Rethinking the rural world / January 26, 2026
American farmers are furious about Trump’s tariffs. Democrats must channel their anger.
A farmer clears snow from the roof of his building on December 9, 2025, near Belvidere, Illinois.(Scott Olson/Getty Images) American farmers are beginning to realize how Donald Trump has betrayed them, and they are seething with anger and despair. These are the ingredients of a populist moment that Democrats can address by offering an explanation of what went wrong and a plan to address the crisis.
As for what’s wrong, they can start with Trump announcing a $40 billion bailout to make Argentina great again. After months of cruel and arbitrary cuts to domestic and foreign aid spending, the Trump administration is creating an economic lifeline to prop up Argentina’s corrupt anarcho-capitalist president, Javier Milei.
Argentina is the world’s third largest soy producer, behind Brazil and the United States. Seizing the opportunity presented by the U.S.-China trade war, Argentina dropped its export taxes and is now selling shipments of soybeans to China, a country that once bought them from American farmers.
Anger over Trump’s tariffs — and with it, the prospect of a political reckoning in farming nations — has become so intense that the president announced a $12 billion payout to compensate farmers for what they lost in the trade war with China. But this bailout represents barely a third of farmers’ losses in 2025 alone and won’t even begin to pay off the $560 billion in debt burdening American farmers.
Soy farmers aren’t the only ones in trouble. Farmers across the country are facing dramatic increases in input costs (fertilizer, seed, equipment, etc.), even as key markets disappear and prices for their products stagnate or decline. This is an issue that Democrats should take up.
American farmers, inspired by the New Deal, were once reliable Democratic voters. Today, they are strongly Republican. The losses they have suffered, thanks to Trump’s tariffs and other disastrous policies, provide fertile ground for defection. And the bailout of Argentina, a major competitor in the agricultural sector, presents Democrats with a golden opportunity. A serious opposition party would never stop complaining about it. It would be a storm in all agricultural communities across the country with a message of solidarity: “Trump has left American farmers in the lurch. He may have wanted to hurt China with the tariffs, but it’s American farmers who are being punished. He promises to give money to farmers, but we all know where that money is going to end up: in the banks that hold half a trillion dollars in farm debt.”
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The Democrats’ message must be direct and politically firm. He should say that our country needs to support farmers in a way it hasn’t done in decades. Instead of a trade war with China, we must rebuild our food system for the sake of farmers and the 340 million Americans they feed.
If a leading Democrat said anything like this, we missed it. The same goes for resistance: we saw virtually no signs in favor of farmers during the massive No Kings protests.
Instead, Democrats left the field open to right-wing populists like former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who rightly condemned the Argentine bailout as a betrayal of “America First.” It’s the same mistake that top Democrats made in 2015 and 2016, when they failed to recognize NAFTA’s devastating impact on America’s industrial cities, leaving room for Trump to do just that in battleground states. After decades of neglect, the Midwest’s “blue wall” finally collapsed.
You would think that collapsing farm country support for Democrats would be a high priority for those seeking to rebuild the party. But we’ve actually seen examples of liberal clicktivists on social media mocking farmers’ calls as “MAGA tears.”
We are convinced that the vast majority of urban liberals do not appreciate the suffering of farmers. But they also lacked the courage to learn or advocate for what could help them: reducing the power of large meat processors and other food and non-food agricultural monopolies; invest in regional food system infrastructure to enable farmers to diversify their markets and increase their share of the food budget; reinstate country of origin labeling; and the adoption of a “right to repair” law allowing farmers to repair their agricultural tools themselves.
The lack of attention to the plight of farmers has helped cement a widespread sense in rural America that Democrats and liberals don’t understand or care about us. This is also a huge missed opportunity. The conditions are ripe for an agrarian populist uprising: it would take no more than 3 percent of the rural vote to flip a number of red states and congressional districts. Farmers and their rural neighbors could give Democrats the votes they need. But these voters need a reason to make this change.
Vague gestures toward middle-class prosperity and promises of a return to a “normalcy” that was never great for farm country to begin with don’t make much sense to the people who are going broke trying to feed America. But an unapologetic agrarian populism that tells farmers that “Trump and those before him (including the Democrats) have betrayed you” – and that proposes a bold agenda for investment in rural America – could transform 2026 politics.
