Editor’s note: After we recorded, the AP posted a piece reporting that cattle ranchers are also opposed to Trump’s plan. “I love ‘America First’ rhetoric,” one said. “But to me this feels a lot like the failed policies of the past—the free trade sourcing cheap global goods.”
Not long after President Trump announced the $20 billion financial bailout idea for Argentina, he floated the proposal of purchasing beef from Argentina to bring prices down here in the United States. This enraged American beef producers. It also produced a backlash from farm state Republicans.
Matt Hildreth: Thanks for having me. I always like to be here with you.
Matt, this has caused a huge eruption. GOP senators were blindsided—they were angry that he’s looking to deal with one of the main competitors of U.S. beef farmers. Can you explain the basic situation here?
So a lot of folks who would grow soybeans invested in more corn—they put their investments in beef. Farmers are really smart, and they know how to anticipate challenges. And so they diversify, just like anybody would diversify their investments. And so a lot of people stepped back a little bit from the beans and said, We might not be able to sell as many soybeans to China in the next coming years, because Trump’s been talking about that forever. So we’re going to put our money into beef and into corn.
And so they felt like they had enough heads-up on what was happening in the markets to make that move. And now you have Donald Trump, who’s just kind of off the cuff—or seemingly off the cuff—talking about importing beef from Argentina. And that would put American farmers in direct competition with the beef coming up from South America. And that’s going to bring down the price of beef.
This is the first really good, positive thing in the market for farmers. Now, for consumers, it’s a problem—but for farmers, they were going to be making back their money this year. So when Trump is throwing this uncertainty out of nowhere into the markets, it’s absolutely hitting farmers when they’re already kind of down—they’re already kind of uncertain about where things are going. And it’s really pulling out the rug from under them on that last lifeline they had, which was the beef prices that were supporting them.
The statement went on to say something really cutting as well, Matt. It said, “helping people abroad before solving problems here puts America last.” That’s going to sting because it’s a direct repudiation of MAGA, Make America Great Again. And I think they intended to get into Trump’s head that way. By the way, this statement’s gotten a lot of press play. So I would not be at all surprised if Trump has heard it. Your thoughts on all this?
And I think that’s happening for a number of reasons. The number one thing that I heard from folks when I talked to them last year about who they were voting for is, they would say they were voting for Donald Trump, and I would say, well, you know, he has these plans for tariffs. And to be very clear, back in 2024, we knew he was planning to do tariffs. And so we would talk about them and say, you know, these tariffs are going to hurt small towns and rural communities. And what they would say is, this is a small price to pay—this is short-term pain for long-term gain. So the tariffs are going to be hard for us as farmers in the short term, but in the long run, it’s really gonna position the American farmer to be more competitive in international markets.
So I think that what’s happening here is not just that, you know, farmers and ranchers are really pissed off about what they’re seeing—but they’re starting to see it in a way, they’re seeing it in their own farm operations and their own small businesses, where, regardless of the talking points that they hear from Fox News, they can’t deny what they’re seeing in their bank accounts.
Sargent: The question I have is, is something like this enough to push the farmers from saying to themselves, you know, I was giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, but he’s really getting this one wrong, over to, Trump doesn’t give a fucking shit about us and he’s screwing us because he really just doesn’t care? Is there a way to get that sort of constituency over to that point?
But I am seeing something change, and I’m actually very skeptical. Like, I am very critical of the, you know, I would sometimes hear in the past that people thought, If we just run an ad campaign, or we just do this one small investment, we’re going to see a change. And I was always like, No, it’s going to take a ton of time to get us out of this. But I am actually starting to see things turn around quite a bit.
There’s not actually a ton of farmers in rural America anymore; the industry has been largely consolidated. But when the farmers are pissed off, people hear about it and they pay attention. And right now, people—whether they’re actively involved in agriculture or just their grandparents were actively involved in agriculture, and maybe now they work in healthcare—they look at what’s happening and they see it for what it is.
And I think that when we look back at the polling over the last couple of years, the most popular message in rural America was that we need to end the corruption in Washington, D.C. And Donald Trump’s message about draining the swamp has been the most popular message that we’ve seen in rural America across the board.
And I think... I don’t know if it’s going to be a dam break, but I think the margins are starting to shift in places that I actually would not have expected. And I think that’s a really good thing.
