Farmers who voted for Trump are feeling the pain: Hold your glee, lefties | Opinion
Let’s start with a vocabulary lesson. There’s a German word — “schadenfreude” — that doesn’t really have an English-language equivalent, but is still handy to have in your linguistic toolbox from time to time. It describes the joy one feels upon seeing somebody else suffer misfortune.
The glee that half of America felt when the Kansas City Chiefs finally lost a Super Bowl earlier this year? That was schadenfreude.
Great word.
Not a very nice idea, though.
Why bring this up? Because on Monday, The New York Times ran a story about how Kansas farmers are suffering from President Donald Trump’s policies.
In just six months, the White House has gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Food for Peace program and provoked a trade war with the rest of the world, all to the detriment of the Sunflower State’s agriculture sector. Farmers have been left “with swollen silos, shrinking markets and volatile prices for crops,” said The Times.
Folks, the schadenfreude was thick with this one.
Why? Because farmers are about as Trump-voting a group as you’ll find. And a lot of people in the half of the country that voted against Trump figure Kansas farmers are getting exactly what they deserve.
“Every farm bankruptcy that comes — and come they will — will be a direct consequence of your members voting for the guy who already hurt them once,” one writer said in a letter (quoted in The Times) to Nick Levendofsky, the executive director of the Kansas Farmers Union.
That’s schadenfreude. It stinks. And for Democratic-leaning voters and pundits, it’s bad politics.
Who is going to feed you?
If you’ve spent any time on Kansas roads, you’ve seen the signs: “1 Kansas Farmer Feeds More Than 155 People + You!”
The number has changed from time to time over the years, but the essential idea remains the same. Kansas farmers do a tremendous amount to feed America, and the world.
So I have a question for left-leaning folks who feel some glee at the misfortune of those farmers:
Who the heck do you think is going to feed you if every Trump-voting farmer goes bankrupt?
I’ll wait for your answer.
There probably aren’t enough Democratic-voting farmers to make up the slack: More than 75% of votes in “farming-dependent counties” across the United States went to the Republican in 2024. They’re probably hurting too, anyway.
And under Trump, it won’t easily be farmers in places like Mexico, who produce a lot of the produce we buy at supermarkets — but who are staring down big tariffs from the administration.
It’s never a good idea to root against farmers. Even if you think they voted badly. Not if you want to keep your tummy filled.
Persuasion, not destruction
It’s not just self-interest that makes schadenfreude a bad idea for anti-Trump voters. There’s also the politics.
Those frustrated Trump-voting farmers? Democrats should consider that some of those folks might be gettable votes now.
Maybe not most of them: A lot of folks in the ag industry are die-hard Republicans. But a few. Maybe even enough to make a difference.
Alternatively, those farmers may be more willing to push back against Trump’s more destructive policies even if they don’t change parties.
“We need people who are willing to speak up,” Paul Penner, a Kansan and former president of the National Association of Wheat Growers, told The Times. “I think privately they say things, but publicly, no. And I’m not sure what their pain threshold is.”
Those farmers are less likely to jump across the threshold, though, if what they see on the other side is a few Democratic voices — not all, certainly, but a few — rooting for their failure.
Getting out of the hole that Trump is digging for all of us will require persuasion and coalition-building, including with people (like right-leaning farmers) who once voted for Trump and are now hurting because of his policies.
You can’t eat schadenfreude, after all. But you sure can choke on it.
This story was originally published July 8, 2025 at 5:08 AM.