re: #154 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

so it is foreign retaliatory tariffs that are the culprit, not the clueless orangutan who started this trade war in the first place

Of course, that’s going to be the official Administration line: it has numerous advantages as a strategy:

1. It puts the blame for farmers’ problems on the “unfair” Chinese: as usual in the Trump Admin.: they have a “sinister foreign power” to dump on. To divert responsibility from their own actions, naturally.
2. Point 1 simply feeds into the stock Trumpian themes of self-righteousness and victimization which he has made the hallmark of the shabby travesty which passes for US foreign policy these days.
3. It lets the Administration hold out prospects of billions of dollars in handouts to the usual Corporate Interests, neatly disguised as “helping farming families” or whatever.
4. It provides a handy cudgel to beat critics of the policy (i.e “why do Democrats hate American Farmers?”, etc.)

Of course, one might ask the question of how a policy of a US Administration more-or-less consciously destroying a major agricultural export market, then begging for billions in taxpayer funding to make up for said lost markets jibes with a supposedly “free market” - but then, see Point 1 above…