Republicans on Tuesday quietly exhaled after President Trump announced $12 billion in subsidies to rescue farm country, fretting that a trade war could bankrupt the agriculture industry and cost the party seats in the midterm elections.
Amid loud grumbling about federal bailouts and “Soviet” central planning, Republicans in Congress conceded that action was needed to mitigate the economic and political fallout from the retaliatory tariffs sparked by Trump’s trade war. In major agriculture states, some of which are also key 2018 battlegrounds, free-trade Republicans reluctantly endorsed the president’s intervention.
“Great to see @POTUS providing aid to farmers impacted by retaliatory #tariffs,” Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., tweeted.
Cramer is challenging Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp. For months he has lobbied the administration to act, fearing Trump’s trade policies, already hurting local farmers, would tank North Dakota’s economy and dampen his prospects in a targeted race Republicans expect him to win. Cramer’s campaign was quick to claim partial credit for the Agriculture Department’s planned $12 billion aid package.
Many Republicans were much less enthusiastic about the taxpayer-funded program; some outright mocked it. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., in an interview with Politico, ridiculed the rescue as “Soviet” with “commissars deciding who’s going to be granted waivers.” In a lengthy, statement, Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., referred to it as “gold crutches” that are “going to make it 1929 again.”
But other Republicans, when pressed, declined to categorically reject the White House rescue package, even as they protested the Trump tariffs that are fueling a trade standoff with Canada, China, and European allies and denounced, conceptually, the use of federal subsidies to keep the agriculture industry afloat.
Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., had asked the administration to do something, emphasizing that soybean growers in his state have lost $600 million and that although support for Trump remains strong, his trade policies “are not working for them” and might not last the year if commodity prices continue to drop without a financial bridge.
“We’ve got some people who are on the tip of the spear right now,” Rounds said. “Even though we don’t like the idea of having an aid package, as opposed to trade, I think most producers would say: ‘We’ll take what we can get to get through this thing, but we really want to get this trade thing settled.’”
Indeed, farmers tend to be big Trump supporters who back his push to extract more favorable terms from America’s trading partners. They generally side with the president when he complains that other countries have taken unfair advantage of the U.S. and aren’t granting American-made goods equal access to their markets.
But Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., a close Trump ally, cautioned that there’s a limit to how much economic pain farmers are willing to absorb. That warning, a red flag for Republicans on the fall ballot, applies to more than the agriculture industry. A Brookings Institution analysis shows that Trump’s trade war stands to primarily hurt communities that voted Republican in 2016.
“At some point you can’t pay the bills with patriotism alone. I think there’s a great deal of deep-water patience there; they know what this president is trying to do. But at some point we’ve got to work this out,” Perdue said. “The farmers I know want markets — they want to ship this stuff, they don’t want a handout.”
Senate Republicans are poised to pad their 51-49 majority in November despite a perilous national political environment that could cost the GOP control of the House, as voters in affluent suburban districts lean toward rebuking Trump.
[Opinion: Emergency farm aid is a New Deal solution to a stupid #MAGAnomics problem]
That’s because Democrats are defending several seats in red states with significant blocs of rural and exurban voters that flocked to Trump in 2016 and remain in his corner. That includes North Dakota, as well as Indiana, Missouri, Montana, and West Virginia. Other red states the Democrats are defending might yet join the GOP target list.
But not if the growing economy Republicans are counting on to preserve their congressional majorities hits the skids, which is what they worry will happen if Trump’s trade war doesn’t come to a successful conclusion — and quickly.
Democratic incumbents, many well-funded and battle-tested, are seizing on this fresh economic anxiety and the administration’s emergency aid package to make the broader case that the president’s policies are unraveling — and that Republicans know it.
“Trump created a mess for farmers, and now he’s asking every taxpayer to help bail him out for the mess he created,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said.
