Pandemic and Economic Collapse Slam Trump Across Rust Belt

Some Donald Trump supporters are so invested in their racism and hatred of "liberals" that they will likely never open their eyes to the reality that Trump's tariff wars and tax cuts for the very wealthy and regulation cuts to big business are the real source of their worsening personal financial situations.  Then there are evangelicals so obsessed with Trump's promises of special rights that place them above the law and grant them a license to discriminate that they seem unable to grasp the financial ruin Trump has ushered in for them.  Now, however, the covid-19 pandemic and the related economic collapse may wake some of them up, especially in hard hit rust belt states that collectively gave Trump a 70,000 vote margin and an Electoral College victory.  A piece in Politico looks at Trump's adverse current situation in these same rust belt states and how November will be a referendum on Trump's policies and failures to handle the pandemic crisis.  Here are highlights:

The Industrial Midwest was always going to be a battleground in November.

The region is now becoming a new frontline for Americans’ lives and livelihoods as coronavirus hotspots proliferate and jobless rates spiral. The confluence of a ferocious pandemic, deepening economic turmoil and rising political tensions is more pronounced here than anywhere else in the country. And it sets the stage for a combustible campaign season that is testing President Donald Trump’s efforts to move on and insulate himself from the crisis—and Joe Biden’s ability to blame him for the fallout.

On Thursday, Trump ventured to a swing county in Pennsylvania, stopping off at a Lehigh Valley medical equipment distributor where he used an official speech to mock “Sleepy Joe,” chastise governors for moving too slowly to reopen and assail the news media as a “disaster” while touting American workers.

“I say it’s the ‘transition to greatness.’ The transition is the third quarter," Trump said. "The fourth quarter is going to do very well. And next year is going to be through the roof.”

The numbers and interviews, however, paint a much grimmer picture. The virus has moved from urban centers like Detroit and Chicago into suburbs and more sparsely populated counties, a trend seen from western Pennsylvania to Minnesota and Iowa. In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—Democrats’ so-called “Blue Wall”—19 counties report coronavirus cases doubling in less than 14 days. Trump won all but one of those counties, by an average of 65 percent.

Democrats are working to ensure that doesn’t happen again by casting his stewardship over the virus and economy as a betrayal.

“There are so many things Trump has done to attack the labor movement to undermine and betray workers,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told POLITICO. “And since the coronavirus, he’s done nothing to help the essential workers.”

The region has been devastated by job losses amid pandemic-induced economic shutdowns, in some cases far outpacing the national average in terms of the proportion of their workforces that have applied for unemployment benefits since mid-March.

In Michigan, more than 3 in 10 workers have sought aid in the past two months, according to a POLITICO analysis of Labor Department data. Layoffs and furloughs are also piling up in Pennsylvania, where more than one-fourth of the workforce — or 29.6 percent — has filed an unemployment claim.

The double shock of the virus and financial meltdown has further sharpened partisan divides in the states. Wisconsin and Michigan were home to the highest percentage of people saying their state governments were overreacting to the crisis, according to a survey conducted by researchers at Harvard, Northeastern and Rutgers Universities last month.

Overall, however, the public has remained solidly behind governors who are urging caution, giving them high marks for their performances while their assessments of Trump’s handling of the outbreak sag.

And private surveys conducted by both parties and described to POLITICO show concerns about the virus and health care running ahead of worries over the economy.

Personal protective equipment also remains a problem in many jurisdictions, health officials say, and there are fears of how rural areas with rising caseloads and fewer hospitals will manage future outbreaks, particularly in Michigan, where health officials are starting to see spikes in rural counties.

The economic fallout is expected to be even more long-lasting, casting a shadow over the presidential election. Biden has maintained polling leads over Trump in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, while public polling of Ohio has been scarce.

The emerging economic downturn has also further undermined [Trump's] the president’s promises of reviving American manufacturing, particularly the steel industry.

In some industries — construction and building trades, for example — workers are used to long breaks between jobs, and many have filed for unemployment in the past. But the abrupt nature of the country’s shutdown threw many out of work with little warning, leaving them without time to prepare.

