Trump Hammers Rural America

And he's just getting started...

Robert Leonard writes at Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture. Please consider subscribing—Bob has a way of showing up exactly where he needs to be to tell stories that are exactly the stories we need to hear. Bob and I have been writing with each other since 2019. Photos were all taken by Bob in south central Iowa.

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Trump received no greater support for returning to the Oval Office than from rural America. But so far, he has thanked them with the worst agenda for rural Americans in decades.

Bankers in the Midwest predict a worsening rural economy with farmers and ranchers facing headwinds. When asked to name the top risk factor for farming in 2025, 68% named lower ag commodity prices as the Number 1 concern, while 23.5% indicated higher tariffs as the top risk factor.

American farmers produce a lot of commodities for the world market. We’re the largest agricultural exporting country in the world, and placing tariffs on trading partners, large and small, will only hurt everyone involved, and trading relationships that have taken generations to build are gone, like Chinese buyers looking to Brazil for soybeans instead of Midwestern US farmers, like our friends and family.

While Trump argues that tariffs will drive production and consumption of American-made products, the agricultural trade deficit indicates just the opposite. The May quarterly report by the USDA shows that the agricultural trade deficit is predicted to continue to set new records. The most recent report forecasts that the farm trade deficit — the gap between the food America sells and buys, along with other products like cotton and ethanol— will hit $49.5 billion this year.

But this report is sketchy--Instead of producing information that farmers, ranchers, and the agriculture community can use to make decisions, the administration is being accused of editing this report to hide the impact of Trump’s tariff policies on the deficit.

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While USDA claims to be refocusing on a farmer-first approach, everything indicates that they are narrowing support to larger commodity farmers and leaving smaller, more diversified farmers behind. In Iowa, we saw over $11 million terminated that would have supported farmers growing foods for schools, care facilities, and food banks. Nationally, those programs totaled over $1 billion.

USDA has lost over 15 percent of its workforce. Over 15,000 people took the first “fork in the road” deferred resignation offered by Elon Musk at DOGE and the subsequent offer. The county office delivery system of about 1,000 employees in Iowa is down by well over 100 people. The Polk County Farm Service Agency is now open only 3 days a week instead of full-time. Many offices, while still open full-time at Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), Farm Service Agency (FSA), and Rural Development (RD) are now extremely short-staffed. USDA has also frozen or canceled somewhere between 50 and 100 million dollars this year to support Iowa farmers in efforts to save soil, clean up water, and support wildlife.

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The national team at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is down 1377 jobs. This is the team that’s dealing with Avian Influenza (bird flu). Iowa has been hit hard since 2022, and the state is left with a lack of senior APHIS leadership. APHIS staff were threatened with becoming at-will employees due to national security and encouraged to leave, as reported by NPR on May 3. Having put us at risk of disease outbreaks, the USDA is now trying to backfill these positions, but the highly qualified experts have already resigned.

The President’s budget proposes staffing and budget cuts to local service delivery for the Farm Service Agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and Rural Development. These cuts will result in fewer farmers and ranchers, bigger farms and ranches, dirtier water, less wildlife, more soil erosion, greater emissions, and lost opportunities for farmers to help solve the climate crisis.

The attacks on universities are hitting our land grants especially hard. Iowa State is being hit twice by Republicans as the state of Iowa cuts back support, and tens of millions of dollars in federal grants have been paused or canceled. No one seems to know the total amount. Iowa State had almost 3,000 international students enrolled in 2024. Most of these students pay full tuition.

For years, conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation have wanted to blow up the farm bill. Trump’s reconciliation package may just get this done. Making cuts to SNAP and doing crop insurance and reference prices for commodities in the One Big Beautiful Bill could derail efforts to do a full Farm Bill. The last bill was passed in 2018 and has now been extended twice.

For over 50 years, a coalition of urban members of Congress focused on nutrition programs like SNAP and rural members focused on agriculture programs have worked together to pass new farm bills on a regular basis. There is growing concern that the reconciliation process could undermine the historic farm bill coalition of urban and rural lawmakers, making both nutrition and farm program efforts more difficult to pass in the future.

