Rep. Sharice Davids Discusses Trump’s Ultimate Betrayal of Farmers

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2:22Ben Meiselas:So as Americans are absolutely livid at Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans' government shutdown, as Americans are puzzled and pissed about why taxpayers here are giving$40 billion to Argentina to bail out Donald Trump's MAGA puppet dictator, Javier Malay there, which we're just flushing our money down the drain. Well, 20 million Americans are set to lose health care. Donald Trump upped the ante and said, you know what? We're not just going to give Argentina that 40 billion. Just want to let our cattle ranchers know here in the United States, we're going to also bring in that Argentine beef, you know, that foot and mouth disease situation going on in Argentina.

3:02Ben Meiselas:That's really bad. We're going to go take that beef, bring it here, undercut our own ranchers, and then we're going to destroy the White House while we're at it. Maybe we'll do some UFC fights in front of the White House. We'll destroy the Rose Garden and what else? Then I'll just golf all weekend. So then Donald Trump sends his agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, and she makes her rounds on the show. And she's asked, what are you doing here? Why would we be undercutting our cattle ranchers now? At the same time, we're bailing out Argentina. It makes no sense. You want to bankrupt our cattle ranchers?

3:37Ben Meiselas:What about the free market as well? And so Brooke Rollins is asked, is importing beef from Argentina a possibility? Like Trump said, here's what she says. Play this clip. What about beef from Argentina? Is that a possibility? Well, the president has mentioned it a couple of times. I think you'll be hearing more about exactly what that looks like right now in America. We consume about 12 million metric tons of beef, 10 million of that we produce here in America. but the 2 million I'm talking about, we've been offshoring. And there's different parts of that, you know, what McDonald's buys and ground beef versus the actual muscle cuts, which is what a lot of Americans, the healthy part of all of this.

4:16Ben Meiselas:I mean. So then she just filibusters the rest of the answer, but she confirms that that is the plan. You're the United States Agriculture Secretary. Like you realize that, right? You're not the Argentinian Agriculture Secretary or the Agriculture Secretary from Brazil, the United States. You're supposed to, the one thing that your job is, is like, defend your American cattle ranchers, basically defend American agriculture. So then she's asked on Thursday more about it. And of course, she's got to make it a both sides issue. The frustration here is on both sides. That's what the issue is here. Plus glue.

4:53Ben Meiselas:Having said all of that, the plan that we released yesterday, which the president was so excited about. We were opening up 5 million acres of taxpayer land, BLM and Forest Service land for our ranchers to lease from the government. We're implementing new programs to allow younger ranchers to get into the business with cheaper loans, better protection, etc. We are with Newton Maha, with Bobby Kennedy and putting protein, specifically beef, back at the center of the American diet from the government's perspective. When you think about what we spend every day on nutrition programs from the USDA. It's 400 million a day, pivoting some of that to specifically locally grown and produced and healthy, the best beef in the world.

5:37Ben Meiselas:Well, she's not answering the question. So we'll try one more time, Brooke Rollins, on Trump and American cattle ranchers. She goes, there's frustration on both sides. Here, play this clip. Say that there's a bigger problem that they've got. It's not even just about the imports of the Argentine beef. That would hurt them. But then they're saying that they're caught, They're struggling with the cost that they're dealing with on their small production farms. How do you address those folks? Yeah, a couple of different points on this, I think, are really important. The first is that this president, when he ran and cast his vision, you know, well over the last almost 10 years now, which is hard to believe.

6:14Ben Meiselas:But certainly over the last year as he was running in 2024, was he many promises, but top of the list was securing the border. And he's done that pretty remarkably. And number two was making America more affordable again, that under Joe Biden, everything that inflation, fuel, groceries, everything had just skyrocketed. You're not answering. The whole point is that things are more expensive for cattle ranchers and you're putting them out of business now and you're going to be bringing in Argentinian beef. You can't just answer every question with Joe Biden. And then Donald Trump responds. And he writes, the cattle ranchers who I love don't understand the only reason they are doing so well for the first time in decades is because I, I did it.

6:57Ben Meiselas:I put tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including 50 % tariffs on Brazil. If it weren't for me, they would be doing just as they've done for the past 20 years. Terrible. It would be nice if they would understand that. But they also have to get their prices down because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking also. So does Donald Trump think that the cattle ranchers control the price of the market, that they are price fixing? He doesn't know the way anything works. I want to call in Democratic Congresswoman Sharice Davids from Kansas's third congressional district. Congresswoman Davids, it's great to see you from Kansas, one of the biggest cattle ranching states in the country.

