Trump’s Self-Inflicted Soybean Problem

Once again, President Trump says he’s preparing an emergency bailout for struggling farmers. And once again, it’s because of an emergency he created.

China has stopped buying U.S. soybeans to protest Mr. Trump’s tariffs on imports. In response, Mr. Trump plans to send billions of dollars of tariff revenue to U.S. soybean farmers who no longer have buyers for their crops. At the same time, Argentina has taken advantage of Mr. Trump’s tariffs to sell more of its own soybeans to China — yet Mr. Trump is planning to bail out Argentina, too.

This may seem nonsensical, especially since Mr. Trump already shoveled at least $28 billion to farmers hurt by his first trade war in 2018. But it actually makes perfect sense. It’s what happens when Mr. Trump’s zero-sum philosophy of trade — which is that there are always winners and losers, and he should get to choose the winners — collides with Washington’s sycophantic approach to agriculture, which ensures that farmers always win and taxpayers always lose. In the end, Mr. Trump’s allies, including President Javier Milei of Argentina and the politically influential agricultural community, will get paid, and you will pay.

I didn’t say it was good. I just said it makes sense.

The most important thing to know about the former real estate developer and casino operator in the White House is that he doesn’t believe in mutually beneficial transactions. The central theme of his book, “The Art of the Deal,” is that every deal has a winner and a sucker. On trade, Mr. Trump sees America as a perennial sucker, and he vows to make it win so much that you’ll get tired of winning.

In theory, Mr. Trump’s tariffs on foreign products ranging from toys to cars to furniture are supposed to encourage manufacturers to move operations from abroad to the United States. They haven’t had that effect, because the tariffs have jacked up the price of steel and other raw materials that U.S. manufacturers still need to import, triggered retaliatory tariffs from China and other countries and created a volatile trade environment that makes investing in America risky. At the same time, higher tariffs mean higher prices for U.S. consumers, even though Mr. Trump insists that only foreigners absorb the costs.

It’s a lousy policy for America, but it works nicely for Mr. Trump, because it gives him enormous power to reward or punish specific companies or industries. He’s provided tariff exemptions for fossil fuels, further enriching some of his most generous campaign contributors, but hasn’t provided similar relief for solar panels. Mr. Trump gave a sweet deal to Apple, whose C.E.O. Tim Cook buttered him up and gave him a fancy plaque in the Oval Office. It’s the economic equivalent of his approach to pardons and prosecutions: For his friends, everything; for his enemies, the law.

Of course, farmers have been among Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters, and these days they’re distraught that rather than make agriculture great again, the president has chased away their biggest soybean buyer. They’re especially irate that Mr. Trump pledged to rescue Argentina the same day Mr. Milei suspended its export tax on soybeans, making it more attractive for China to leave U.S. farmers in the lurch. Mr. Trump even admitted that the $20 billion Argentine bailout won’t help America much, that it’s a favor for an embattled political ally who’s “MAGA all the way.”

But American farmers were distraught about his last trade war, too, until he regained their trust with truckloads of cash. They say that this time they don’t want handouts, just open markets and a level playing field, but in the end they’ll accept the handouts while less powerful business owners victimized by tariffs will get nothing. Mr. Trump initially promised to use his tariff revenue to pay down the national debt to benefit all Americans, but he’ll take care of farmers first.

In fact, “Farmers First” is the motto of Mr. Trump’s Department of Agriculture, and the upcoming bailout won’t be even his first effort this year to redirect money from taxpayers to soybean growers. His Environmental Protection Agency has proposed to mandate two billion additional gallons of biodiesel, a huge giveaway to soy growers. His “big, beautiful bill” also included lucrative subsidies for soy-based biodiesel, which drives deforestation abroad and makes food more expensive but could provide a convenient market for unwanted grain.

Democrats have been airing ads blaming Mr. Trump’s tariffs for the pain in soybean country, and they’ve started attacking the Argentina bailout as well. But most of them aren’t complaining about his imminent farm bailout, and his recent biofuel boondoggles have bipartisan support. Mr. Trump’s incessant pandering to the farmer-industrial complex is one of the most conventional Beltway instincts he has. And it has worked for him politically; even now that crop prices are plunging and soybeans have nowhere to go, rural America remains the heart of his base.

I’ve argued that Democrats can’t out-agri-pander Mr. Trump in rural America, and now that the president has posted a meme of himself dumping on urban America, there’s never been a better time to stop trying. Mr. Trump has committed to a destructive mix of tariffs, bailouts, biofuels mandates and immigration crackdowns that will make consumers pay more for food and saddle taxpayers with more debt. It’s a bizarre combination of crony capitalism and agricultural socialism. It’s all the worst elements of big government.

A more limited government approach would be to let farmers grow what they want, let consumers buy what they want and stop trying to micromanage the global economy to prop up specific domestic industries. Americans would be able to buy low-cost Chinese toys to give our children and the Chinese would be able to buy American soybeans to feed their pigs. We do not live in a zero-sum world; the nice thing about free markets and free trade is that voluntary transactions between individuals or nations really can make both sides better off.

Or we can keep paying farmers to farm soybeans, pay them more to convert some of those soybeans into wildly inefficient fuels, pay them even more when they can’t sell their soybeans because we’re in a trade war with their customers — and then pay extra to bail out one of the countries replacing them in the marketplace.

That only makes sense in Mr. Trump’s Washington.