Trump says farmers are ‘over the hump’
In Milwaukee speech, president downplays state’s dairy struggles
President Donald Trump raised $3 million in Wisconsin cash on Friday touring Milwaukee to promote a new trade deal he says will help rebuild the country’s wounded manufacturing and agriculture industry.
But in doing so, the president downplayed the suffocation felt by Wisconsin dairy farmers because of Trump’s own tariffs.
“We’re taking in billions and billions of dollars and I’m giving our farmers a chunk because they were targeted,” Trump told a crowd at Derco Aerospace on Milwaukee’s northwest side. “These are great American patriots ... the farmers (said) no it’s not like things are perfect but we’re with our president.”
Trump said the new trade agreement would help Wisconsin dairy farmers by providing access to Canada’s market, painting an optimistic picture of the Wisconsin industry’s future — which is losing almost two dairy farms a day.
Nearly 700 Wisconsin farms were shut down last year by owners used to enduring a brutal workload and hard times, calling it quits in a downturn now headed into its fifth year. In 2018, for the third straight year, Wisconsin led the nation in farm bankruptcies.
“Some of the farmers are doing
well,” Trump said Friday, speaking broadly. “We’re over the hump. We’re doing really well.”
A spokeswoman for the Green Bay-based American Dairy Coalition did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.
Trump arrived in Milwaukee still simmering about former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s recently reported opinion that the president didn’t know “anything about government” and less than two hours after losing his labor secretary amid furor over a child sex trafficking case.
The president set aside the controversy — for now — in Milwaukee as he pushed Congress to approve a new trade deal with Mexico and Canada and boosted his campaign’s coffers in a private fundraiser.
“We’re here today to celebrate the triumphant return of American manufacturing,” Trump said.
“We were laughed at by the rest of the world. We were patsies,” he said about previous trade deals. “It’s not China’s fault that we were stupid. It’s not China’s fault that we allowed it to happen.”
The president on Friday didn’t mention Milwaukee’s flagship manufacturer Harley-Davidson — a company he has repeatedly criticized for moving manufacturing overseas — or the Foxconn project Trump negotiated himself but has been scaled back, and its promise of 13,000 jobs all but dismissed.
But Trump did stress the importance of the state to his 2020 re-election, illustrated best by his exaggeration of the narrow victory delivered by Wisconsin in 2016.
“I’m thrilled to be back in your great state — a state that I won and we won it not so late in the evening. A little bit early in the evening, actually,” Trump said.
In reality, the Associated Press did not call Trump the winner of Wisconsin until 1:30 the morning following the election.
Fundraiser in Fox Point
Before his public comments, Trump stopped by a $2,800-minimum Fox Point fundraiser — one of two the president held Friday in the swing states of Wisconsin and Ohio that were expected to bring in $7 million by the day’s end.
His trip to Milwaukee came one day after a handful of Democratic presidential candidates barnstormed the city — ripping into Trump’s onagain, off-again effort to include a citizenship question on the 2020 U.S. Census.
Top state Republicans greeted the president at Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport and the president took a few minutes to greet National Guard members and fans — even signing one woman’s stiletto shoe.
The warm reception came even after Trump spent the last 12 hours ripping a beloved member of their party.
When one reporter on the tarmac asked why Trump didn’t like Ryan — the president merely grimaced and wagged his finger.
Ryan, one of the most prominent Wisconsin Republicans, was absent from the day’s events after Trump called him “atrocious” late Thursday in a series of tweets and blasted the former Janesville congressman at a White House press conference on Friday.
Trump lashed out at Ryan on Twitter following the release of excerpts from an upcoming book about the post-Trump Republican Party in which Ryan criticized him for not knowing “anything about government.”
“Paul Ryan, the failed V.P. candidate & former Speaker of the House, whose record of achievement was atrocious (except during my first two years as President), ultimately became a long running lame duck failure, leaving his Party in the lurch both as a fundraiser & leader,” Trump tweeted.
Ryan has not publicly responded to the president’s criticism.
Visit comes a year before DNC
The president visited Milwaukee one year before Democrats will descend on the city for the party’s convention to nominate a candidate to challenge Trump for the presidency.
Wisconsin Democrats are hoping to use a newfound momentum after sweeping statewide victories in 2018 to turn the state back to blue.
“One year from today, Democrats will officially nominate their candidate for president here in Milwaukee. But we’re not giving Trump a one-year head start,” Ben Wikler, chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said in a statement. Wikler said the party is organizing “a historic grassroots statewide operation now, so the nominee can hit the ground at warp speed next summer.”
Friday is Trump’s second stop in Wisconsin this year and the sixth since he was elected — a victory delivered by the Badger State.
While the state’s dairy industry backs Trump’s plan to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement because it opens access to Canada’s market, dairy farmers are skeptical the president will back off from tariffs if House Democrats agree to pass its replacement.
“President Trump has displayed a willingness to play hardball in order to secure concessions,” Laurie Fischer of the Wisconsin-based American Dairy Coalition said in a statement. “Nonetheless, he has reached a point of rapidly diminishing returns and every day unnecessary tariffs remain in place, more and more of the very people he claims to be fighting for — American dairymen and farmers — are being pushed into bankruptcy.”
Fischer said Trump needs to acknowledge when the fight isn’t worth the pain.
“A good general knows when the day is won and when to remove his troops from harm’s way. If Trump can’t learn the same lesson, he may find few farmers willing — or able — to stand behind him,” she said.
While Republicans are touting the effect of the proposed trade deal on dairy farmers, Trump chose to make his case at a manufacturer — another Wisconsin industry hurt by the trade agreement Trump wants to replace.
Trump visited Derco Aerospace, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, that provides parts for fixedwing aircraft and repairs them. It’s also accused of defrauding the government in a federal lawsuit by overbilling the U.S. Navy.
Trump’s visit came two days after Lockheed Martin agreed to keep its Sikorsky Helicopter Plant in Pennsylvania open following a request from the president.
Derco, 8000 W. Tower Ave., employs about 250 people in Milwaukee at a plant that operates an FAA repair facility and an inventory of more than 75,000 different aircraft parts.
Among aircraft Derco supports from its Milwaukee operations are the C-130 Hercules transport plane, the F-16 Fighting Falcon combat jet and the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. About 20% of Derco’s employees are veterans.
Derco dates to 1979, when it was founded by Eric Dermond as Aerospace Industries Inc. It became a subsidiary of Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. in 2002 and part of Lockheed Martin in 2015 when Lockheed acquired Sikorsky.
Derco is accused of defrauding the U.S. government by illegally overbilling in a Navy contract in a 2014 federal lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, which filed the suit against Derco, Sikorsky and another Sikorsky subsidiary.
David Newby, president of the Wisconsin Fair Trade Coalition, said the president’s proposal “fails to make the changes needed to stop outsourcing jobs.”
“The president needs to decide if he’ll work with Congress on a real NAFTA replacement that stops the pact’s ongoing damage,” Newby said in a statement.