I don't necessarily believe that a majority of farmers and adjacent Midwestern voters are going to vote for Trump's opponent in the next presidential election, but when the secretary of agricultural more or less tells farmers to eat shit, the Trump regime is not helping their case.
Secretary Sonny Perdue appeared at Farmfest in Minnesota over the weekend and sat down for a townhall meeting with the Minnesota Corn Growers Association where local farmers told him things are, in fact, not great again.
“We’re not starting to do great again,” Brian Thalmann, the president of the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, told Mr. Perdue at the event. “Things are going downhill and downhill quickly.”
On Monday, after a 72-hour period during which Mr. Trump twice escalated his trade war with China, Mr. Thalmann said he could no longer support the president as he did in 2016.
“At some point we have to quit playing games and get back to the table and figure this out,” Mr. Thalmann said. “There’s no certainty to any of this.”
Unfortunately for the nation's farmers, and for the rest of us, playing games is the only thing Trump knows how to do. And the only thing Trump has ever been certain about in his entire life is which porn stars he'd like to cheat on his current wife with.
I don't know what it will take to convince a plurality of these particular voters that Trump never had a plan, never had their best interests at heart, and was never going to deliver better results than virtually any other asshole you could stick in the White House.
Maybe it will take Trump's lackeys cracking jokes as ill-timed as this one:
“What do you call two farmers in a basement?” Mr. Perdue asked near the end of a testy hourlong town-hall-style event. “A whine cellar.”
A cascade of boos ricocheted around the room.
Imagine having decades of work or family heritage destroyed overnight by Trump's trade war only to see a shit-eating cabinet official turn it into a joke.