the effect of the tariffs Trump imposed in April.
(The least consequential but funniest reason is the implication that American farmers were being mistreated by foreign countries but maybe the other countries’ hearts were in the right place.)
The Agriculture Department’s Farmer Bridge Assistance program will distribute some $11 billion to row crop farmers who produce corn, soybeans, rice, wheat and other staple crops. According to a USDA press release, the program is meant to “address market disruptions, elevated input costs, persistent inflation, and market losses from foreign competitors engaging in unfair trade practices that impede exports.”
An additional $1 billion is set aside for potential help to farmers of commodities such as sugar and other specialty crops that don’t normally qualify for the assistance program. The bulk of the funds will be released by the end of February to farmers who apply for the aid.
Crucially, despite Trump’s statements, as the New York Times reports the “bridge payments” to farmers “are not being funded directly by tariff income.” But those tariffs have dealt a massive blow to the farmers who are turning to the USDA for financial aid. The increased cost of “agricultural inputs,” which include seeds, fertilizer, pesticides and mechanical equipment, has cost farmers $33 billion this year, according to North Dakota State University’s Agricultural Trade Monitor. I’m not a mathematician, but that is quite a bit more than the $12 billion the government is about to dole out.
Meanwhile, countries that would normally buy American produce have been placing their own retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products. Soybean farmers have taken a particularly massive hit this year. China, the world’s biggest importer of American soybeans, has all but boycotted them in response to Trump’s onslaught of tariffs in May. Soybeans are also America’s biggest agricultural export, accounting for about 14% of the crops shipped overseas, making the whammy to the sector especially potent. A one-time federal intervention doesn’t correct the strife that Trump’s tariff regime continues to fuel. The recent deescalation between Washington and Beijing has led to an uptick in Chinese soybean purchases — but the shift came late enough in the harvest season to ensure that prices depressed from reduced demand stayed low. Likewise, moves to cut tariffs on imports such as fertilizer have helped some, but the economic damage Trump began inflicting back in the spring is still reverberating. As NPR reported Monday, farmers it interviewed already say the administration’s bailout, while welcome, is not enough. The farmers are right. A one-time federal intervention doesn’t correct the strife that Trump’s tariff regime continues to fuel. The same was true during Trump’s first administration, when farmers received a massive bailout program to help offset the pain from the trade war he launched against China back then. In April, when the president began unveiling his tariff levels, I argued that Trump’s trade policy mostly consists of patching together half-considered solutions to problems that Trump himself has created and calling it a win. There was no clear strategic end game then to his scattershot approach from a White House scrambling to justify the tariffs’ existence beyond Trump’s appetite for them. The money that is poised to be paid out to America’s farmers shouldn’t be mistaken as anything more substantial than duct tape on a broken pipe: It may give the appearance of helping while doing little to fix the underlying problem — which threatens to rupture again at any moment.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW Daily. 
