President Donald Trump’s new plan to help America’s “wonderful farmers and ranchers” landed with a thud Friday among critics, of which several described it as a misguided attempt to quell rancher uproar against his mystery deal to import ground beef.
“You've already cost far too many families their farms and ranches. This does nothing to bring them back,” wrote Texas-based journalist Arturo Dominguez Friday in a social media post on X.
Last week, Trump sparked outrage from ranchers after announcing that he planned to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef to be sold at 25% below market price, and without revealing the country or countries of origin.
On Wednesday, Trump appeared to endorse the idea of rolling back beef processing regulations during a conversation with right-wing media figure Glenn Beck, and on Friday, made good on those remarks by revealing he had authorized “legal documents to be drawn” to target “big processors,” whom he called “nasty.”
Specifically, Trump's plan appears designed to let ranchers and farmers process their own livestock for commercial sale, rather than requiring the product to go through a federally or state-inspected meat processor.
In a scathing write-up published Friday in The Cattle Report — a weekly cattle-market newsletter published by The AG Center — Trump’s plan was met with ridicule.
“It is unlikely as the mid term voting approaches that Trump supporters from the AG sector will switch in mass to the democrats or democratic socialists. More likely is the possibility they simply won’t vote,” the newsletter reads.
“This threat caused him to participate in an AG interview with the conservative commentator Glenn Beck in which the President tried to redirect the reason for the recent cattle market decline to the greedy big 4 packers and government regulations.”
Chris Kleene, a Nebraska-based commodity trader with a focus in the “livestock nutrition sector,” also argued that Trump’s plan was mere “positioning for the midterms,” and in a follow-up post, Dominguez predicted that the ploy to address rancher outrage would ultimately fail.
“Farmers and ranchers are turning on Trump, and the White House thinks this will solve the problem,” he wrote. “Tell it to all those who have already lost their farms and ranches, and to the families who have fallen victim to suicide.”