Democrats maintain that the region’s long standing financial difficulties were already being exacerbated by the Trump administration in the three years before the coronavirus struck. They point to tariffs and renewable fuel-standard waivers that impacted corn farmers. Manufacturing, too, has taken big hits. Last year, Pennsylvania saw a drop of 5,700 factory positions, while Michigan was down 5,300 and Wisconsin lost 4,100 jobs.

In her conversations with constituents, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) says they now recognize Trump’s role in a string of earlier economic setbacks, which have been compounded by the virus.  “They are very clear about what those missteps are and, frankly, they are angry," Baldwin said.

Trump aides and allies are primarily focused on changing the subject from the pandemic and ensuing economic devastation — highlighting Biden’s vulnerabilities in the region rather than defending the administration’s response.

Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf last month vetoed a GOP-backed bill to reopen more businesses. He's issued stern warnings in recent days that county leaders who defy current state orders will lose out on funding.

“Even though we are seeing a positive trend in our Covid-19 cases, we know that we’re far from done with this,” said Benjamin Weston, director of medical services for the Milwaukee County Office of Emergency Management, who added that the county will continue dealing with the coronavirus and continued outbreaks and surges until a vaccine is, hopefully, available sometime next year.

Democrats need to relentlessly hammer Trump for his trade wars, war against unions and the working class and utter malfeasance in the federal government covid-19 response.

Voodoo Economics May Be Catching Up with Trump/GOP

The stack market - actually the bond market - has been showing signs that the economy is slowing and that a recession might well begin in 2020 or before.  Recently job growth and GDP figures have been revised downward and manufacturers and consumers are feeling the adverse effects of Trump's insane trade wars with China and other nations.  And then there are America's farmers who have been dealt the double blow of Chinese tariffs and the impacts of climate change, particularly in the Mid-West, even as the GOP denies climate change is occurring.  To what ought to a shock to no one, the Trump/GOP tax cut for the wealthy and huge corporations - which only scattered crumbs for everyone else - has yet again proven that huge tax cuts for the top income brackets (i) do not pay for themselves, (ii) explode the deficit, and (iii) do not strengthen the economy overall. These three realities have been known since the days of Ronald Reagan, yet the GOP continues to live in a fantasy world.  A column in the New York Times looks at the slowing economy and the efforts of Trump and the GOP to shift blame from themselves.  Here are excerpts:

Almost four decades ago then-candidate George H.W. Bush used the phrase “voodoo economic policy” to describe Ronald Reagan’s claim that cutting taxes for the rich would pay for itself. He was more prescient than he could have imagined.

For voodoo economics isn’t just a doctrine based on magical thinking. It’s the ultimate policy zombie, a belief that seemingly can’t be killed by evidence. It has failed every time its proponents have tried to put it into practice, but it just keeps shambling along.

[W]henever tax cuts fail to produce the predicted miracle, their defenders come up with bizarre explanations for their failure.
 My favorite until now came from Art Laffer, the original voodoo economist and recent recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Why did George W. Bush’s tax-cutting presidency end not with a boom, but with the worst economic slump since the Great Depression? According to Laffer, blame rests with Barack Obama, even though the recession began more than a year before Obama took office. You see, according to Laffer, everyone lost confidence upon realizing that Obama might win the 2008 election.
 Trump has gone one better. As it has become increasingly clear that the results of his tax cut were disappointing — recent data revisions have marked down estimates of both G.D.P. and employment growth, to the point where it’s hard to see more than a brief sugar high from $2 trillion in borrowing — Trump has invented ever more creative ways to blame other people. In particular, he’s now claiming that the promised boom hasn’t arrived because his opponents are hexing the economy with bad thoughts: “The Democrats are trying to ‘will’ the Economy to be bad for purposes of the 2020 Election.”
 [B]laming the Fed for the tax cut’s fizzle won’t wash. For one thing, the Fed has actually raised rates less than in previous economic recoveries. Even more to the point, the Trump economic team was expecting Fed rate hikes when it made its extravagantly optimistic forecasts.
 The Trump tax cut was supposed to create a boom so powerful that it would not only withstand modest Fed rate hikes, but actually require such hikes to prevent inflationary overheating. You don’t get to turn around and claim betrayal when the Fed does exactly what you expected it to do.
 Since the Fed is unlikely to oblige, what else might Trump do? Officials have floated, then retracted, the idea of a cut in payroll taxes — that is, a tax break for ordinary workers, rather than the corporations and wealthy individuals who mainly benefited from the 2017 tax cut. But such action seems unlikely, among other things because top administration officials denounced this policy idea when Obama proposed it.

