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.