Trump’s trade agenda is on a collision course with his rural voters’ economic interests

Rural America has backed Republicans for decades, but it gave unusually strong support to Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy, with Iowa scoring the biggest D-to-R shift of any state in the union. It’s interesting, then, that one of the segments of the business community with the biggest concern about Trump’s policies is agribusiness. This sector enjoys traditional Republican priorities like lax environmental regulation and eliminating the estate tax, but could suffer enormously from trade wars that Trump might initiate. One clear sign of that is a letter sent this week from a wide range of farm sector stakeholders, ranging from the North American Meat Institute to the American Soybean Association to the US Dry Bean Council urging Trump not to blow up NAFTA. Beyond the specifics of NAFTA, the objective economic interests of rural America are systematically opposed to those of Trump’s beloved Rust Belt manufacturing workers. The farm sector is a large net exporter that depends heavily on foreign trade to sustain income and employment. It will inevitably bear the brunt of any retaliatory measures imposed by foreign countries on the United States. The result is that Trump’s policy agenda is on a collision course with one of the bulwarks of his political support.