Trump has also suggested using executive authority to reduce taxes on capital gains (which are overwhelmingly paid by the wealthy). This move would have the distinction of being both ineffectual and illegal.

What about calling off the trade war that has been depressing business investment? This seems unlikely, because protectionism is right up there with racism as a core Trump value. And merely postponing tariffs might not help, since it wouldn’t resolve the uncertainty that may be the trade war’s biggest cost.

The truth is that Trump doesn’t have a Plan B, and probably can’t come up with one. On the other hand, he might not have to. Who needs competent policy when you’re the chosen one and the king of Israel?

Funny how the last GOP administration engaged in massive tax cuts and George W. left the country with the largest economic meltdown since the Great Depression.  The GOP truly never learns. 

Trump and the Seemingly Faltering Economy

Donald Trump likes to claim he is responsible for the United States' economy and boasts about the stock market. The truth is that he merely inherited a growing economy from the Obama administration and that to date, his regime has done little to provide a basis for claiming responsibility for the economy which has grown, yet since much of the benefit go to the top 1% percent of taxpayers (especially due to the Trump/GOP tax break give away).  Now, with signs that the economy may be on the verge of faltering, Trump economic and trade policies may be a driving force towards a slow down and recession in 2020 - a recession (f not depression) already slamming American farmers thanks to Der Trumpenführer's tariffs and trade wars.  A column in the New York Times suggests that Trump's policies are a flop and, worse yet, his regime has no plan on how to deal with an economic slow down other than to blame "fake news" and the Federal Reserve.  Here are highlights:

Last year, after an earlier stock market swoon brought on by headlines about the U.S.-China trade conflict, I laid out three rules for thinking about such events. First, the stock market is not the economy. Second, the stock market is not the economy. Third, the stock market is not the economy.

But maybe I should add a fourth rule: The bond market sorta kinda is the economy.

An old economists’ joke says that the stock market predicted nine of the last five recessions. Well, an “inverted yield curve” — when interest rates on short-term bonds are higher than on long-term bonds — predicted six of the last six recessions. And a plunge in long-term yields, which are now less than half what they were last fall, has inverted the yield curve once again, with the short-versus-long spread down to roughly where it was in early 2007, on the eve of a disastrous financial crisis and the worst recession since the 1930s.

[T]he bond market is telling us that the smart money has become very gloomy about the economy’s prospects. Why? The Federal Reserve basically controls short-term rates, but not long-term rates; low long-term yields mean that investors expect a weak economy, which will force the Fed into repeated rate cuts.

So what accounts for this wave of gloom? Much though not all of it is a vote of no confidence in Donald Trump’s economic policies.

[L]ast year, after a couple of quarters of good economic news, Trump officials were boasting that the 2017 tax cut had laid the foundation for many years of high economic growth. Since then, however, the data have pretty much confirmed what critics had been saying all along. Yes, the tax cut gave the economy a boost — a “sugar high.” Running trillion-dollar deficits will do that. But the boost was temporary. In particular, the promised boom in business investment never materialized.

At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that Trump’s belligerence about foreign trade isn’t a pose; it reflects real conviction. Protectionism seems to be up there with racism as part of the essential Trump. And the realization that he really is a Tariff Man is having a serious dampening effect on business spending, partly because nobody knows just how far he’ll go. [T]hink of the dilemma facing many U.S. manufacturers. Some of them rely heavily on imported parts; they’re not going to invest in the face of actual or threatened tariffs on those imports. Others could potentially compete with imported goods if assured that those imports would face heavy tariffs; but they don’t know whether those tariffs are actually coming, or will endure. So everyone is sitting on piles of cash, waiting to see what an erratic president will do. Of course, Trump isn’t the only problem here. Other countries have their own troubles — a European recession and a Chinese slowdown look quite likely — and some of these troubles are spilling back to the United States. But even if Trump and company aren’t the source of all of our economic difficulties, you still want some assurance that they’ll deal effectively with problems as they arise. . . . reportedly, is that there is no policy discussion at all, which isn’t surprising when you bear in mind the fact that basically everyone who knows anything about economics left the Trump administration months or years ago.

