In the first half of 2025, farm bankruptcies in the U.S. had already surpassed the total number from 2024.
That’s right, by July, we had already seen more farms go under in 2025 than we did for the entirety of the previous calendar year. This was due, in large part, to Donald Trump’s asinine trade war that he claimed was both “good” and “easy to win.” But, like all bullies, Trump failed to realize that he’s not as big and bad as he thinks he is, and those countries he tried to push around by slapping with tariffs weren’t just going to sit there and take it.
No, they hit back. They restricted American manufacturer and farmer access to their markets. China, for example, stopped buying American soybeans and instead turned to Argentina. At the same time, Trump inexplicably gave Argentina $20 billion from American taxpayers, further helping them undercut American farmers.
Arkansas has been hit particularly hard by this trade war. According to Hunter Biram, an economist at the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, the value of Arkansas crops in 2025 has fallen by $617 million – nearly two-thirds of a billion dollars. While it’s nice to have scientists backing them up, farmers don’t need researchers to tell them what they already know: They can’t sell their crops.
Despite ample warnings that a trade war was going to make Americans poorer, it took our “very stable genius” of a president nearly 12 months to realize he shot himself in the foot and was driving one of his core constituencies – farmers – out of business. This is problematic for Trump as it has become likely that Democrats will flip at least three seats in the Senate, and losing even one heavy farming state could cause Trump to lose his Senate majority.
One of those farming-heavy states is Arkansas, where Trump minion, incumbent senator and occasional state visitor Tom Cotton is now fighting for his political life against an insurgent challenger Hallie Shoffner. With his fear rising over losing the Senate, Trump did the only thing he could think of, throw money, to the tune of $12 billion, at the problem. The farmer bailout money is still less than what he gave to Argentina.
While the more cynical of us may have thrown their hands up, assuming that this money would buy off farmers and help candidates like Cotton, it isn’t that simple. This is for two reasons. First, people generally want to work. Scientific research has found that we are not pure seekers of financial benefit. That is, we want more from life than money. Yes, money matters a great deal, but we also gain things like self-esteem from working. To lean on a bit of a cliché, people don’t want a handout, they want a hand up. And this is true of farmers as well. They want to grow and sell crops, not just cash a check. Trump can’t simply give money to America’s farmers and have them forget that he pushed them to the edge of bankruptcy. By trying to pay off farmers, he is just highlighting the problem he created.
To fully understand this, it’s important to think about how voters make decisions. Voters might decide where they stand on particular issues, but we are all easily swayed on which issues we think are most important. Campaigns seek to focus public attention on issues that give them an electoral advantage. This means that if the public agrees with a particular candidate on the economy, it is a good idea for that candidate to constantly talk about the economy to increase the salience of the issue, because if a voter is thinking about an issue they agree with one candidate on over the other when they go to cast a ballot, they’re far more likely to vote for the candidate with whom they agree.
And this is not just theoretical. Democrats around the country, including in Arkansas, are constantly talking about the dire economic situation Trump and company have wrought. Not only are they focusing the public on the fact that prices for food and utilities are out of control, housing costs are untenable, and the labor market is extremely soft, but they are winning doing it. We can look to New Jersey, where Mikie Sherrill won the governorship by double digits on a message of affordability. Or Virginia, where not only did Abigail Spanberger pummel her Republican opponent on the issue of the economy, winning by more than 15 points, Democrats flipped 13 seats in a 100-seat Legislature.
Put simply, if voters are thinking about the economic pain Trump, Cotton and the rest of the Republicans in Washington have inflicted upon us, that party is in for a rough election in November. And by announcing a massive $12 billion bailout to farmers across the country, they are putting the economic farm crisis they created front and center.
They are telling Americans, and Arkansans, that Trump’s failed policies ripped the beating heart out of the farmers of this country and state. They are telling all voters that they screwed up, and that the result of their trade war boondoggle is something we all need to pay attention to. After all, it’s going to cost the taxpayers $12 billion just to begin to fix his mistakes.