Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for editorial writing. It’s about 80 miles east of Sioux City, which I’ve visited often, last in 2016. For WaPo he sums up the situation in his home town, where a JBS meat-packing plant ran for weeks without protective gear or Covid-19 testing, and – my focus – as well as the multistate region:
The rural Midwest was anxious before the pandemic. Trump’s trade wars and ethanol blunders iced exports and killed commodity markets. Workers were getting laid off from John Deere. The president’s approval numbers sank underwater in Wisconsin despite $30 billion in agricultural trade bailouts. Soy exports fell through the floor. Republican Sen. Joni Ernst (Iowa) is no longer a lock for reelection this year.
Now this plague of errors. No personal protective equipment. No tests. No guidance. Trump ordered workers into potentially unsafe environments in the absence of facts and without authority, fully abetted by the governor. That put the whole county at risk.
You can imagine that this is unsettling in a place that depends on hogs and turkeys to put bread on the table. Hogs are being shot and buried for lack of slaughter capacity. The ethanol industry has collapsed. You can’t get through to unemployment on the phone. All of it — trade wars, Clorox fantasies and incompetence — is a political convulsion waiting on November.
It’s worth noting that it may be true that Trump considers himself a friend to the farming community, and has done what he can. But remember the old adage about Better enemies than friends like these? When it came to trade, he attempted to put into practice the old barroom blowhard opinion about how to resolve the issue – take out a big fuckin’ bazooka and blow them to smithereens.
The trade war, instead, put family farms, already on the edge because of the usual problems farms seem to face over time[1], at desperate risk. Farmers are leaving their beloved farms, in the case of dairy farms, dairy cows – and sometimes it’s feet first. I recall reading about farmer suicide hotlines being overwhelmed with calls a year ago, and I suspect it hasn’t slackened off.
It puts front and center the general rural preference for Trump. It’s become blindingly clear that he has no idea how to rescue the farmer from the precipice. Indeed, at this point it may be an impossible mission. But the Democrats need to step forward with a set of propositions which make sense to the farming community.
Give them the old one-two – point out how Trump has absolutely failed them, despite all of his promises, and then lay out the Democratic plan, whatever it may be. Don’t make promises, offer plans. Ask farmers to join in refining these plans.
People may think they want a “strong leader”, but the Trumpist version is a disaster. I call on every single farmer in the Midwest to give their most serious consideration to whatever it is the Democrats bring forth, help improve it – and then vote for it.
1 For more information on farm crises from a historical perspective, buy and absorb Secular Cycles by Professor Turchin.
