A group of farmers angrily booed Trump Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue earlier this month when he tried to make a joke about the economic hardships they're facing thanks to President Donald Trump's trade war with China.
The situation for many farmers has now gotten so bad that the president and some of his allies in conservative media have taken to shamelessly lying to them to make sure they still back the president in 2020.
As the Washington Post's Greg Sargent documents, the president has been trying to paper over the damage his trade war is doing to farms by tweeting out claims such as, "Farmers are starting to do great again, after 15 years of a downward spiral."
As Sargent writes, one angry farmer directly alluded to this tweet during a testy exchange with Perdue.
"We’re not starting to do great again," Brian Thalmann, the president of the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, told Perdue. "Things are going downhill and downhill quickly."
In addition to the president's own lies, Media Matters has found that The Federalist, a Trump-backing publication, has published an article that is outright lying to farmers about the causes of their falling revenues.
In fact, the author of the article claims that the trade war with China has nothing to do with farmers' current misfortunes, and he instead blames it all on the fact that "China’s pig population is being rocked by a terrible pig disease called African Swine Fever."
But a CNBC report from last month found that China is still purchasing plenty of soybeans -- just not from the United States.
"Soybean demand in China appears to be surprisingly robust despite the widespread culling of pigs due to African swine fever," the report stated.
Additionally, as Bloomberg reported last week, China's announcement of new tariffs on American agricultural products directly correlated with an immediate drop in soybean prices.
"November soybean futures in Chicago erased early gains and closed down 1.4%, extending losses after Trump said he’ll announce a response to the latest Chinese tariffs Friday afternoon," Bloomberg reported. "Cotton and hog futures both slumped, as did shares in crop handler Andersons Inc. and tractor maker Deere & Co."
