Council Bluffs Speech Whoppers Re-Write History of His Trade War’s Impact on Agriculture, “Hush Money” Payments to Farmers
Those who have not fallen into the ever-swirling vortex of the MAGA cult know Donald Trump is a prolific liar. He is the most active and biggest liar in American political history. When I say we know he’s a liar, I don’t mean he says things with which we disagree, and therefore he must be lying.
That’s just having a different view or opinion, and there would be nothing wrong with that – if that were what Trump is doing. But that is not what he is doing.
When I say Donald Trump is a liar, and a most prolific one, I mean that he says things that are outrageously and demonstrably untrue every day, every hour and virtually every moment his lips are moving. Nonpartisan, independent fact-checkers documented more than 30,000 individual, specific Trump lies during his four years in the White House, and at that pace, it’s a pretty good bet they missed quite a few, too. It’s hard to keep up when the lies are coming at you at such a rapid-fire pace.
I say Trump is a prolific liar – not as an exercise in name-calling – but rather because it is an accurate, independently documented fact.
Trump reminds me of what President Harry Truman once said about Richard Nixon. Truman was no fan of Nixon and rarely minced words. Truman said what he thought, and what he said and thought about Nixon’s ability, to tell the truth was this: Nixon was such a habitual liar that if he ever caught himself “telling the truth on accident, he’d turn right around and tell a lie, just to keep himself straight.”
I thought I understood the full extent of Trump’s lies, his capacity to lie, his utter inability, it seems, to tell the truth – unless he’s confessing to one of the many crimes for which he’s been indicted, in which case he usually tells the truth by accident.
I thought it impossible for Trump to top his 2020 election “Big Lie.” In terms of sheer audacity, he couldn’t possibly top that, right? I was wrong about that.
Trump’s remarks in Council Bluffs last week make clear I underestimated Donald Trump as a liar. He’s willing to tell even bigger lies than I thought him capable of telling. His “signature” lie – the “Big Lie” – the one history will remember him for and will be in the lead sentence of his obituary when the time comes – was not the zenith of his career as a liar, after all.
He topped it in Council Bluffs on his third visit to Iowa in his 2024 campaign. And there’s still plenty of campaign left:
“No president has ever been close to me for farmers!” Trump claimed.
Not satisfied with that whopper, he ramped it up even more. He declared himself the most “pro-farmer” president in history. A boast that would no doubt surprise the multiple numbers of presidents who were actual farmers and not career fraudsters and grifters in Manhattan and Washington, DC.
Not even Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Homestead Act into law in 1862, which granted free farmland to farmers who would move onto it and work it – tens of thousands came to Iowa as early settlers to start farming under that law – comes close to Trump as a “pro-farmer” president, to hear Trump tell it.
In case anyone has forgotten, Donald Trump is the only president who ever had to pay billions of dollars in what I described at the time as “hush money” to farmers before an election because he did so much damage to them during his presidency.
That’s exactly what happened before the 2020 elections. Trump’s trade wars so damaged foreign markets that American farmers – and Iowa farmers – depended on that Trump decided to give them billions of dollars in “hush money” to keep them quiet and “in the corral” before Election Day.
After Trump imposed tariffs on products from countries like China, those countries predictably retaliated. Farmers in America and their export markets in China were easy targets for that retaliation, devastatingly impacting the U.S. farm country.
The value of U.S. farm exports under Trump plummeted from $19.5 billion in 2017 to just $9 billion in 2018. That was a 50% drop.
Farm bankruptcies, even with Trump’s “hush money” payments, increased by 20% in 2019.
Not exactly the record of the greatest “pro-farmer” president in history that Trump’s false narrative in Council Bluffs seeks to plant. Farmers were lucky to survive his presidency.
Trump wants Iowa’s farmers to remember the checks, but not why he had those checks sent. They were – using tax dollars – a payoff, a buy-off, a “settlement” – paid to farmers for the damage he did to them and to protect himself from the political rage, fallout, and disaster that would have been visited upon him in the 2020 election, had he not sent billions of dollars in these “hush money” payments to farm country.
In Council Bluffs, Trump promised to wage more trade wars if he gets a second term in the White House. His audience seemed to approve.
They seem to have forgotten that agriculture was the first and one of the biggest casualties of Trump’s first trade war. Agriculture – and Iowa farmers – will be just as easy targets in his next trade war if he gets the chance to start one because there are always plenty of alternative suppliers around the globe willing to take those newly available markets and make them their own for the long haul.
There is something even more troublesome the crowd seemed to overlook:
Let’s say Trump does get elected in 2024. Let’s say he does start a new trade war.
Trump will not be on the ballot in 2028 because the Constitution limits presidents to no more than two terms. If Trump is not on the ballot, that means there will be no need for him to send “hush money” to farmers again, this time before the 2028 election.
Everything Trump does, he does to help himself. Period. That is clear. Sending billions of dollars in “hush money” to farmers has no payoff for a second-term Donald Trump, who is not on the ballot for the next election. So it is very unlikely to happen.
Any Iowa farmer who thinks Trump will be looking out for them when the fallout from another trade war lands on their “back 40” is likely to be sorely disappointed. Trump looks out for himself. Period.
Author Barry Piatt’s Substack columns can be found at Barry Piatt on Politics: – Behind the Curtains. Mr. Piatt is an Iowan, having grown up on an Iowa farm near a small town West of Des Moines, Iowa. He is currently a lecturer at George Washington University and the host of the podcast Barry Piatt’s Political Goose Chase.