A play in 3 acts

ACT I

President Donald Trump messages on Truth Social in March:

To America’s Large Farmers: Get ready to start manufacturing many agricultural products for sale INSIDE the United States. Pricing will be applied to external products starting April 2. Have fun!

ACT II

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said in April:

No one is going to fight harder, smarter or more strategically than @POTUS – for ALL Americans…we are going to give America FIRST PART; not China, not India, not beef from Argentina, not dairy from Canada – but America first.

ACT III

Asset said in October:

Trump: “The only high price we have is beef, and we’re going to lower it. And one of the things we’re looking at doing is Argentine beef.

Oddly enough, American farmers don’t like this piece. The people who most strongly supported Trump in his three elections are now crying about it.

“NCBA family farmers and ranchers have many concerns about importing more Argentine beef in order to drive down prices for consumers. This plan only creates chaos at a critical time of year for U.S. livestock producers, while doing nothing to lower prices at grocery stores.” said Colin Woodall, CEO of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a strong supporter pro-Trump organization.

In fact, this self-serving industry hack is wrong. Importing Argentinian beef will lower prices. It’s basic Econ 101: more supply means lower prices.

And that’s exactly the problem with American farmers: they are not essential. If food can be produced more cheaply elsewhere, we will buy it elsewhere.

For decades, blue America and blue cities in red states having subsidized the inefficiency of rural America– fund hospitals, schools, postal services, broadband and other infrastructure in places where there are more cows than people. And for that generosity, we have been rewarded with resentment, intolerance, division, and the election of the man who embodies it all.

So to hell with it with all their precious subsidies. There is a certain poetic justice in seeing Trump’s most loyal supporters become his latest victims. Just months after his Agriculture Secretary promised to protect them from Argentine beef in the name of “America First,” Trump threw them under the tractor.

This is the story of Trumpism, really – a betrayal disguised as populism – while he works to help his friends (in this caseright-wing Argentine President Javier Milei) at the expense of his country.

Now the people who cheered the loudest are finally learning what we already knew.