On a Friday morning in March 2018, the president made a promise about the trade war he was starting. "When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with," he posted, "trade wars are good, and easy to win." [1] The line was built to sound like common sense. The receipts from his own administration tell a different story, and the biggest one was written to American farmers.

What "winning" cost

Start with the bill the government sent itself. When China answered the tariffs with tariffs of its own, aimed squarely at the farm belt, the administration did not collect a windfall. It opened the checkbook. Through the Market Facilitation Program in 2018 and 2019, the US Department of Agriculture paid farmers more than twenty billion dollars to offset the damage from the retaliation the trade war provoked. [2] A fight that was "easy to win" required bailing out the people caught in it, with public money, by the tens of billions.

The customer who walked

Then there is the market that vanished. China had been the largest buyer of American soybeans, the single biggest farm export, and during the trade war its purchases of the US crop collapsed almost to nothing. [2] The beans piled up in storage with nowhere to go, and the farmers who grew them traded a paying customer for a government check. You can win an argument about trade policy. You cannot call it "easy" when the scoreboard is a record bailout and an empty export dock.

THE BOTTOM LINE

  • "Trade wars are good, and easy to win": False [1]
  • USDA paid farmers more than $20 billion to offset the retaliation [2]
  • China, the top soybean market, stopped buying almost entirely [2]

The promise was that the other side would fold and the win would come cheap. Instead the cost landed here, on farmers who lost their biggest market and on taxpayers who covered the difference. The honest version does not fit in a tweet: the trade war was expensive, it was paid for at home, and the people who grow the food got a bailout in place of a buyer. [2]