"....I guess we should have paid attention to the Project 2025 document" - head of Kansaa Farmer's Union
- Thread starter jadillac
- Start date
yardman
Afro-pessimist
I was looking to post that video of Trump calling republican’s dumb, but I can’t find it. Come to find out he scrubbed it from the internet and other publications are saying the video/quote never existed. I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone.
Richard Glidewell
Yall done tore all the bottom of ya shoes w/me!!!
Can't trust em
Recca Gatsby
LWO
Lucky_Lefty
Dreams Are Colder Than Death...
They expect some sort of sympathy for their stupidity or something? FOH
Formerly Black Trash
Philosopher, Connoisseur, Future Legend
Wow
Tribal Outkast
Veteran
And they’ll lose 1000 more times too
mc_brew
#NotMyPresident
all the people i know irl that supported trump still do... i don't know a single person irl who supported trump in 2016 that has a single issue with what he's doing now... that includes a veteran at my job... another black woman at my job LOVES 
what trump is doing... shĂŹt is mind boggling.....
i don't think this is the win you guys think it is...
what trump is doing... shĂŹt is mind boggling.....i don't think this is the win you guys think it is...
They feelin' how Marlon felt on Wayans Bros when he moved out on his own and didn't read the fine print on the lease
Pull Up the Roots
Veteran
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yardman
Afro-pessimist
Are you talking about the supposed quote from People Magazine? It was fake.
It’s not fake, I seen the video right before he got elected for his first term. Remember him saying that quote vividly. He definitely got it scrubbed.
Pull Up the Roots
Veteran
yardman
Afro-pessimist
This is not the clip, I’m not going to argue with you.
Damn near the whole comment section is echoing what I’m saying. I’m not bugging.
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Transcript: Trump Voters Suddenly Shocked at How Badly He Screwed Them
As farmers start realizing they will be devastated by Trump's tariffs, the author of a book about MAGA country digs into the true nature of his rural support—and how Democrats should try to reverse it.
newrepublic.com
The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent/
April 7, 2025
PODCAST
Transcript: Trump Voters Suddenly Shocked at How Badly He Screwed Them
As farmers start realizing they will be devastated by Trump's tariffs, the author of a book about MAGA country digs into the true nature of his rural support—and how Democrats should try to reverse it.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 7 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The wreckage from President Trump’s sweeping new tariffs is only beginning, and some of the leading victims could be Trump’s own supporters. China has slapped enormous retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports—and the last time this happened, during Trump’s first term, U.S. farmers got absolutely slaughtered. There are indications that Trump’s escalating trade wars could be a whole lot worse for farmers this time around. So is there a point at which Trump’s own supporters could turn on him over the damage he’s unleashing? What other Trump-backing constituencies could get clobbered here? We’ve got a great guest to explain all this today: Tom Schaller, co-author of the book White Rural Rage with Paul Waldman. Really good to have you on, Tom.
Tom Schaller: Great to be here, Greg. Thanks for inviting me.
Sargent: According to multiple reports, farmers around the country fear that Trump’s trade wars could be much worse for them than last time. China just said they’re going forward with retaliatory tariffs of 34 percent on U.S. imports. China’s aiming directly for politically sensitive sectors for Trump like agriculture and industry. A lot of that is in Trump country. Tom, what do you make of this? How important are Chinese markets to rural America right now?
Schaller: Well, Chinese markets are important to all Americans, but the impact, as you suggest, may be disproportionate for rural communities. Rural communities, of course, are much more dependent on so-called extractive economies—mining and farming particularly—and they tend to have more heavy industry. That’s because you can’t have major plants and stuff in [urban] and suburban areas because of zoning and property cost reasons.
When Paul and I wrote the book, we got tons of angry emails from people, and the general form of that is I hope you don’t need to eat or drive your car ever again because energy is produced in rural America and all your food and meals are produced here. Now that’s a bit of a stretch. And of course, in any economy—so what? You can make potatoes and sell them to me, and people in the cities can make electronics and sell them to you. Nobody and no liberal or no Democrat ever says to rural America, Hey, you don’t make MRIs or put people through MRIs, you got to come into the big city and see the doctor so I hope you don’t get sick, because that’s how an economy works. We don’t expect every community to make every product.
Because extractive industries are disproportionately located in rural communities, and because rural Americans disproportionately rely on those commodities, when developing countries like China still need things like food, the same people who have been yelling at my co-author Paul Waldman—whom you know well—and me, saying, Hey, I hope you don’t need to rely on food, are going to be the same people bearing not all but a disproportionate brunt of tariffs if they stay in place, like the ones that Trump is going to impose on China and the reciprocal response which China has already announced.