[T]the administration’s only plan if things go wrong seems to be to blame the Fed, whose chairman was selected by … Donald Trump. To be fair, it’s now clear that the Fed was wrong to raise short-term rates last year.

But it’s important to realize that the Fed’s mistake was, essentially, that it placed too much faith in Trumpist economic policies. . . . the Trump boom wasn’t supposed to be so fragile that a small rise in rates would ruin it.

I might add that blaming the Fed looks to me like a dubious political strategy. How many voters even know what the Fed is or what it does?

Investors were clearly far too optimistic last fall, but they may be too pessimistic now.  But pessimistic they are. The bond market, which is the best indicator we have, is declaring that Trumponomics was a flop.

Buttigieg Looks to Truman, Not Obama, on Foreign Policy

If one looks at America's foreign policy over the last quarter century, in many ways it has been a disaster - think the Iraq War and the never ending war in Afghanistan as prime examples- that has done little to improve the lives of most Americans.  One could point to the stability of the NATO Alliance as a positive, but now under Donald Trump, everything is plagued with instability and Trump's tariff policies and war on clean energy are taking the nation backwards and in many ways making it less competitive - e.g., if Trump rolls back fuel efficiency standards on cars, American made vehicles will be less competitive in the global market and at home, Americans may switch to more fuel efficient foreign vehicles (I drive a very fuel efficient Mercedes). So far, few of the Democrats have laid out detailed foreign policy positions.  One, Pete Buttigieg, while in the beginning stages, may be headed towards a foreign policy approach that for a change considers impacts on everyday Americans.  He has a long way to go, but perhaps it is a start as a piece in The Atlantic suggests.  Here are excerpts:

“Basically, my entire adult life has been one where it’s a little bit illegible where you’re supposed to be as a Democrat on foreign policy,” Pete Buttigieg told me last weekend. He was preparing to give his first speech on the subject, today at Indiana University. So far, most of the Democratic candidates have avoided the question of how they’d conduct foreign policy, and the voters and the press have made that easy for them.

When candidates decide to say something about global affairs, they tend to quarantine their views in a single all-encompassing speech, as if to get the topic out of the way. Elizabeth Warren gave hers in Washington in November. Bernie Sanders has actually given two, in Missouri in 2017 and last fall at Johns Hopkins. None of the other candidates has given even one.

This silence about America’s role in the world is strange. The quest to replace Donald Trump presents the first chance since the end of the Cold War for Democrats to think fundamentally anew about foreign policy. The liberal internationalist approach of the Bill Clinton years aimed to enlarge the sphere of capitalist democracies, manage the world’s chaos, and extend American influence, through free trade, NATO expansion, diplomatic deal making, and occasional military intervention.

The high-water mark was the American-led peace agreement in 1995 that ended the war in Bosnia and repaired damage to the transatlantic alliance. September 11, the Iraq War, and the financial crisis threw this consensus into confusion. Those were the early years of Buttigieg’s adult life, when Democratic foreign policy became “a little bit illegible.” Still, the approach of the ’90s persisted into Barack Obama’s presidency—free trade, diplomacy, ongoing war—even as Obama himself became more and more skeptical of American overreach.

Hillary Clinton, a holdover from the unipolar moment, was the last of the muscular interventionists.

In his Indiana speech, Buttigieg welcomed “a season for thinking about what comes next with greater urgency and, in certain ways, greater freedom than has been available to a president for some time.”

Most of the energy in the new thinking is on the left. Sanders has called for a foreign policy based on the worldwide struggle against oligarchy and corporate power—a “global progressive movement” for economic equality, democratic rights, and environmental sustainability. In this view, American dominance has been a mixed bag at best, a force for ill as much as good, and it should yield to a transnational movement led by citizens, not just governments.

As Peter Beinart has pointed out, this idea goes back to World War II and the appeal in 1942 by FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace for a foreign policy of “the common man.”
Where does Buttigieg come down? When I asked him which recent presidents might serve as models for foreign-policy making in his administration, he didn’t single anyone out. “What’s interesting about the period certainly since the Cold War is how hard it is to say there’s been a real alignment that many of us could feel like we’re signed up for,” he said. “Most of what I get out of looking at the past is cautionary tales, and just reminders of how hazardous it is.”

