Ottawa Trump went traveling. There were no state dinners this time. He was visiting a farm in Wisconsin in a Congressional district in trouble in a state that he narrowly won in 2024, but has been breaking hard against him more recently. Farmers, including in the vetted panel, gave him an earful, and, just maybe, for a change he seemed for a minute to have heard some of what they were saying.
They had beefs about tariffs that had cratered the markets for their products, fertilizer prices, gas prices, and more. When he claimed, optimistically, that his war in the Middle East was almost over, they applauded, whether they believed him or not, because they needed it to be over. The cost of fertilizer is up 25% because a good deal of it is produced in the Middle East. They told him plainly they were hurting.
Trump has been Mr. Denial about the impacts of his policies on the economy. He has gone so far as to state baldly that he doesn’t care about the finances of American families. At least on the farm, he finally acknowledged that he had come to realize that his policies had hurt farmers. He claimed he loved farmers. Luckily, he did sing the words to the old song that “you only hurt the ones you love,” even if it might have been appropriate.
They say that recognizing the problem is the first step in moving to solve it. Well, I’m not so sure about that. He claimed he had done a lot for the farmers, though none of it was really responsive to the issues they were raising or at the best tangential. Saying, even if falsely, that he had pardoned someone for fixing their own tractor and this would save them money, is small comfort to famers who know they can only survive if they can fix their own machinery and implements. It also turned out that the person he pardoned was no farmer but a fellow who had jimmied emission controls to allow more pollution from his vehicle.
If anyone might make the mistake that Trump has turned the corner and become empathetic, the story in the Washington Post makes it clear that that isn’t the case. He also reportedly shared five minutes with them about the beautiful things he was doing to the DC reflecting pool by painting it bluer. He also told them to keep their remarks short, advice he might should have given himself, so he could get back to DC to deal with the Iranian war, though it turned out he was really just on his way to his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Farmers usually have pretty good BS detectors. I’m not sure that Trump could hear them going off as he waved goodbye, but I bet they were beeping pretty loudly.