Yet Another Self Afflicted Wound. From Trump, Yet Another Bailout For Farmers

Oct 20, 2026 04:25 PM EDT, Tue

White House approves new bailout for farmers hurt by Trump

The one thing that all four of the Trump administration’s bailouts have in common is that they’re effectively admissions of guilt.

By Steve Benen

Oct. 20, 2026, 12:53 PM EDT

Donald Trump’s first bailout for farmers came in 2018, at which point the president approved payments totaling $12 billion. A year later, the Republican administration kept going, announcing a bailout for farmers worth $16 billion.

Late last year, the president launched another $12 billion bailout for farmers, many of whom were harmed by the White House’s misguided and ill-fated trade tariffs policy, though the money proved insufficient. As my MS NOW colleague Hayes Brown summarized, the policy was little more than “duct tape on a broken pipe,” which did “little to fix the underlying problem.”

In June, Trump made it clear that he was eyeing a possible fourth bailout for the industry. And this week he followed through, announcing an $8 billion bailout during a campaign rally in Kansas, specifically aimed at helping farmers address higher diesel costs. The New York Times reported:

Under the plan, known as the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, the Agriculture Department will use a formula based on how many acres and which crops farmers planted to reimburse them for a “portion” of their losses. The money will come from the Commodity Credit Corporation, a financing institution that the Agriculture Department uses to fund crop insurance and natural disaster payment programs.

Payment rates will be announced next month, and farmers will receive money at a later date.

There’s ample reason to believe the $8 billion will be insufficient. But just as notably, at no point during Trump’s event did he mention that farmers were struggling with higher diesel costs because of the war with Iran that the president launched eight months ago.

Indeed, the one thing that all four of the bailouts have in common is that they’re effectively admissions of guilt: Trump’s agenda continues to hurt his own country’s agriculture industry, which in turn has necessitated a series of payouts.

As for the timing of the president’s latest announcement, it comes just two weeks before Election Day, with early voting underway in many states. It’s a safe bet that the bailout was intended to address intensifying discontent among voters in farming communities, who have long backed Republicans but don’t appear to have much to show for it. MS NOW reported this week:

After two decades of defeats in rural America, Democrats are suddenly putting up a fight in farm country. The party is running competitive Senate races in Iowa, Kansas and other farm states, as well as House races in heavily rural districts that could help it regain control of Congress in January.

Credit (or blame, depending on your party) for this reversal of fortune lies with President Donald Trump’s tariffs and his war with Iran, which have battered farmers and pushed the rural economy into crisis. The Department of Agriculture’s analysts expect farmers’ net incomes to decline by 5.5% this year, as costs rise and receipts fall. The National Agricultural Law Center’s tally of farm bankruptcies jumped 45% last year, and is on pace to rise another 11% in 2026.

Will Trump’s latest bailout affect voters’ attitudes, enough to stem the tide? We’ll find out in two weeks.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

  1. Katie Zacharia lasted less than half a Scaramucci2 as White House Press Press Secretary. 2026-10-12 – 2026-10-16 ↩

  2. Anthony Scaramucci / LinkedIn White House Press Communications Director. 2007-07-21 – 2007-07-31 ↩

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