After our interview, he got back to me with the name of an earlier president—Harry S. Truman, the namesake of one of Buttigieg’s dogs. In 1948, Truman defeated Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate, and made liberal anti-communism the doctrine of the postwar Democratic Party.

Buttigieg spent seven months as a Navy intelligence officer in Kabul in 2014, which was supposed to be the last year of the American war in Afghanistan. Five years later, American troops are still there. Buttigieg is a critic of ill-defined military intervention generally. “I believe we should use force when there is a clear and present threat to the U.S.,” he said in his speech, “when it’s necessary to deter and defend against an attack on or imminent threat against the United States, our citizens at home or abroad, or our treaty allies, and when we act as part of a legitimate international coalition to prevent genocide or other atrocities.” Those conditions would have ruled out the war in Iraq, of course, which Buttigieg opposed while he was at Harvard, but also military intervention in the Syrian civil war. When I asked whether he would have ordered missile strikes after the Syrian regime massacred civilians with chemical weapons outside Damascus in the summer of 2013, the answer was no, not without the support of allies and Congress. Both Republican and Democratic presidents since the Cold War have failed to connect events overseas with the lives of ordinary Americans. It wasn’t until his last months in office, just days after the election of Trump, that Obama said, “Globalization needs a course correction.” That failure to see the connection between foreign and domestic policy explains the public’s exhaustion with unexplained commitments and its loss of faith in foreign-policy elites.

Buttigieg is placed by age and experience—a Millennial, a veteran of the forever war, the mayor of a struggling industrial city—to insist on making the connection. “Everything we have to say about foreign policy has to be tied back to what it means at home,” he told me. In other words, every geopolitical move should be evaluated by its effect on American workers, farmers, and citizens.

Ever since the ’90s, for example, America’s relationship with China has generally been more beneficial for elites than for ordinary Americans.

But where Trump sees a merely economic rival, Buttigieg sees a dangerous ideological model (“the perfection of dictatorship”) whose stability and success look more and more attractive to other countries. To prevail against that competition, America has to be true to its own claims about itself. [T]he rising popularity of Chinese-style authoritarianism and Russian-style oligarchy make it all the more important “that American values be vindicated globally … It’s actually a moment that kind of makes me, more than usual, feel patriotically committed to American values, at least American values at our best and what they’re supposed to be.” In framing a picture of the next few decades as a battle of competing ideologies, Buttigieg sounds a bit like Truman at the beginning of the Cold War.

Buttigieg wants to set a generous narrative of national identity against Trump’s cramped and cruel vision, and against the progressive hostility to any national identity at all. It won’t be easy. He speaks of the compassion of his Indiana neighbors toward refugees, their desire to be part of “a greater project” than just America First. But the strongest political emotions of the moment are fear, disillusionment, and hatred. As impressive as he is personally, Buttigieg hasn’t yet found the words, the music, and the policies to make his appeal convincing.

The Trump/GOP Bludgeoning or Rural America

Harvesting a crop of soybeans at a farm in 

Hickory, N.C., in 2018. Charles Mostoller/Reuters.

For decades the GOP - and more recently, Donald Trump - has used religion and racial hatred and a smoldering feeling of inferiority/resentment to induce rural voters to vote for GOP candidates and against their own long term economic and financial interest.  I have used a cartoon on past blog posts that shows a red state voter stating that "they hate the same people I do" as a basis for voting Republican.  Sadly, there is much truth in the cartoon's message.  Now with the Trump tariffs, many rural voters find themselves and their communities reeling economically.  Trump wants to give farmers a bailout but lies about the revenues to be used to fund the bailout and omits the fact that the tariff revenues will be paid by AMERICANS and not China.  As is always the case, Trump and the GOP hope voters are too stupid to see that they are being conned and in some measure, it is GOP policies that are accelerating economic stress in rural areas.  Enterprising Democrats need to seriously come up with proposals to address the growing economic malaise in rural America and work to educate rural voters to the reality that the GOP and its policies is harming them and that these need to stop taking the GOP race-baiting and appeals to far right Christian extremism.  A column in the New York Times looks at the ongoing decline of rural America and how a new set of solutions is needed.  Here are excerpts: 

[Donald] President Trump’s feckless trade war is bludgeoning the bottom line of the Republican Party’s reliable rural base. But the party’s disregard for the economic interests of its own constituents goes well beyond barriers to Chinese markets.

