Donald Trump has emasculated the American farmer
One of the odder aspects of Donald Trump’s presidency is the way in which he has alienated the very voting blocs he claims to love the most.
Trump has proclaimed that he is the biggest booster of the military and that the uniformed services support him. Yet he has done nothing to better understand his role as the commander in chief of the armed forces. Military officers have expressed increasing discomfort with Trump’s use of the uniformed services as a partisan prop. His meetings with veterans groups have led to bizarre exchanges. Trump has restricted his encounters with the families of those killed in action because he found the experience to be too intense. Col. David Lapan, a retired Marine who served as the spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security during the first year of the Trump administration, once told the New York Times, “There was the belief that over time, he would better understand, but I don’t know that that’s the case. I don’t think that he understands the proper use and role of the military and what we can, and can’t, do.” Even evangelical groups, the backbone of Trump’s base, have recently expressed qualms about the president’s rhetoric.
Without question, however, the Trump bloc that has suffered the most from the Trump administration has been farmers. Sure, Trump has tweeted about the country’s “Great Patriotic Farmers” multiple times. Tweets don’t put food on the dinner table, however. On that front, this administration has been a blight on America’s breadbasket. Indeed, one has to step back and appreciate the devastation wreaked by administration policies. The Trump White House has taken one of America’s leading export sectors and turned it into a group dependent upon government welfare for its very survival.
Trump’s damage to farmers has two prongs. The first has been his administration’s evisceration of the Department of Agriculture. As Michael Lewis documented in “The Fifth Risk,” Trump’s appointees had little respect for the scientific research performed by the department’s scientists. In 2018, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, Sonny Perdue, centralized control over USDA researchers in an effort to limit the publication of any research critical of administration policies. As a result the Department of Agriculture’s best and brightest began to exit government service. By 2019, non-retirement departures from USDA research agencies had more than doubled compared to the previous three-year average. That exodus will only increase after USDA scientists were given a short date to select whether to move with their agencies from D.C. to Kansas City. White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney celebrated the transparent ploy to purge the administration of scientists as “a wonderful way to streamline government.” One outside expert warned my Post colleague Ben Guarino, “This is the brain drain we all feared, possibly a destruction of the agencies.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/13/donald-trump-has-emasculated-american-farmer/
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