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Businesses are increasingly struggling to pay their debts, Fortune reported, with growing defaults threatening a quarter of the bond market.

Small-scale farmers across Africa — responsible for feeding much of the continent — are struggling amid a shortfall of diesel and fertilizer.

The new assessment suggests Iran has rebuilt operational capacity at 30 of 33 missile sites along the strait.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 7 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.Donald Trump just got hit by some really terrible inflation numbers, and boy is he in a rage about it. He erupted at a reporter for asking a reasonable question about prices, seethed at another reporter over his ballroom, and made an admission about ordinary Americans’ economic pain that was incredibly self-damaging. Yet we’re in a split-screen moment. Trump’s inability to resolve the Iran fiasco means his travails with inflation will likely keep getting worse. But we’re also seeing GOP chances in the midterms rebound significantly due to redistricting. So we’re working through all of this with Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who’s been arguing for months that Trump’s political problems on the economy predate the Iran war and won’t be fixed if the war ends. Simon, always good to have you on.Simon Rosenberg: Greg, it’s always great to be with you.Sargent: So we just learned that consumer prices spiked big time last month, much of it driven by energy prices rising due to Trump’s war. The consumer price index is up 3.8 percent in April relative to last year. That’s up from 2.4 percent before the war. But even if you take out volatile food and energy costs, prices still rose by the same amount. Simon, your quick reaction to all that news?Rosenberg: Yeah. I mean, look, Trump’s tariffs and his broader economic strategy had already caused the economy to slow, job growth to slow, and inflation to reignite prior to the war. And the more data that we’ve gotten, the more it’s clear he took an extraordinary risk by engaging in this war, given that things were already heading in the wrong direction in the economy, which we also saw in his polling data. And now we’ve had a couple months of postwar data and Trump’s polling numbers are collapsing even further. His economic ratings are going down. We have the lowest consumer confidence recorded in 65 years. And the inflation numbers are ugly. And so it’s pushing him and his party further and further away from the electorate.Sargent: Absolutely. And Trump knows he’s in trouble on all this. He was asked about all of it by a reporter and he lost it. Listen.Reporter (voiceover): Mr. President, you promised to bring inflation down. It’s now at its highest level in three years. Are your policies not working? What’s happening?Donald Trump (voiceover): My policies are working incredibly. If you go back to just before the war, for the last three months, inflation was at 1.7 percent. Now, we had a choice. Let these lunatics have a nuclear weapon. If you want to do that, then you’re a stupid person. And you happen to be. I mean, I know you very well.Sargent: Simon, I was unable to determine who this, quote-unquote, stupid reporter is. But what’s funny here is his anger over being asked whether his policies are to blame. You could not ask for a clearer example of a president actually being to blame for economic conditions. It’s never this clear—tariffs, immigration, the war. The connection is absolutely inarguable. Your thoughts on that?Rosenberg: Costs are up because of him. And I think the reason this has hurt him so much in the polls is that he promised otherwise. He promised to lower everybody’s prices and costs and to make lives better for everybody. And he’s done the exact opposite. And I think that’s part of the reason that he and his party are paying such a heavy price right now in polling. In economic terms, he’s done all these things, including cutting health care, that have hurt working people. And he gave himself a massive tax cut. And if you look at the tariffs, the tariffs are clearly part of a strategy to shift the tax burden in the United States from wealthy people to working people. And so it’s literally the case that he’s done a series of things that have done enormous harm to working people, farmers, small business people—and done a whole series of things to enrich himself and other wealthy people in America. It’s about as clear-cut as you can get, Greg.Sargent: Well, look, you’ve been a Democratic strategist for a long time, and for Democratic strategists like yourself, one of the things about Trump has always been that he’s really hard to hit on the economy. He’s a billionaire, but he just comes across to a whole lot of people out there—especially low-information voters—as some combination of an economic populist [and] as someone who’s not like other Republicans on the economy. He very consciously distanced himself from other Republicans on the economy in 2016, sort of did the same again in 2024. That plus the kind of deep cultural penetration of the image of Trump as this can-do guy who snaps his fingers and makes things happen—he’s never been easily pilloried as a plutocrat. But now it sort of seems like precisely because of that, we all have a tough time getting our heads around the idea that maybe Donald Trump is perceived as out of touch on the economy. And he is perceived that way.Rosenberg: Yeah. I mean, and I think your analysis is correct. In the 2020 election, despite the fact the economy was in the toilet when Trump ran for reelection, Trump beat Biden with voters who said the economy was the number one issue by 81 to 18. And he also beat Biden by more than 10 points on the question of who would be better for the economy. Biden won the election because of COVID, but even though he