Soybean Trumpism
For his friends, everything; for everyone else, the bill.
You’ve probably seen farmers on TV complaining that they can’t sell soybeans to China because of President Trump’s tariffs. Never fear: Trump plans to use tariff revenues to bail them out. Oh, and he’s also bailing out Argentina, which has stepped in to sell China some of the soybeans it isn’t buying from us. America First!
Needless to say, you’re going to pay for all this mishigas. My latest essay in the New York Times argues that this soybean mess is the essence of Trumpism, the economic equivalent of pardons for. his pals and prosecutions for his enemies. He sees the world as a zero-sum game, where he gets to pick the winners and everyone else is a loser. In this case, the winners are Trump-friendly soybean farmers—who are also getting lucrative new subsidies for environmentally disastrous biofuels in his Big Beautiful Bill—and the Trump-friendly president of Argentina, Javier Milei.
This is the result: “We pay farmers to farm soybeans, pay them more to convert some of those soybeans into wildly inefficient fuels, pay them even more when they can’t sell their soybeans because we’re in a trade war with their customers — and then pay extra to bail out one of the countries replacing them in the marketplace.
One point I didn’t make is that Brazil is also selling more soybeans to China, and as a result more of the Brazilian Amazon is being transformed into soybean fields. Yes, thanks to Trump, we are eating even more of the earth.
Speaking of which!
I’m so grateful to those of you who have bought the book, posted about it on social media, given it five-star reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, or sent me encouraging notes when unenlightened people have said mean things that hurt my feelings. So many unenlightened people! Seriously, though, I know I got a bit frosty about the hippie-foodie backlash to my defense of Roundup, but people who actually read WE ARE EATING THE EARTH really seem to like it, even if they don’t agree with all of it.
If you want to see me talk about it, I’ll be in Chicago Tuesday the 28th for an event sponsored by the Paulson Institute, then Wednesday the 29th I’ll do an event at Northwestern University. After that it’s Stanford University on November 5 with the great food and ag researcher David Lobell, Boston University on November 7 with the legendary Cass Sunstein, and the Texas Book Festival in Austin on November 9 with the excellent climate author (and super-excellent We Are Eating the Earth blurber) Jeff Goodell. Then I’ve got a bunch of Florida events later in the month—Gainesville, St. Petersburg, Babcock Ranch, and of course my hometown Miami Book Fair.
I’m busy! It beats the alternative.
I spent five years digging into food and ag because I wanted to start a conversation, and for better and worse, it’s started. Here’s a cool Q&A with Grist. Here’s another with Yale Climate Communications. I hope the conversation can keep going - please feel free to reach out with speaking gigs, story assignments, death threats, whatever.
And if you haven’t bought the book yet, a shameless flack I know says buy it.