Ohio Farmer Fed Up By Broken Promises Tells Donald Trump, ‘I Wouldn’t Vote For You If You Walked On Water’
An Ohio farmer, fed up with the toll Donald Trump’s trade war with China is taking on his profits, has a message for the president.
“I wouldn’t vote for you if you walked on water.”
As CNBC reports, soybean farmer Christopher Gibbs is so fed up with Trump that not only is he quitting the president, he’s given up his former side job as the chair of the Republican Party in Shelby County.
“I’m not going to vote for the president, and I’m on record as saying that,” he says.
Gibbs, like multiple farmers across the country — soybean farmers, in particular — has seen his profits shrink due to Trump’s trade war with China. The tariffs Trump levied on China led the country to buy soybeans from alternative markets, like Argentina, as Bloomberg reports.
It’s a somewhat painful irony for those farmers hurt by the tariffs, as many of them are rural and white, and it was rural, white voters who voted for Trump in overwhelming numbers in 2016. Voters such as Christopher Gibbs, who admits he supported Trump in 2016.
Meanwhile, Trump announced last week that he’s struck a deal that would result in China purchasing between $40 and $50 billion worth of American farm products. Gibbs isn’t buying it.
Ohio farmer Christopher Gibbs, who voted for President Trump, says Trump’s comments about farmers being “patriots” during US-China trade war are “just a design to make me continue to be quiet. And I’m not going to be quiet” pic.twitter.com/K1LcE6eTZi
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) May 15, 2019
“I don’t believe it until [the crops are] on the boat. This is deja vu all over again,” he said, noting that Trump has previously made promises that have failed to materialize.
And even if the deal does materialize, that’s not going to change Gibbs’ vote, he says.
“He could come up with this $50 billion, he could walk across my pond and not get wet, and I’m still not going to vote for him because, you know, at the end of the day my name is Chris Gibbs, it’s not Judas, and I’m not going to sell my political moorings for 30 pieces of silver,” he said.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, the financial toll that is being exacted on farmers due to Trump’s trade wars has led to a number of reported suicides among despondent growers.
Minnesota soybean farmer Bill Gordon says that he’s seen some of his colleagues, squeezed to insolvency from being unable to sell their crops, take their own lives. Similarly, farmers’ help group Farm Aid reports that calls to its assistance hotline are up 30 percent this year. A spokesperson for the group said that family farmers are being driven to extinction through foreclosure, voluntarily going into other jobs, or in extreme cases, suicide.
