Green Acres Is The Place For Scott Bessent
Who gets allergic smelling hay? Not this guy!
It’s getting hard for even rural MAGA to overlook that they’re getting screwed by Donald Trump and those LIBERATION DAY tariffs that American consumers are paying for. Especially farmers, whose supply costs went up at the very same time their markets disappeared overnight. And it’s not easy for Trump’s myrmidons to keep defending!
But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is going to get out here and try. Watch his shellacked face sputtering to ABC’s Martha Raddatz that he understands the pain of soybean farmers, because HE himself is a soybean farmer, and he and Trump have frameworks of concepts of plans for a deal for real this time, and a special something that will make soybean farmers real happy real soon, oh boy! But he can’t tell you what it is, because it is a surprise.
Here’s a link to the entire cringey interview, or just watch the dumbest part at 3:40:
Nobody thinks MAGA is stupider than its own leadership.
In no world, in no universe, at no time, by no rational definition was Scott Bessent ever a soybean farmer. Scott Bessent has never tilled any land, unless he and his husband grew soybeans in the glassed-in portico of the $18.25 million waterfront historic pink mansion in Charleston they recently sold. Soybean farm investor, yes, he owns $25 million worth of North Dakota corn and soybean farmland, which he rents out to tenant farmers and makes more than $1 million a year in rental income. A lot! And an investment he did not divest from when he took the job as Treasury secretary like ethics rules said he was supposed to, either.
But pity poor gentleman non-farmer Bessent!
His mother was a real estate agent, his father a real estate investor who went bankrupt. Bessent went straight from North Myrtle Beach High School in South Carolina to Yale, and then directly into investing. With George Soros’s partner! And then Bessent worked for George Soros for nearly two decades, rising to become his top investor. Paging QAnon!
And Scott Bessent is not feeling any pain, unless it’s from another member of Trump’s circle physically attacking him again after Bessent provoked them, probably while jumping up and down and squealing like Scrappy-Doo. Bessent’s now worth more than $500 million, he can pay his food bill.
PREVIOUSLY!
What happened to this guy? Bessent was once an Al Gore supporter. But then he wormed his way into Trump’s circle via Blaine Trump, the ex-wife of Trump’s late brother, Robert, and switched teams. He became friends with JD Vance, and was an early supporter of him for the VP position. And he’s become, as the New York Times put it, the “most powerful” of Washington DC’s new Republican “A-Gays.”
Meanwhile, the US government is bailing out Argentina and its pet-psychic chainsaw-wielding president for $40 billion. It was $20 billion, but the price doubled, for some reason!
AND the Argentina deal quadruples the amount of beef that can be imported from Argentina. Even Trump-supporting farmers are getting confused. “We want to drill our own oil,” puzzled one to the local Fox affiliate. “We want to use our own corn and soybeans. Let’s use our own beef.”
But Argentina is fighting for its life, young lady!
And now China is buying Argentina’s soybeans, and not a single soybean from the US anymore. There is no upside to Trump’s tariff temper tantrums at every single one of America’s trading partners for the farmers, manufacturers and consumers of America.
But there’s an upside for Scott Bessent’s insider cronies! Like the ones heavily invested in Argentina, or in long-term bonds. Bitcoin investors who thrive on chaos! And big farmland real estate investors, like Bessent himself, who will be in a position to buy up even more land when farmers can’t afford to keep their farms any more. Though it will surely pain him to do so.
Meanwhile, Trump has been teasing a bailout for farmers for a while, like the one he had to give them during his first term after his first dumb tariffs gutted them. But no actual bailout has been forthcoming so far. And the House is, of course, closed for business. Oh, and there’ll be no SNAP benefits starting November 1 either. Happy Thanksgiving!
Meanwhile, the world moves on without us. On top of China getting off US soybeans, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney has been using Trump’s mental instability to pitch Canada as the world’s more reliable trading partner, and says Canada plans to double its non-US exports.
Here at home, consumer prices keep going up and up. Inflation was up three percent in September, following 2.9 percent in August.
But simple farmer Scott Bessent feels everybody’s pain, you betcha!
Goodbye, city life!
Green Acres, we are theeeeeeere!
[New York Times archive link / WSJ gift link]
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I've been growing resentment and dread. I'm a farmer too!
I once grew a zucchini. I am a farmer.
but I ate it, and now I have no farm left.
shit.