And pesky consumers are getting in the way of Trump’s glorious trade plans.

In his speech last night, Trump included two truly bizarre paragraphs about agriculture:

A new trade policy will also be great for the American farmer. I love the farmer. We’ll now be selling it to our home market in the U.S.A., because nobody is going to be able to compete with you. Because those goods that come in from other countries and companies, they’re really, really in a bad position in so many different ways. They’re uninspected. They may be very dirty and disgusting and they come in and they pour in and they hurt our American farmers.

The tariffs will go on agricultural product coming into America and our farmers starting on April 2nd, it may be a little bit of an adjustment period, we had that before when I made the deal with China, $50 billion of purchases and I said, just bear with me. And they did, they did. You really have to bear with me again and this will be even better. That was great. The problem with it was that Biden didn’t enforce it. He didn’t enforce it. $50 billion of purchases. And we were doing great. But Biden did not enforce it, and it hurt our farmers. But our farmers are going to have a field day right now. So to our farmers, have a lot of fun. I love you, too. I love you too.

Trump thinks trade deficits are bad, so one would think he would be alarmed that the U.S. trade balance in agricultural goods has been trending negative for the past few years. Instead, he is urging farmers to sell less abroad while also promising tariffs, which would reduce both exports and imports.

The agricultural trade balance used to be a consistent surplus in the supposedly awful times when NAFTA was in effect and China was buying larger amounts of U.S. agricultural exports. In 2019, the year after Trump’s China tariffs took effect, the U.S. ran its first agricultural trade deficit since at least 2001.

The administration knew that the decline in exports that year was because of retaliatory tariffs, so it spent billions of taxpayer dollars bailing out farmers to make up for it. Exports increased significantly from 2020 to 2022, but so did imports, keeping the trade balance close to zero.

“The robust increase in U.S. demand for imports has been largely driven by the strong U.S. dollar and consumer preferences for year-round produce selections,” the Economic Research Service of the Department of Agriculture explains. Pesky consumers who take advantage of exchange rates to buy fruits and vegetables that don’t grow in the U.S. at certain times of the year — in other words: you — are getting in the way of Trump’s glorious trade plans.

Then, in 2023, U.S. agricultural exports declined. This was in part due to an understandable calculation by China. Since Biden kept most of Trump’s China tariffs in place, signaling U.S. persistence in this policy regardless of which party is in power, China deepened its relationship with Brazil, which was more than happy to supply agricultural goods to replace the ones that China had been buying from the U.S.

This is what “decoupling” from China looks like in practice in the agricultural sector. It means farmers get hammered. It means that the trading relationships built up in many cases by Republican governors of agricultural states get destroyed.

Maybe Trump thinks that’s for the greater good. There’s a case to be made that the agriculture sector, which is relatively small, is worth sacrificing for some geopolitical goal. Even in Iowa, a heavily agricultural state, farming accounts for 5.9 percent of GDP. That’s about the same proportion as retail trade. Manufacturing accounts for almost three times as much. Finance, insurance, and real estate account for almost four times as much.

For the country as a whole, farms accounted for less than 1 percent of GDP in 2023. If Trump wants to throw them under the bus for the sake of his trade war, maybe you could say that’s pro-American. But you can’t say it’s pro-farmer.

Trump is taking farmers for granted, saying he loves them while pursuing policies he knows will harm them. He probably thinks they mostly live in states Republicans win in elections anyway, and he’ll be happy to bail them out with your money for their loyalty.