ArcaMax

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — “We love farmers. We love everything about you,” U.S. President Donald Trump said to a group of Wisconsin farmers.

Maybe because farmers, who deal in dirt-under-nails reality, are everything this administration vows to be — but consistently fails to deliver.

Farmers don’t have the option to be performative. They don’t get the luxury of sitting back and talking about how great they are and all the useful things they’re going to do. They’re judged strictly by results: plowed fields, picked crops, fed cattle. There’s no such thing as a farmer who survives solely on the promise of accomplishments they foresee materializing someday while stringing people along until it happens — or until they leave office. As one French farmer once said to me of politicians: “Our hands may be physically in the dirt, but at least the dirt is clean.”

It’s no wonder that farmers, whom I spent days alongside amid mass protests against government mistreatment of their industry in Europe over the past few years, have little use for a political world more interested in shuffling paper around and polishing its own reflection than getting anything productive done.

So what does Trump do when he shows up in Wisconsin? How does he address these very no-nonsense Americans whose livelihoods depend on concrete results — and which have been upended by the taxes and shortages that he’s imposed on their basic work materials, like fertilizer and fuel? He tells them how great it is, how great it’s been. How it was great “four months ago," in case they haven't noticed, and how it can be that great again. And how he thought that it would have all been a lot worse — but they’re so lucky that he’s in charge, because it’s really not that bad, actually.

He then calls one particular farmer “one hell of a physical specimen.” Trump says that he thought he was “big” himself until he met this other guy. “Fantastic,” Trump added. “That’s what I like.” He’s talking about “Joe,” who is presumably someone who does actual physical work for a living, and isn’t just impressively spreading through impressive spreads. “You all built this country, not the complainers, not the wise guys,” said the wise guy.

He then started riffing about how his blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is unlike any other blockade in history. True, I suppose, considering that it’s hard to recall any other time that a country reacted to a blockade by blockading the blockade, as Trump is doing to Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. The difference being that Iran is getting rich from charging tolls for their blockade while U.S. ships just sit around watching the show at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.

He then starts on Democrats. “I call them the ‘Dumocrats.’ DUM. You take out the B. A lot of people don’t know that dumb has a B. You take out the B and you change the E, you put the U, and you have Dumocrat,” Trump said, before availing himself of this newly-set low rhetorical bar to segue into the comparatively brilliant notion that American farmers had to sacrifice their livelihood so that Iran couldn’t have nukes. And unlike how farmers can pull a carrot out of the ground and people can connect it to a direct benefit with zero explanation — the return on investment for Trump’s current Mideast shenanigans requires a more heavy-handed and relentless sales pitch.

About the only concrete offering during Trump’s visit was a comedy routine. But what else is new? This administration has been doing more “busy work” than the average primary schooler. In the same week, Trump held up a poster board in the Oval Office to show how much bigger the newly cleaned and painted Reflecting Pool on Washington’s National Mall is, compared to various buildings around the world. The idea seemed to be to shut up critics wondering why it’s taking so long to merely repaint and fill it, and at great cost. And the answer, apparently, is that you don’t build Rome in a day. Not even if Rome was of the same size and horizontal plane as Trump’s pool job?

He unilaterally had his name plastered above the official name of DC’s “John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” before a federal judge had it removed.

His administration also gave $50 billion in government contracts to donors who were funding his new White House ballroom, whose legality is now being examined by a federal appeals court panel as it sits there partly finished, alongside some kind of massive wrestle-mania ring built for a show fight on the White House lawn. There’s a sentence that I never thought I’d write as a political columnist.

None of the various military actions that Trump has initiated has resulted in an obvious net gain for the average American, either — nor for the people of the countries involved. But Trump remains insistent anyway, with new talk of regime change in Cuba.

How about that promise to end the Ukraine war in a day? We’re about a year and a half worth of days into it now. Probably just as well, though. The longer the U.S. stays involved at all, the less likely that Russia and Europe — which is now doing the intelligence targeting for Ukraine — will work things out.

There’s always so much drama with this administration, but it’s mostly “fake news” when it comes to real progress on anything. The French have a phrase with no clean English equivalent: se faire mousser. Or to suds oneself up. So far, Trump’s entire presidency is just one long self-indulgent soak in a public bubble bath, with exceptionally loud jets.

In farming, if you’re still preoccupied with guzzling your own bathwater when the crops are ready, then you’ve already missed the season entirely. There’s no such gap between performative rhetoric and outcome. At least not one that reality forgives. Trump could stand to do a lot more listening than blabbing the next time he ventures into rural America, for precisely the reason he claims to admire it.