Trump vs. Agriculture | Roundtable

The Dispatch Podcast

The Dispatch

News, Politics

4.6 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2025

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and Megan McArdle discuss the Trump administration’s planned bailout for farmers, ICE agents’ aggressive tactics, and Jonah’s fight against the cat lobby. The Agenda:—Steve Hayes’ farmer arc—Bailout on the way?—ICE, ICE, no baby—Trump is not Hitler, but he is Juan Perón—‘Hitler could have gotten rid of Obamacare.’—NWYT: The best pieces of their career Show Notes:—Jonah Goldberg: To Hell with You People—Kevin Williamson: Zombie Dick Gephardt—Megan McArdle: Out of Osama's Death, a Fake Quotation Is Born—Kevin Williamson: The Death of a F***ing Salesman—Steve Hayes: The Post’s Yucca Mountain Scare The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes.
0:17.8	On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss what Trump's tariffs mean for the economy and
0:21.5	specifically for farmers. Is a ballot on the way to compound this mess? Then a flood of videos
0:27.5	shows U.S. troops deployed in cities across the country and federal law enforcement officers
0:31.8	using increasingly aggressive tactics with protesters. Where is Trump's militarization of law enforcement going? And finally,
0:39.3	stay tuned for a not worth your time where we discuss things we've written that we didn't expect
0:43.7	to earn a large readership, but surprised us by their popularity. I'm joined today by my
0:49.6	dispatch colleagues Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson and by Megan McArdle from the Washington Post.
0:55.0	Let's dive right in. Welcome, everyone. For our first topic today, I want to take a big picture
1:01.0	look at Donald Trump's trade wars, sort of what they mean to do where we are today with a particular
1:08.4	focus on agriculture. We've spent a lot of time over the past
1:12.4	few weeks reading about, looking at reports about the status of America's agriculture sector,
1:21.9	the challenges that are resulting from Donald Trump's trade wars and the potential bailout that the Trump administration has been promising.
1:30.8	I want to start with a quote from Bob Bragg from Farm News and Views, who opened his podcast report the other day this way.
1:41.4	Is it bad timing or bad karma as U.S. farmers have watched markets for both
1:46.6	corn and soybeans tank? Last year, China purchased about 45% of all U.S. soybean exports and
1:53.9	usually secures about 45% of its annual soybean needs by early October. But so far this fall,
2:00.8	China has not yet purchased a single
2:03.3	bean, end quote. Corn and soybeans are currently costing more to produce per bushel than they
2:09.8	can earn on the market, and soybean farmers are beginning to scramble to store their excess
2:13.5	production. Megan, I'll start with you. Can you give us a big picture understanding of how we got
2:22.1	here? Well, we got here because we are decoupling from China. And China is trying to use every
	...

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