Photo credit: Ben Smith
The latest development in Donald Trump’s total destruction of loudly proclaimed political beliefs within the Republican Party is his creation of a $12 billion, taxpayer-funded welfare program for farmers who already have become victims in the reckless international trade war he started. Surely, Wisconsin farmers can’t be very happy about going on welfare as a direct result of the self-destructive economic policies of the man many supported for president. Few Republican officials even try to pretend that’s not exactly what’s happening.
Wisconsin’s Tea Party Republican Sen. Ron Johnson is one of the most caustic critics, comparing Trump’s administration to Russian communism: “This is becoming more and more like a Soviet-style economy here… commissars in the administration figuring out how they’re going to sprinkle around benefits.” Other farm state Republicans were just as blunt. Here’s Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker: “You have a terrible policy that sends farmers to the poorhouse and then you put them on welfare.” Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse said: “The trade war is cutting the legs out from under farmers, and the White House’s ‘plan’ is to spend $12 billion on gold crutches.”
There’s one thing you have to remember, though, about all this uncharacteristic wailing by Republicans about the economic destruction being caused by Trump’s ignorant trade war. Republicans control the co-equal legislative branch of government. They have the power to stop a dangerously uninformed president from imposing his whopping tariffs on foreign goods that have caused foreign nations to retaliate with extreme tariffs of their own on exports from the U.S.
‘Tariffs are the Greatest!’
The economic destruction on all sides can be widespread and uncontrollable, experts say. For U.S. farmers and manufacturing companies, that means foreign markets disappear and revenue plummets. For ordinary consumers, tariffs are an enormous tax causing prices to soar on foreign goods and every domestic product with any foreign components, which is practically every major purchase. Meanwhile, Trump raves on Twitter: “Tariffs are the greatest!”
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The early days of Trump’s trade war already have Republicans complaining their constituents are headed for the poorhouse and that Trump’s creating a Republican welfare state. So why haven’t these horrors prompted Republicans to use their total control of the legislative branch of the U.S. government to do anything about it? Well, it turns out Trump’s welfare program for farmers is Republicans’ favorite kind of welfare—corporate welfare.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that $12 billion government financial bailout for farmers bears any resemblance to Willie Nelson’s annual Farm Aid all-star country-rock music festival providing financial assistance for struggling family farmers. Just like Republican tax cuts, Republican welfare programs overwhelmingly go to those at the very top. You can expect the bulk of those billions to go to corporate agribusiness.
No Drug Tests for GOP Welfare?
One tipoff Trump’s government handouts are aimed at agricultural executives rather than poor farmers is that Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and other Republican governors haven’t proposed drug testing those receiving Republican welfare—neither will there be any of the other usual punishments for poor people receiving government assistance, such as requiring recipients to train for minimum wage jobs or prohibiting them from spending their welfare checks on steak and lobster.
Even if Republicans had the political courage to oppose Trump’s corporate farm bailout (which they don’t), Trump doesn’t really need congressional approval to launch the program. Get this irony: Trump is taking the money from Agriculture Department programs created during the Great Depression by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt to compensate farmers for weather-related disasters or other unavoidable crop failures. Trump is repurposing emergency disaster funds to pay off farmers who helped elect him for enormous losses resulting from the disaster of the Trump presidency.
Of course, farmers weren’t the only voters Trump lied to when he promised they would no longer be forgotten once he became president. Coal is not going to be the booming, energy source of the future, and the plywood is not coming off the boarded-up windows of dying, small towns that lost their name-brand manufacturing plants.
The breakneck speed—from the launching of Trump’s trade war, to billions of dollars in economic damage, to American farming and manufacturing and to the first multibillion-dollar government bailout—set a new world record. The best hope now is that, after all the phony public bluster and stupid tweets about how easy it is to win trade wars, Trump is already starting to cave and fraudulently declare victory.
That was exemplified by his quick, totally vague deal with the European Union instantly trumpeted as a win. As with other Trump controversies, he backs down without really accomplishing anything other than disruption and inflicting a lot of unnecessary pain on ordinary Americans he doesn’t care about anyway. But it accomplishes two things Trump relishes. His fake toughness impresses wild-eyed supporters who don’t really know anything—the key constituency cheering him at his rallies—and it keeps him and his monumental ego at the center of everyone’s attention.
