'Stop what you're doing': Iowa farmers beg Trump to stop taking 'hatchet' to government

Several farmers are telling North Carolina-based local news station WXII 12 that their anxiety is spiking thanks to President Donald Trump's trade wars.

With massive tariffs set to go into effect next week on Canada and Mexico, the farmers who spoke with WXII 12 said that they already feel on shaking financial ground.

Wisconsin dairy farmer Sarah Lloyd, for example, told WXII 12 that the tariffs could make farmers exit the food growing business all together.

"We're losing the backbone of our rural economy, and it's very dangerous," she said. "I think that any uncertainty is just going to cause more people to say, you know what? We're going to get out now before we go off the cliff."

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Iowa farmer Patti Naylor was even more explicit in her warnings about the harm being caused to farmers by Trump's actions.

"Stop what you're doing," she said. "What you're doing right now is just taking a hatchet to everything without really thinking about it. We need real discussions about what kind of changes we need in our agriculture."

Even farmers who supported Trump overall expressed reservations about going after the two major American trading partners in Canada and Mexico.

"I just don't think we need to pick on so many countries because there's a lot of them that do use our products,” Travis Anderson, a Trump-supporting farmer from North Dakota, told WXII.

The anxieties expressed by farmers coincide with a drop in consumer sentiment and an unexpected spike in new jobless claims, as well as polling showing Americans anxious about the impact of Trump's tariffs.