Small towns and rural areas, along with some Rust Belt metros, are falling ever further behind booming urban dynamos — leaving many heavily Republican regions in a deepening morass of economic deterioration, joblessness, substance abuse and declining life expectancy. The lower-density places most Republicans call home produce barely half as much wealth as our biggest cities — and it’s showing.

Yet the travails of America’s struggling red regions, and practical ideas about might be done to alleviate them, are barely mentioned in right-leaning policy circles. For example, “The Once and Future Worker,” a widely discussed book by Oren Cass, a former economic policy adviser to Mitt Romney now at the Manhattan Institute, focuses on initiatives to expand employment and wages for American workers but largely neglects the changing geography of economic output and opportunity behind the woes of heartland workers.

Worse, the Republican Party under Mr. Trump has blundered into a positively anti-rural economic agenda, leaving the soybean fields littered with $20 bills for enterprising Democratic presidential hopefuls to pick up. The president’s nativist immigration agenda deprives farms and small factories of workers local economies can’t otherwise supply, while the administration’s latest budget proposal continues the Republican assault on the health care and social insurance programs rural populations increasingly rely on to survive.

For decades, poorer areas had been converging economically with wealthier ones, but that stalled in the early 1980s as employment began to shift away from widely distributed agriculture and manufacturing jobs toward the service sector and high-skill “knowledge work” in the city-centered information economy. Since then, inequalities in regional productivity and living standards have been widening. The declining capacity of smaller towns and cities to bounce back from job loss — whether because of recession, automation or offshoring — means that the regional economic gap grows wider with every downturn, “disruptive” technological advance or uptick in global economic integration.

As smaller towns lost population and viability as centers of commerce, the families of workers who remained in rural hamlets came to rely on trips to larger nearby towns and cities for their shopping, education and health care.

But then many of the factories supporting these regional hubs downsized, moved overseas or folded under competition from countries with cheaper labor. Assembly-line workers who lost jobs mostly shifted to lower-paid service jobs or dropped out of the work force. Crucially, the college-educated workers who ran these factories — the engineers, managers and lawyers — began to flee with their families to the opportunities in bigger cities, and took their money, civic energy and organizational know-how with them.

Scholars at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project have devised a county-level “Vitality Index” combining weighted measures of median household income, poverty, life expectancy, housing vacancy and rates of unemployment and prime-age employment from 1980 to 2016. They find that the fifth of the American population living in counties with the highest share of rural population suffer the lowest levels of vitality — by a long shot. Americans in these low-vitality counties are far more likely to live in poverty, suffer health problems, die early and lack a job. These places, it bears emphasizing, are overwhelmingly majority Republican.

So what can be done? Here are five ideas:

·         States with flagging economies and declining populations lack the tax base to finance the programs needed to maintain healthy economies. We should adopt fiscal measures to “equalize,” or share, national wealth, which are standard in other advanced countries. This would help prop-up state budgets and ensure the healthy functioning of our decentralized federal system.

·         Basic scientific research and infrastructure investments pay big, long-term economic dividends, yet they are underfunded. A network of federally chartered regional development banks could support weak local economies by issuing tax-favored bonds to finance infrastructure upgrades and promising Research and Development projects spearheaded by currently struggling state universities.

·         The Small Business Administration could be refitted to expand small firms that generate growth in exports and high-value-added sectors, as the economist Dani Rodrik has suggested, rather than simply supplying cheap credit to mom-and-pop shops that sustain, but don’t expand, local employment.

·         A new federal Office for Struggling Regions could facilitate interstate compacts and agreements to help attract firms to flagging local economies on terms that prevent the race-to-the-bottom tax-incentive bidding wars.

·         Granting states some authority to mint visas to meet their specific labor market needs would help dry up demand for undocumented workers, stave off depopulation, keep businesses in place, and fill in fiscal gaps.

Conservatives who have come to embrace economic nationalism have misdiagnosed the problem, and therefore fail to see why bullying trade partners and indiscriminately cracking down on immigration won’t bring back jobs and increase wages.

