The Collapse of Farm Exports Is the Most Underappreciated Story in American Politics
· Reason
As President Donald Trump embarked on his plan to hike tariffs and escalate tensions with America's biggest trading partners, he offered an infamous bit of reassurance.
"Trade wars are good," Trump tweeted on March 2, 2018, "and easy to win."
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More than eight and a half years later, both claims have proven to be untrue. And while much of the focus of Trump's trade wars has been on American manufacturing, it is actually American farmers who have been marched to the front lines. For them, Trump's trade wars have been difficult, losing affairs.
Don't take my word for it. Read what the Trump administration's own Department of Agriculture said in a report on the status of the "farm economy downturn."
From 1990 to 2018, the U.S. ran agricultural trade surpluses—meaning that it exported more farm goods than it imported from other countries. Since the start of Trump's trade war, however, that dynamic has flipped. That's bad news for farmers, who have seen their overseas markets shrink.
And it all points back to the trade war with China.
"The sharp decline in U.S. agricultural exports…has been due to decreased sales to China," the report states. American farm exports to China peaked in 2022 at $38.1 billion before falling to $8.4 billion last year. That's a 78 percent drop in the span of just three years—the years that coincide with Trump's return to the White House and the escalation of his trade war. "This single-country drop accounts for the majority of the recent contraction in overall U.S. export performance, and it marks one of the steepest market losses ever recorded for a major U.S. agricultural buyer."
That, again, is an analysis produced by the Trump administration itself.
How did this happen? In March, the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) reviewed the sharp decline of American exports to China.
"Each time Trump raised tariffs—by 145 percentage points in early 2025, as well as during his first trade war of 2018–19—China retaliated with matching tariff increases, accelerating the US export decline," PIIE senior fellow Chad Bown concluded. "Less obvious were the host of other Chinese policies that discouraged its imports. Some incentivized Chinese firms to produce too much. Others encouraged Chinese consumers to buy more locally. Most of those Chinese policies also hurt exporters in other countries."
Meanwhile, farmers are getting squeezed on the other side by rising prices—another consequence of the trade war. A new analysis from the Trade Partnership shows that Americans have paid $355 billion in higher tariffs on goods from China since 2018, when Trump declared trade wars to be good and easy to win.
The dissatisfaction that American farmers are feeling over the trade war might be the most underrated story in American politics right now.
It helps explain, for example, why Republicans from farming states are suddenly going all in on trying to convince the White House to ban diesel exports in a desperate attempt to lower gas prices before the midterm elections.
Nearly everyone agrees that's a bad idea that will worsen global supply shortages and drive prices higher. That includes a long list of free market nonprofits, experts in the oil and gas industries, and even Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
The only people who think a ban on diesel exports makes sense are Republicans in farm states who are standing for election in a few weeks. They are desperate to offer voters something, anything, that might reverse the ugly trends showing up in polling. The "blue wave" forming ahead of November's election is "overwhelmingly concentrated in red states," Nate Silver noted on his Substack on Thursday.
Unfortunately for those Republicans, Trump has made this bed and forced them to lie in it. There is no easy fix to the damage that the trade war has done to American agriculture. Banning diesel exports won't do it. A deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is visiting Washington this week for meetings with Trump, won't do it either.
The only winning move was not to start a trade war eight years ago and not to escalate that trade war over the past two years.
It wasn't easy to win. Indeed, America seems to be losing it. And it certainly hasn't been good.
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