Again, with the betrayal language, which I think is very strong and is going to really piss off people around Trump. The valorization of rural America and farm country as something kind of uniquely American is often absurd. This statement trades in that a little bit, but Trump and MAGA traffic in that very heavily themselves.
Hildreth: I think—yeah—I think Trump will always have about a 30 to 40 percent base in rural America, no matter what he does. And I think that base is always going to be higher than in more urban areas. There’s a chunk of rural America that we will just never be able to win.
I mean, it is—our polling shows—no, like, far and away, the messenger matters just as much, if not more, than the message. And the messengers here are pissed off, and they’re people that local rural folks trust. And I don’t see Trump figuring out a way out of this, and people are going to get screwed.
Sargent: Well, you’ve got the tariffs killing rural America. The Medicaid cuts are already leading to rural hospitals closing—or planning to close. Food stamp cuts and the lapsing of the expanded ACA subsidies—Affordable Care Act subsidies—will badly hurt a lot of Trump’s working-class supporters.
Hildreth: It is piling up. And the other thing is—and they didn’t mention it in their Twitter post, or their post—but immigrants are the backbone of our agriculture economy.
So that’s just one other piece. The agricultural workforce is being decimated right now. And then you throw on healthcare—I mean, so many of these farmers, they have to have off-farm income just to get access to health insurance. The ones that have health insurance are getting it oftentimes through the expansion of Obamacare. Their premiums are going to be going up. The cost of their fertilizer is going to be going up. Their income is going to be going down. I mean, they are so screwed.
But that’s not happening anymore. And it’s just so overwhelming that I think people are starting to realize that they’ve been had a little bit. And I don’t know that they’re going to admit it publicly, but I think we’re going to start to see it even in the places where you might not expect it. It’s not going to be everybody, but it’s going to be, I think, enough to really start having an impact on statewide races.
Hildreth: Absolutely. I think there are two things happening in Virginia right now. One is, there is a cooling on Trump—and I think that’s having an impact on Republicans at all levels. And I think that, like, right now we’re not hearing that much from the Trump base in small towns and rural communities, including in Virginia.
At the same time, Democrats are being mobilized in ways that I actually had not even seen in 2024. In Virginia specifically, there’s a group called Rural Ground Game—they’re doing fantastic work—and they’ve recruited, in every race at the state level, a candidate. And that’s unheard of.
And so I think, because you have those two factors—the Trump base cooling, and then also Democrats getting mobilized, and the Democratic base being mobilized—and that mobilization coming from small towns and rural communities, in addition to the more urban areas, I think it’s going to have an impact.
Hildreth: I’ve always referred to this as the “Democratic donut hole.” So you have base voters in non-targeted areas, and that base has been ignored for years. If you’re a base voter in a targeted county, you are flooded with advertisements, you are flooded with mailers, you are flooded with text messages.
So you had base voters there—about 17 to 20 percent of the population were base Democratic voters—but they had no resources because they weren’t in a targeted county. So you have all of these people who would be with us if they turned out to vote, but they’re getting nothing from the Democratic Party because the party is focusing on maybe 20 percent of the more populated counties.
That’s something that we’ve been really focused on. That’s something that Rural Ground Game in Virginia is really focused on, and I think is really kind of the cutting edge of what’s happening there. And I think we’re going to start seeing that in more places across the country, because I think Virginia is showing that it can work.
Hildreth: I think so. And if you would have asked me that in the past, I would have said probably—but I’m more confident now than I think at any point. And I’ve really been waiting to have that confidence. I was one of the biggest—even though I work in rural America, and I think because I work in rural America—I was one of the most... I was very skeptical in the past.
Polling going back to 2018 showed that when good things happened in rural America, people just assumed it was Republicans, because they think Republicans are the ones fighting for them. Despite the fact that all of these good things that happened in rural America were coming from the Democrats, the policy was not leading to the political wins because we were losing the communications fight. And so that’s the biggest, I think, challenge that we’re seeing now.
Trump set the bar so high that he was never going to be able to achieve it. And so now I think people are starting to say—you know, my friends, my family members, that one crazy Democrat that I never listened to, that I get coffee with in the morning—they might be onto something. And I think that’s what’s cracking right now in a way that I hadn’t anticipated.
There are still people out there who are coming over to us, who even after all of this time hadn’t gotten over to us, who are now showing up. So I think we have to be welcoming those people and finding them—and realizing it’s not going to be a wave all at once. It’s going to be one person at a time. And I think that’s what’s happening.
Hildreth: Thanks for having me.
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