But the reality of widening geographic disparities has been slow to penetrate Democratic politics and policymaking. Elizabeth Warren’s plan to protect family farms and check the market power of agribusiness giants takes rural woes seriously, but it’s a band-aid on a hemorrhage.

Politically, if Mr. Trump once again chooses divisive culture-war theatrics over an honest attempt to shore up the places that, for now, still prefer Republicans — probably a good bet — Democrats could flip rural House and Senate seats Republicans have long considered “safe.”

This mere possibility could even become likely if only Democratic primary contenders, now seeking favor in rural states, would finally spot the glittering opportunity that Republican misrule has laid at their feet.

 One can only hope that (i) Democrats will recognize and seize this opening and (ii) rural voters will finally wake up to the reality that being duped by GOP culture war memes is not in their best interests or in the best interests of their children and grandchildren.  Indeed, clinging to the culture wars and far right religion makes rural areas anathema to many progressive and innovative businesses - businesses that rural America desperately needs. 

Trump's Trade War Leaves Mid-West Farmers Reeling

The unkind part of me struggles to have much sympathy for Mid_West farmers who helped put Trump in the White House as they watch their führer pushing trade tariff policies that are wreaking havoc on their financial survival. They are, after all reaping what they sowed, motivated by racism and a war against modernity itself. The kinder side of me, feels sympathy for the children and youth who are suffering as a result of their parents' bigotry and overall idiocy.  Frighteningly, rather than admit his tariffs have been a failure, Trump wants to give a bailout to farmers and shift the costs of his failure to the rest of the American taxpayers.  One can only hope that the Democrat controlled House of Representatives rejects any such handout to farmers and that they are left to live with the consequences of their voting for an unfit candidate.  Actions do need to have consequences. NBC News looks at the growing plight of Trump supporting farmers.  Here are article highlights:

WATERLOO, Ill. — As Tim Bardole surveyed his farmland, the soil too wet to plant corn or soybeans because of a recent downpour, he remarked that there are few rays of hope for most American farmers these days. While the weather continues to hamper the planting season, the news over the weekend that the United States and China had only moved further away from a trade deal was seen by the farmers as another blow.

Bardole runs a 2,400-acre farm near Rippey, Iowa, with his father, brother and son. This time last year, they figured the trade dispute between China and the U.S., which had already created an economic nightmare for farmers, would be over by harvest time in the fall. Now, it appears there is no end in sight.

"We just keep hunkering down and doing what we can to reduce costs as much as possible, and digging into reserves, and borrowing more money and using up equity," Bardole said over the phone, adding that the entire industry is doing the same.

China announced Monday that, beginning June 1, it would impose tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. goods. That caused stock markets in the U.S. to tumble, and left farmers to face a future that looks financially bleaker than the historically tough years they have recently faced.

Because of the Trump administration’s trade tactics, the Congressional Research Service concluded in a report published in December that national net farm income dropped by more than $9 billion, or 12 percent, in 2018.

Things looks like they could get much worse as the trade dispute continues.

With the most recent news of the intensifying tensions between the U.S. and China, the price of soybeans has dropped below $8 a bushel for the first time since 2008, which comes as many Midwest farmers are facing rampant flooding on their land during the planting season.

Despite the financial strain that farmers have been enduring while the White House’s trade war continues, many had remained committed to the president and his negotiating tactics. Most farmers tend to agree that China is not an equal trading partner, so the common refrain is that they are willing to suffer short-term pain for long-term benefits.

But after years of hardship, confidence in Trump’s negotiating tactics has begun to waver among some of his most ardent supporters.

Kenneth Hartman, a fifth-generation farmer in Waterloo, Illinois, said he’s long been a Trump supporter . . . But, he added, farmers also need free trade and open markets or else the agriculture community will continue to erode. More than 160,000 farms in the U.S. disappeared from 2007 to 2017, according to the USDA Agriculture Census released in April.

Whether falling confidence in this particular trade negotiation will diminish Trump’s very solid backing among farmers overall, however, remains unclear.

The GOP Elite Despise the American Heartland

An abandoned gas station in East Lynn, W.Va., a coal mining town (NYT).