Sargent: Well, according to the American Farm Bureau of Federation, underscoring your point, more than 20 percent of farm income comes from exports. The last time this happened, farmers got hurt badly by Chinese retaliatory tariffs which were aimed at U.S. exports like soybeans, corn, and wheat. And as far as I can tell, the farm economy is actually weaker now, partly because of that. Can you recount what happened last time Trump did this and China retaliated?
Schaller: Yeah. So Trump put tariffs on a variety of products, and China retaliated. That had an adverse effect on American farmers. What happened was Trump, who of course declared that trade wars are easy to win.... I guess they are easy to win if you don’t mention the fact that you end up having to pass a bill with something like $30 billion in bailouts to farmers to compensate, essentially subsidize the losses they endured from decreased demand for their products because of the reciprocal tariffs that other countries put on you.
I think Trump, as you know, is a guy who views the world transactionally, and he projects his view onto everybody else. What he believes is that every negotiation, every deal by definition has to be zero-sum. It can’t be non-zero-sum; it can’t be collectively good for both sides. So that means there’s got to be a winner, and there’s got to be a loser. And Donald Trump never loses, right? He’s always got to be the winner, and he assumes that the person on the side is always going to buckle, is always going to give in, and that they’re not going to respond in kind. And he’s already learned....I don’t know if he did learn, but he should have already learned from the first-term experiment here that other countries aren’t going to take this lying down.
China’s a major economy. They’re going to reciprocate in kind, and it’s going to extract costs from your domestic producers. And then you’re going to have two choices. They’re either going to go bankrupt—which is probably what the Farm Bureau is implying, Greg. It weakens the industry because some of the producers end up not recovering and having to go out of business. Or you have to bail them out, which means taking money out of the Treasury—money you could have just given to them as a direct subsidy without having the tariffs in the first place. So you’re just spending money to pay down the cost of the tariffs that you imposed.
Sargent: Speaking of Trump’s zero-sum worldview in which there are only winners and losers, he’s already raging about what China did with its retaliatory tariffs. On Truth Social in all caps on Friday, he said, “CHINA PLAYED IT WRONG, THEY PANICKED, THE ONE THING THEY CANNOT AFFORD TO DO!” Now, I don’t really claim to be a China expert, but panic isn’t the kind of thing that they do. They seem to be pretty deliberate in thinking this type of stuff through. And as you point out, this happened once before, and their retaliation actually did successfully from their point of view target Trump country. Here though, Trump is trying to make it look as if China is already losing because everything at all times always has to revolve around his infallibility and dominance.
Schaller: Everybody knows that a bully is really just a coward with a rich daddy and a big microphone and a fancy car. And of course, Trump is both of those things: a bully who had a rich daddy and a big mouth. But inside, he is just a coward. And the coward usually picks on the weak. They usually slam the kids up against the locker who are too weak to do anything and don’t have enough friends because they may back down. When you put tariffs on a tiny little country that relies on only a couple of industries, you could devastate an entire country because they don’t have the power economically to respond.
China is not one of those countries, Greg. China is a major growing force. And when they respond, you feel that. You’re not beating up the wimpiest little kid who’s three years behind you and is a college freshman. You’re picking on another senior who’s across the line from you on the varsity football team.
Sargent: Underscoring the point is the fact that, as you point out, the government last time spent tens of billions of dollars to bail out farmers. Now the Trump administration is reportedly mulling another aid package for farmers. Now this is a tacit admission that they know their policies will absolutely devastate farm country. This time, we’re going to have many more retaliatory tariffs from many other countries because our tariffs are much broader as well. Is it really going to be possible to bail out farmers this time, given how much worse it could be?
Schaller: First of all, it could be difficult because it’s expensive. But to your point, if they got to do selective bailouts for all these industries that are severely hampered, and even if they start with just the industries that are in the most favorable parts, the most reddish parts of America, it’s still going to be costly for them to do it. There’s a real political opportunity here for the Democrats to say something like, You’ve got Elon Musk going around with his little DOGE marauders trying to save $10 billion here and five billion here and sometimes only a few million here and there. And every time you got to create a bailout because of retaliatory tariffs, you’re just eating away at all that supposed savings from waste and abuse because you’re having to pour it right back out of the Treasury to bail out industries that are otherwise going to collapse under the pressure of the retaliatory tariffs, whether they come from China or whether they come from Europe or whether they come from South America. There’s an opportunity to point out that whatever money we’ve been saving is going to be poured right back in.
Now, Pete Navarro, as you know, has projected that the new tariffs, if they stay in place, are going to generate $600 to $700 billion in revenues annually. I did some quick math before I came on. Last year, our federal revenues were $4.9 trillion—let’s call it $5 trillion. The share of that that’s generated by tariffs is 1.7 percent—let’s round that to 2 percent to make the math easy. Two percent of $5 trillion is $100 billion.
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