Donald Trump

The Guardian -  Donald Trump’s policies have been a disaster for the nation’s farmers, so much so that a near electoral miracle may soon happen: Kansas, one of the deepest red, most rural states, may elect its first Democratic senator in nearly a century.

After Trump won farm country handily in 2024, many rural voters in Kansas, Iowa and elsewhere have soured on him because the price of diesel fuel, a key input for farming, has soared by nearly 70%, farm bankruptcies have surged and because Trump’s trade wars have significantly reduced agricultural exports.

Rural voters are so upset with Trump that polls show that Republican Senate candidates stand a good chance of losing in Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska and Texas, even though Trump won those rural states by 13 percentage points or more in 2024. No wonder Trump is hopscotching madly across Kansas, Iowa, and other states in the midterm campaign’s final weeks.

No one is saying that Trump deliberately hurt farmers, but when he plunged the US into the Iran war and his many trade wars, he showed little concern about what those decisions might mean for rural America. It was nearly inevitable that Trump’s moves would batter farmers – by pushing down soybean and other farm exports and by pushing up the price of fuel, fertilizer and farm equipment. Not only that, Trump’s proudest legislative achievement, his “big, beautiful bill”, further hammered farm country with its major cuts to food assistance and its $1tn in Medicaid cuts, which will cause an estimated 1.8 million rural Americans to lose health insurance.

Even the Cato Institute, a Republican-friendly, conservative thinktank, slammed Trump over what he has done to farmers. A Cato commentary stated that while Trump calls this a “golden age” for farmers, the fact is that Trump’s “tariffs are inflicting serious damage” on farmers, increasing their input prices and causing their exports to decline by billions of dollars.

This helps explain why farm bankruptcies have jumped by 85% over two years ago.

Michigan: Trump’s grim closing argument. “I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator,” Donald Trump said of Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed at a rally yesterday in Port Huron. He said El-Sayed, if elected, “would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders responded to Trump at an El-Sayed rally in Grand Rapids: “Mr. President, instead of slandering Abdul and his family, what are you going to do about the health care crisis in America?”

For his part, El-Sayed offered this: “I get that the president of the United States takes personal offense to my first name, he doesn’t mind as much when it’s a shared name from the Saudis who are funding his son-in-law’s private equity.”