While Democrats struggle to determine which of their multitude of presidential nominee candidates can win the American Mid-West and perhaps pinkish red states, Donald Trump continues to play the racism card and panders to evangelicals' extremism even as he and his party continue to push policies that harm working class workers and farmers in these areas of the country. Between the Trump tariffs which have hurt both farming and manufacturing and the Trump/GOP tax cut give away to the extremely wealthy and multi-national corporations.  Then, of course, there is the GOP effort to gut Medicaid and decrease Medicare spending which prove catastrophic to rural areas in so-called flyover country.  The consistent losers under the GOP agenda?  The middle and working classes and farmers, many too blinded by their anti-non-white bigotry and their homophobia to realize that they continued to be played by fools not only by Trump but also the so-called GOP elite who hold them in contempt despite occasional lip service to the contrary.  A column in the New York Times looks at how the GOP really views this element of the party's base.  Here are column highlights: 

“If you live in the Midwest, where else do you want to live besides Chicago? You don’t want to live in Cincinnati or Cleveland or, you know, these armpits of America.” So declared Stephen Moore, the man Donald Trump wants to install on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, during a 2014 event held at a think tank called, yes, the Heartland Institute. The crowd laughed.

Moore is an indefensible choice on many grounds. Even if he hadn’t shown himself to be extraordinarily misogynistic and have an ugly personal history, his track record on economics — always wrong, never admitting error or learning from it — is utterly disqualifying.

His remarks about the Midwest, however, highlight more than his unsuitability for the Fed. They also provide an illustration of something I’ve been noticing for a while: The thinly veiled contempt conservative elites feel for the middle-American voters they depend on.

This is not the story you usually hear. On the contrary, we’re inundated with claims that liberals feel disdain for the heartland. . . . what’s the source of that narrative? Look at where the belief that liberals don’t respect the heartland comes from, and it turns out that it has little to do with things Democrats actually say, let alone their policies. It is, instead, a story line pushed relentlessly by Fox News and other propaganda organizations, relying on out-of-context quotes and sheer fabrication.

Conservative contempt, by contrast, is real. Moore’s “armpit” line evidently didn’t shock his audience, probably because disparaging views about middle America are widespread among right-wing intellectuals and, more discreetly, right-wing politicians.

There is a real economic and social crisis in what one recent analysis calls the “Eastern Heartland.” This region suffers from persistently low employment among working-age men and has seen a surge in mortality from alcohol, suicide and opioids — “deaths of despair,” in the phrase of Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

What lies behind this crisis? The view of most liberals, as far as I can tell, is that it reflects declining economic opportunity, changes in the economy that have favored metropolitan areas over rural communities.

Many conservatives, however, blame the victims. They attribute the heartland’s woes to a mysterious collapse in morality and family values that somehow hasn’t affected coastal cities. Moral collapse is the theme of books like Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America,” and of innumerable articles. One widely read essay in National Review went so far as to label the troubled Eastern Heartland “the white ghetto,” whose people are too indolent to move to where the jobs are.

When it comes to politicians, of course, what they say is much less important than what they do. So what do the policy choices of liberal and conservative pols say about how they value the heartland?  Some Democrats, notably Elizabeth Warren, have been offering real proposals to help rural areas.

Meanwhile, all that Republicans have to offer are fantasies about bringing back lost jobs in things like coal mining and manufacturing. In reality, coal mine closures have continued and the manufacturing trade deficit has widened since Trump took office.

More important, think about what will happen to troubled parts of America if Republicans manage to do what they tried to do in 2017, and impose savage cuts on Medicaid and other safety net programs.

I always think about West Virginia, where Medicaid covers almost a third of the nonelderly population. And it’s not just about receiving care, it’s also about jobs. More than 16 percent of West Virginians are employed in health care and social assistance, compared with less than 3 percent in mining. Hospitals are the biggest employers in many parts of rural America. What do you think will happen to those jobs if Medicaid is hollowed out?

[I]f you look at what conservatives say to each other, as opposed to what they pretend to believe, it becomes clear that contempt for middle America is much more prevalent on the right than on the left. And this contempt is reflected in the right’s policy agenda, which would badly hurt the people it claims to consider the only real Americans.

I know that this will be a hard point to get across. Indeed, I’m sure that some people in the heartland will take any effort to convince them that they’re being misled as just another example of liberal disrespect. But all Americans, wherever they live, deserve to be told the truth.