7:40Ben Meiselas:This must make you and your constituents absolutely livid, especially during this government shutdown where people are suffering from so many other reasons. Yeah. And I was you caught me shaking my head from that that social media post, because the idea that cattle ranchers in Kansas or in any state would need Donald Trump from New York City telling them. that he understands cattle, the cattle markets, the work that they do better than the people who get up at five o 'clock in the morning. That's why they're successful. They're not successful because of Donald Trump. They're successful because they're working really, really hard.

8:33And I am at a loss at why the Secretary of Agriculture would try to defend this specific thing. I know this is politics and that's kind of what people do, but this isn't about right and left. This is about right and wrong. And the idea that our cattle ranchers are being told by Donald Trump why they're successful is outrageous. And then, you know, I've heard some of my colleagues, some of my Republican colleagues have encouraged Donald Trump to be transparent about what's going on with this idea of importing beef from Argentina. and I'll just say this, we don't need transparency to know that this policy is garbage.

9:28We need to be supporting American ranchers, farmers, producers, and this ain't it.

9:36Ben Meiselas:Right, and it's now hitting the cattle ranchers and farmers, I think with 64 ,000 cattle ranchers, but half the farms, I think, in Kansas, when I looked it up and did the research, are cattle ranching farmers. But there's lots of other farms and agriculture there. Yeah. And then the other thing is, sorry, this is so wild to me that the president decided to do this. The other thing is, when you talk to folks about, because farming is tough. And when I say that, it's both it's physically demanding and, you know, folks are getting up early. They're up before the sun and there's that piece. But it's also it's tough because there are all of these factors that are out of the control of the farmer.

10:32They're having to deal with the uncertainty of weather. They're having to deal with the uncertainty of the international space. You know, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the price of fertilizer skyrocketed. All these inputs that are rising, they're trying to navigate all of this. And the last thing they need is the uncertainty being created by these tariffs. And it's the uncertainty being created by nonsensical policy of importing Argentinian beef. And I apologize for interrupting you. I just got. Oh, not at all.

11:13Ben Meiselas:Where I was going was I said, so you look to your left in Kansas and you've got cattle ranches. You look to your right. You've got soybean farmers. Right. The state's producing nearly 200 million bushels annually across four point seven million acres. And then the soybean farmers are looking to your cattle ranches or cattle ranch. They go, wait a minute, we're getting screwed, too. What do you mean? Well, the soybean farmers are saying, well, we don't have an export market anymore because China is not buying soybeans. And so now Trump's talking about giving government handouts to the farmers to bail them out.

11:45Ben Meiselas:The farmers, you tell me, they're saying we don't we have the product. We want to sell it. And now you're given a 40 billion dollar bailout to Argentina. And while dangling in front of us that you may bail us out, we don't even know what that even means. Who are you going to bail out? The cattle rancher, the soybean farmer who gets priority over who? And then you're telling us we should fix the market. it's a wild concept to your point that Mr. New York City guy is out there screwing the soybean farmer, the cattle rancher, but some of these people still vote for him. What's it going to take? Some still say, you know, he loves me though.

12:22Ben Meiselas:No, he doesn't. He hates you. Well, I think that this, and this touches on, you know, I know we're going to get to the redistricting conversation too, but this just further highlights how we have too many politicians in this country who are willing to ignore the voices and the needs of the folks that they are supposed to be representing. And when we talk about the impact of tariff policy or this idea of importing beef from Argentina, it is like... It couldn't be the furthest thing away from listening to the folks who depend on the federal government and our elected officials to actually show up in Washington, D.C.

13:14and do the job of bringing the voices, needs, concerns, and even the successes of our constituents out here and try to make it so that they have a dependable, reliable federal government that isn't going to make things harder for them. And right now, that's exactly what this policy is doing. This president has implemented too many extreme policies that are actually damaging so many Americans, including the 79 ,000 Kansans that are going to lose their health care because they passed a budget to give billionaires more tax breaks.

13:53Ben Meiselas:And I want to get into the redistricting, but I want to remind people that in Kansas, your governor, Governor Laura Kelly, who we've interviewed here before on the Midas Network, she's a Democrat. Donald Trump won the state, though, in the 2024 election by 16 points. And so, you know, it's it's it has that dynamic. You know, when I talk to Governor Beshear, where you have a Democratic governor in Kentucky, for example, but then Trump won that state by it's a fascinating dynamic. Like, do you know, seeing the dynamic and what's happening and playing out right now, how does that happen? Do you see that changing, especially as Mr.