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Other actions of Trump and Republicans have an oversized impact in rural America.

Congress is torching the social safety net that disproportionately benefits rural America. Medicaid and SNAP are lifelines in farming country, because of demographics--we’re older and poorer.

Also, the Affordable Care Act has been a lifesaver for farmers and rural small businesses. While about 14% of America is rural, 17.4% of ACA participants are from rural America. People with ACA Marketplace plans stand to lose all or most of their tax credits, which the Republicans in the House are trying to let expire as part of their cost-saving efforts.

In Iowa, we looked at a farming couple’s health insurance bill, which showed a total monthly premium of $1,646 and an advance payment of the Premium Tax Credit of $1,096, resulting in an out-of-pocket monthly payment of $550.42. That’s essentially a $13,152 dollar support for making health insurance affordable. If the ACA Marketplace tax credits expire, the cost to farmers and other self-employed rural Americans is going to be catastrophic.

Trump broke FEMA, and the citizens hit by tornadoes in Missouri, Mississippi, Kentucky, and other states had to beg for help recovering. Here in Iowa, we had a record high of 125 tornadoes in 2024, and can’t count on FEMA’s help this year. Hurricane season is just beginning in the south. Republicans accused FEMA, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, and the Biden Administration of not doing enough. People are expecting the Trump Administration to respond to disasters, and it’s not clear they will.

Some of our MAGA friends will go to their graves supporting Trump, no matter how much pain and suffering there is, but it will be hard to ignore when it hits home later this year and into 2026.

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People are only going to believe MAGA media until their own lives tell different stories, and we are starting to hear them in our small Iowa towns. Here are some of the conversations we have had recently.

A manufacturing company executive for one of the largest employers in the county told us that because of the tariffs, parts of her supply chain have been crushed, that her costs are going up, that she is having to raise prices, and that jobs in her company will be lost.

A woman who was an Americorps volunteer nearly wept as she told us she had lost her job. A woman who cared for the elderly and disabled told us that she had lost her job, and worried about who would take care of her clients. A librarian told us that digital downloads of books will likely be cut. People are telling us they aren’t going out to eat as much. Grants to police departments are on hold. Road construction projects are on hold. Veterans' services have been cut.

Our immigrant friends, family, and neighbors live in fear, even if they are here legally. A small shopkeeper who sells women’s clothing hopes for the best, and knows her costs and prices will go up, but she just doesn’t know by how much. Our food pantry shelves have record usage. A florist tells us that all of her flowers come from overseas, and that the price of stem lilies, as one example, has gone from $2 to $8 in anticipation of tariffs and will go up more when they hit. All of her suppliers have warned her of price increases, and that most of the home decor in her shop comes from China. A proprietor of a local watering hole tells us the price of his high-end tequila has doubled.

A couple of weeks ago, a hospital administrator told us that if severe Medicaid cuts go through, hospitals will close in rural America. The same hospital administrator told us that 40% of births in Iowa are funded by Medicaid, and the other 60% will be impacted if the Medicaid reimbursements go away.

A banker told us that there will be farm foreclosures, business foreclosures, and personal bankruptcies. He said loans that made sense last fall don’t make sense now.

If the Medicaid cuts are bad, everyone in town will know someone who is hurt. Rural protests have already begun.

Trump has started raids on packing houses in the Midwest, beginning in Omaha. Without immigrants, our rural economies crumble. We wrote about this four years ago in the New York Times, “Why Rural America Needs Immigrants.” Our need has only gotten bigger.

It’s too early to say the bloom is off the rose for Trump in rural America, but if Republicans continue to support Trump as he crashes markets, undermines rural economies, and makes farmers and small town shopkeepers pay the costs of his trade war, there is growing risk that the populism that helped deliver a second term could shift to kicking him and the billionaire class to the curb sooner than later.

And that would be great for rural America.

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