Questions: Society & Politics

https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trump-tariff-carveout-farmers/682260/

American farmers are pleading for exemptions from President Donald Trump’s tariffs. GOP farm states reps are working to deliver the relief farmers want.

Tariffs will indeed hurt farmers badly. Farm costs will rise. Farm incomes will drop. Under Trump’s tariffs, farmers will pay more for fertilizer. They will pay more for farm equipment. They will pay more for the fuel to ship their products to market. When foreign countries retaliate, raising their own tariff barriers, American farmers will lose export markets. Their domestic sales will come under pressure too, because tariffs will shrink Americans’ disposable incomes: Consumers will have to cut back everywhere, including at the grocery store.

Farmers will share this tariff predicament of higher costs and lower incomes with almost all Americans—except the very wealthiest, who are less exposed to tariffs because they consume less of their incomes and can offset the pain of tariffs with other benefits from Trump, beginning with a dramatic reduction in tax enforcement.

Farmers are different from other Americans, however, in three ways.

First, farmers voted for Trump by huge margins. In America’s 444 most farm-dependent counties, Trump won an average of 77.7 percent of the vote.

Second, farmers have already pocketed windfall profits from Trump’s previous round of tariffs.

Third, farmers can better afford to pay the price of Trump’s tariffs than many other tariff victims.

But if a farm family voted for Trump, believing that his policies were good, it seems strange that they would then demand that they, and only they, should be spared the full consequences of those policies. Tariffs are the meal that rural America ordered for everyone. Now the dish has arrived at the table. If rural America cannot choke down its portion, why must other Americans stomach theirs?