14:36Ben Meiselas:New York City's like literally destroying the farmers and like the main source of income in the state and people's lives? Like, what do you see on the ground? Yeah, what I see on the ground right now is a lot of frustration. It's a lot of frustration, confusion, and actually anxiety. And, you know, my preference would be that instead of folks having to wait until the next round of elections to make a change, my preference would be that our elected officials, my colleagues included, would actually just start listening to their constituents. And I wish that the Secretary of Agriculture and the President of the United States would listen to our agricultural community and understand that folks want to do their job.

15:25They want to continue to feed the state of Kansas, the United States, and the entire world, frankly. And they can't do that with this whiplash of extreme policies that we're seeing coming out of this White House.

15:40Ben Meiselas:So that's why we're seeing the redistricting efforts across the country, but that's targeting in Kansas, they want a special session. Kansas is already gerrymandered in ways that make a pretty simply shaped state into one that looks gerrymandered wise into something that looks Frankenstein-y. And what's happening there? I know it's an important issue for you. Yeah. Well, I think that your description as being Frankenstein is, I hadn't thought about it that way, but you're right. I will say that, you know, Kansans in a lot of ways, you know, when you're there, you see that folks want to know that they're going to have good public schools.

16:24Folks want to know that they're going to, their children are going to have the opportunity to thrive and don't want to see the government getting in the way of that. And when it comes to this redistricting push, folks also recognize that, you know, voters should be choosing their representatives and not the other way around. And right now, because Donald Trump has essentially instructed our state legislators to take on this mid-decade, unprecedented redistricting effort for purely political partisan purposes, because they know all this extreme stuff is so unpopular that they're not going to win unless they cheat.

17:07And Republicans already did this a few years ago. They gerrymandered the Kansas maps. And the fact that they're willing to revisit this, it's outrageous that they would further polarize folks and then worst of all, like silence the voices of Kansas voters. And I am absolutely going to fight this and try to make sure that our maps don't get further gerrymandered because Kansas voters don't deserve to have their voices silenced because we have an administration that has such unpopular policies that they have to cheat to win.

17:48Ben Meiselas:Before we go, Congresswoman, are there any other issues that you're seeing in Kansas? Maybe it's health care, maybe that you keep getting asked over and over and over again, especially right now, that it's important. And I want to highlight it to our 6 million subscribers because, you know, it's important that we cover states like Kansas and what's going on. We have a lot of people who watch from Kansas, and I want to make sure we're getting their voices out here to the world as well. Yeah, and I appreciate that. I can tell you, Kansans right now have a whole multitude of things there. They are having to worry about rising costs, everything from gas to groceries.

18:29and the health care issue, you know, we're at crisis proportions here. Folks are about to, if Congress doesn't act, folks are going to lose the tax credits that have saved somewhere around$700 a year for about 160 ,000 Kansans. And that's at the same time that Medicaid has been cut. And so this health care crisis is is certainly on the top of the mind of so many Kansans that I've talked to. And I'm going to continue to push. leadership. You know, it is a fact that Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. We need for them to come to the table so that we can actually work together and, yeah, fight it out.

19:24We need to do that. We got to have these hard conversations because that's what people expect. That's why they elect us, to have the hard conversations. We got to get the government open, and we need to take care of the health care of millions of Americans, including the 160 ,000 Kansans who depend on these tax credits.

19:43Ben Meiselas:I think it's such an important point. There needs to be conversations. Like it sounds so basic, but when you and I learning about government, it's like the parties are supposed to speak to each other. It's okay that they disagree. And then they come up with a compromise and a solution. And then they, you know, figure it out. And right now, MAGA Mike Johnson has said, he's ordered the Republicans, do not talk, do not converse, no conversations allowed, yet alone negotiations. And I think that's what just pissing a lot of people off. They're like, wait a minute, the MAGA's are saying that they're not talking.

20:15Ben Meiselas:They're not going to do, they're too good to speak to the other side when they need the votes. That's not the way it should work anyway. I appreciate you, Congresswoman Cherise Davids. Thank you so much. Kansas is third congressional district. Everybody hit subscribe. We'll get to six million subscribers this week. Want to stay plugged in? become a subscriber to our sub stack at MidasPlus.com. You'll get daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski, ad-free episodes of our podcast, and more exclusive content only available at MidasPlus.com.

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