'Can't afford it': Kentucky Republican sweats as neighbors get especially hard tariff hit

Farmers in Kentucky overwhelmingly voted for President Donald Trump last year but the New York Times reports that they are already bracing for severe impact from the global trade war that he launched last year.

Kentucky State Rep. Ryan Bivens, a Republican who owns a 10,000-acre corn, soybean and wheat farm, tells the Times that his farm was already struggling thanks to persistent inflation that hit the economy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and he's not sure he can take a prolonged trade war with nearly every country on the planet.

“This is coming at a pretty tough time for us right now,” he said. “We don’t want to see this going on for a long time — we can’t afford for it to.”

The Times report focuses on the impact that Trump's trade war has been having on the American spirits industry, as farmers in Kentucky are heavy suppliers of corn that is used to produce whiskey. That's now been hit with retaliatory tariffs by Canada.

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Chris Swonger, president of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, told the Times that "we’re a very anxious industry right now, because there is no reason for our industry to be implicated" in a global trade war.

Marci Palatella, owner of Preservation Distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky, tells the Times that she simply can't buy everything she needs for her business locally, and that she fears that the tariffs will greatly increase the prices of glass bottles.

"To tax imports from almost every source only punishes small companies like ours,” she said. “And in retaliation, we get hit doubly hard as foreign markets are going to tax our Kentucky bourbon.”