A Wisconsin farmer says President Donald Trump has failed farmers and left many feeling abandoned. Judging by part of the reaction online, that apparently means he deserves whatever happens next.
That was the ugly turn taken by a discussion around a short Spectrum News 1 Wisconsin clip featuring Dylan Bruce, a farmer at Driftless Seed Supply in Ferryville. Asked directly whether Trump has failed farmers, his answer was unequivocal: “
Yeah, I do. Absolutely. He’s failed farmers and ranchers, and I think the Republican majorities in the House are complicit in that and that the versions of the farmers bill that have come out don’t fix those problems.”
Asked whether he had faith in Congress to help, he was similarly pessimistic.
“Not really. It feels like we’re kind of on our own.”
Spectrum News shared the remarks Thursday, against a backdrop of very real pressure on Wisconsin agriculture. State agriculture officials have recently warned that tariffs, retaliatory tariffs and soaring costs are creating uncertainty for farmers, while congressional candidates from both parties acknowledged this week that producers are being squeezed financially.
But on Reddit, the farmer’s actual problem was quickly overshadowed by a much more familiar American pastime: deciding what someone must believe politically, then determining whether they deserve sympathy accordingly.
“They should be on their own,” one commenter wrote.
“Farmers voted to ‘be on their own,’” said another.
One confidently predicted, “He’ll still vote the same way again,” while another declared that farmers were responsible for their own troubles and deserved no sympathy. Others characterized farmers broadly as wealthy beneficiaries of government handouts.
There is just one rather important problem. Nothing in the Spectrum clip establishes how this particular farmer voted.
America Has Turned ‘Farmer’ Into A Political Identity
There is a factual basis for saying rural America leans Republican. Pew Research Center found that 69% of rural voters backed Trump in the 2024 election, compared with 29% for Kamala Harris. An Agri-Pulse survey conducted before that election similarly found 61% of surveyed farmers identified as Republicans.
But neither statistic says every farmer voted for Trump. They certainly do not prove that this farmer did.
That distinction somehow vanished for a chunk of Reddit, where “farmer” rapidly became shorthand for gun-toting MAGA Republican, government-subsidy hypocrite and, in one comment, someone whose supposed political choices could be reduced to racism.
Other commenters noticed the absurdity. Several pushed back on the assumption that Driftless Seed Supply or the farmer featured in the clip was necessarily Republican. One offered perhaps the most sensible sentence anywhere in the thread: “Let’s not be mad at the wrong folks.”
There is another stereotype worth puncturing here, too. Wisconsin’s Department of Agriculture says 95% of the state’s more than 58,000 farms are family farms. University of Wisconsin research found the majority of Wisconsin farms reported less than $100,000 in agricultural sales, while the number of farms in the state fell 9.7% between 2017 and 2022. Land can be extraordinarily valuable while the business operating on it remains financially vulnerable.
None of this means farmers should be protected from criticism. Agriculture receives enormous government support, including roughly $201.6 million in safety-net and conservation payments announced for Wisconsin this month. Trump’s administration has also announced billions more in assistance as farmers contend with record fuel costs and trade disruption. Debating those policies, and whether farmers supported politicians responsible for creating some of those pressures, is entirely legitimate.
What is considerably harder to defend is assigning the politics first and the humanity second. The farmer in the clip did not demand viewers pity him. He answered two questions about whether Washington had helped and whether he expected help to arrive. Reddit filled in the rest of his biography.
That may be the more depressing story here. America’s political divide is now so reflexive that even a struggling farmer can become a red or blue avatar within seconds. Once that happens, economic hardship stops being a problem to understand and becomes something to celebrate when it appears to land on the “other team.”
Farmers are not a voting bloc with one personality, one bank balance and one ballot. Neither are teachers, factory workers, veterans or city residents.
If political tribalism has reached the point where people need to check how somebody voted before deciding whether their livelihood collapsing is funny, perhaps the farmer in Ferryville is not the only American with reason to feel “kind of on our own.”
