After his address to a joint session of Congress last week, I wrote about how Donald Trump takes farmers for granted. He told them to “have a lot of fun” and said “I love you” while promising tariffs that will hurt them. We already know how the tariffs worked out for farmers during Trump’s first term: The federal government spent billions of dollars bailing them out.

Javier Blas at Bloomberg has also written on something I discussed in that post: The U.S. is no longer a net exporter of food. The year after the China tariffs from Trump’s first term began, 2019, was the first year in over half a century that the U.S. was a net importer of agricultural commodities. “This year, the US will record its third consecutive annual deficit in food trading, with imports set to exceed exports by nearly $50 billion,” Blas notes. “America hasn’t seen three straight years of agricultural deficits since Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House.”

The U.S. used to be the world’s largest exporter of wheat; now it’s Russia. The U.S. used to be the world’s largest exporter of soybeans; now it’s Brazil. The U.S. is still the world’s largest exporter of corn, but Argentina could surpass it because “the policies of President Javier Milei could unleash monster crops that will erode US dominance,” Blas writes. The chain-saw-wielding president of Argentina isn’t looking to boost his country’s industries with greater trade restrictions but rather with free markets.

The basic dynamic of other countries’ agriculture sectors filling the void left by U.S. trade wars has been well known for a long time. Blas writes:

The Trump administration should read a 1983 government report analyzing the impact of American food embargoes and trade spats in the 1970s and 1980s, under Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. The three lessons are crystal clear – and as applicable in 2025 as they were half a century ago. The US became viewed as an “unreliable” world supplier of agricultural commodities; the report found that “major countries that compete with the United States in the world grain and soybean markets expanded their production and exports of these commodities so as to capture a growing share of the world trade”; and the US government “incurred costs to cushion the adverse effects” of the trade policies. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Learning from past mistakes on trade doesn’t seem to be one of Trump’s strong suits.