Of course. What did those farmers think they were going to happen when they voted for Trump and his love-affair with tariffs as some cure-all cudgel instead of a precision tool?
You get what you asked for.
replies(2):
You get what you asked for.
“Too strong a belief in the rationality of people in general, or of the world, will lead us to seek purposive explanations where none exists.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/15/farm-labor-shortage...
https://investigatemidwest.org/2024/11/13/trump-election-far... (includes a map)
https://investigatemidwest.org/2024/10/15/midwest-farmers-ta...
> America’s most farming-dependent counties overwhelmingly backed President-elect Donald Trump in this year’s election by an average of 77.7%.
> Some political observers questioned whether Trump’s support would wane among farmers after his first-term trade war, which led to increased prices and a drop in agricultural exports. During the campaign, Trump promised a return to high tariffs if given a second term.
> “His policies didn’t do us any good; his tariffs didn’t do us any good,” Lance Lillibridge, an Iowa farmer, told Investigate Midwest.
> Not only did Trump increase his support among farming-dependent counties, but more than 100 of those counties supported him with at least 80% of their vote.
It’s a curious study in the psychology of cognitive blind spots I suppose. Surely farmers in the course of their work understand the phenomenon of cause and effect. Why is it so difficult then to port that to the political sphere? This is a man, who regardless of one’s own position on the political spectrum, seems so grossly under-equipped - both in terms of education and disposition -to steer a large complex economy, that it beggars comprehension as to how these farmers could have made the decisions that most did.