The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 2 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

President Donald Trump unleashed a strange Truth Social rant on Wednesday, declaring straight out that farmers are getting hurt because China is not buying soybeans. Of course, Trump’s own trade wars are the reason for this—so in effect, he admitted that his own policies are badly screwing one of his core constituencies.

That’s amusing, but it also comes as some brutal economic news landed suggesting job losses could be about to get worse. The bigger story here is that the bad economic news is piling up at exactly the moment we’re entering a bruising government shutdown fight. And of course, a shutdown will make the economy even worse.

So does that mean Trump and Republicans will be in a weak enough position for Democrats to hold the line in the shutdown battle? We’re talking about all this with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who has a good new piece arguing that Democrats are finally finding some spine in this fight. Alex, good to see you, man.

Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.

Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s post on Truth Social. Here’s what he said, “The soybean farmers of our country are being hurt because China is, for ‘negotiating’ reasons only, not buying. We’ve made so much money on tariffs that we are going to take a small portion of that money and help our farmers.” Alex, note how Trump says China isn’t buying soybeans for negotiating reasons, but leaves out how we got to this point, which is Trump’s trade wars. Your thoughts on that?

Shephard: Yeah, I mean, it’s also funny that he puts “negotiating” in inverted commas, as if there’s some other possible meaning for that word. But this shouldn’t have come as a shock at all. One of the things I found most surprising about this is that Politico’s agriculture newsletter—because of course they have a newsletter for everything—reported that the Trump White House was taken aback by the response from soybean farmers who are being crushed by these tariffs.

China has bought nothing for basically the entirety of the year. And what was shocking about that is that it happened in Trump’s first term too. When Trump started a trade war against China, to a less significant degree, soybean farmers were among the first targets.

Not only is this absurd, it’s also crazy that no one in the Trump administration could have seen this coming. And now they’re clearly scrambling. Trump is promising to rub some pennies together from the tariffs he’s bringing in. But this is just yet another sign that this trade war—OK, he’s doubled money from tariffs, but what it’s doing to the actual American economy is devastating for a lot of people, including a lot of people who happen to be Trump voters.

Sargent: Yeah. And Alex, it’s worth noting that this is a real calamity for those farmers. China bought over 12 billion dollars worth of soybeans last year. And this year, it’s nothing. And also to your point, when Trump says he will pay off the farmers with money from tariffs, well, that money was actually collected from importers who passed on higher costs to consumers who also happened to be Trump voters, or many of them are anyway. He’s basically admitting he’s really screwing his own people here. He’s taking money from some of his own people and he’s going to give it to others to mask the deep failure of his policies.

Shephard: It’s not just that though, too. The stated rationale for this tariff policy has shifted somewhat, but at its foundational basis, it’s supposed to rebuild American enterprise, manufacturing; it’s supposed to make Americans wealthy by building up their ability to make things. So I think the other thing that’s so absurd about this is that you have an actual successful industry. There is really no market for domestic American soybeans. If you’re an American soybean farmer, you sell them to foreign markets, most notably China. And so I think what you have here too is like an example of just how ridiculous this entire stratagem is that Trump is essentially like taking existing successful American industries that do export goods, in this case soybean farmers, and holding them hostage so he can, one, extort the rest of the world in the form of tariffs and claim that he’s making all this money, but also, two, build up successful American industry, or farming, manufacturing, whatever you want to call it. And what you have here is an actual successful thing. It’s being destroyed. And there’s nothing that this administration can point to that’s being built........

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