Recently President Trump announced he would be delivering $13 billion to America’s farmers to compensate them for the damage done by his reckless trade war.
Let me see if I’ve got this straight: In the run-up to the election Trump promised the fellas with the steel mills that he’d make the steel industry great. So they voted for him. And he promised the coal companies that he’d make coal great again. So those guys voted for him. And the same story to the farmers: “We’ll make agriculture great again” for a few more votes.
But now in 2018 he’s trying to juggle all these promises and keep everybody happy so, you guessed it, they’ll vote for him in 2020. But it’s not working quite like he planned. China, Canada, Japan and the EU have discovered that they can live without a lot of American trade and in a game of global tit for tat have put retaliatory tariffs on our farm products.
So what’s the Trumpian solution? Pay off the farmers for the damage he created. It just seems so complicated. I’d like to propose a simpler alternative strategy: Back off on all this bellicose trade war stuff. Let real diplomats negotiate fair trade policy. And then send someone like Steve Bannon on a road trip with a big trailer full of a bazillion dollars to buy as many votes as necessary to win in 2020 because when all’s said and done that’s what Trump is really trying to do.
Paul Miller
Stanwood
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