had crashed the economy, his economic numbers stayed unbelievably high in the 2020 election. So yes, you’re right.And I think in 2024, part of what gave that extra veneer of this idea that if you want to make more money, you go with Trump—which I think was very important, particularly in the Hispanic community and with younger voters who had just been through COVID and were worried about their economic lives—he also had Elon Musk and the tech bros right there to give that additional imprimatur of the people who were creating wealth and prosperity in America who were now on his side. And it was a very powerful kind of branding thing that he did. It’s all unraveled now.And you’re seeing this gradually. And what happened is, about a month or six weeks ago, you started seeing polling where Democrats were more trusted on the economy, more trusted on inflation, on fighting for working people. And now in CNN, Democrats had significant leads in all those measures, as opposed to just being up by a couple of points. I don’t know the trajectory of this, but I think we cannot underestimate the importance of what’s happening with inflation right now. It is spiking at extraordinary levels. And the reason why it’s breaking into Republican Party circles is that gas prices really matter for Republican voters, given that they live in more rural areas, they drive bigger cars. And so now this is crashing deeply into the MAGA world and it’s breaking through the bubble. And that’s why you’re seeing his numbers come down even further.Sargent: I want to get to the question of Democrats and the economy in a bit, but first let’s listen to more of Trump. A reporter asked him to what degree Americans’ financial situation shapes his thinking about Iran. Listen.Reporter (voiceover): When your negotiating with Iran, Mr. President—to what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?Donald Trump (voiceover): Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran—they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.Sargent: This is going to end up in a lot of Democratic ads. Note the claim that he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation even a little bit. Simon, this is somebody who is absolutely convinced that he and Republicans are politically untouchable on the economy, someone who thinks his ability to control what Americans think of him and the GOP is absolute. And I think there’s a real serious hubris at work here, kind of rooted in what we were just talking about, which is that for years, for cycle after cycle, he was untouchable on the economy—and he still thinks he is, right?Rosenberg: Well, and they also have said that they think the war is just going to end magically, right? Just the way that COVID ended. He kept saying COVID is just going to end one day. The war is just going to end and things are going to snap back to the way they were. And I think that is the widespread belief in the Republican Party now, that this is a temporary blip. And yet what we’re seeing in the inflation data in this report is that—remember, energy inflation is different than food inflation or different than other inflation because it affects anything that is transported. That also goes up in price. So it’s like a multiplier through the economy. It’s not just a singular pillar of inflation. And you’re starting to see that impact, for example, on food prices. Trump and the Republicans I think are in a place of extraordinary denial and magical thinking about the depth of the hole that he’s digging for them right now because of the war.Sargent: Well, not all the data shows that unfortunately, and I want to get to that. We have this new CNN poll, which does contain brutal news for Trump and Republicans. Trump’s approval on the economy is down to 30 percent among Americans—the lowest ever from either Trump term. Seventy percent disapprove. Among independents, it’s 21 percent approve to 79 percent disapprove—that’s just extraordinary. Meanwhile, nearly two thirds of Americans say Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in our country. Abysmal. And yet the CNN poll has the generic House ballot matchup at Democrats up only three points. Simon, that could be wrong—the polling averages have Democrats leading by five or six points. But still, how do you square those findings? Where are you on the claim that we keep hearing, that Democrats are underperforming in the generic ballot given Trump’s extraordinary unpopularity?Rosenberg: I think the generic ballot has been all over the place. I mean, to be fair, there were three polls taken in the last few weeks that had the generic ballot up high single digits and double digits for the Democrats. It’s been more choppy and bouncy than I remember in recent election cycles. But certainly, look, in a potentially wave election—which we may be in—there are two different dynamics, right? You can win an election just on voters being sick of the party in power and have the election that you want to have. And we’ve been having test cases around the election in all these special elections and other elections over the last 16 months. And things have been going very well for Democrats.But obviously it would be better if we also had a short, clear agenda about what we would do when we got back into power. And I think that agenda is available to us. Things like we would get rid of the tariffs, which would lower your prices, right? We would restore some of the health care cuts so you can afford health care again. These are not complicated things that we can run on that are necessary things for us to do. And my hope is that House and Senate Democrats come together around a simple agenda of things that we’ll do when we get back into power. As we did, for example, in the 2006 midterm—we had “Six for ‘06,” which was the plan that Pelosi put out, the six things that Democrats committed to do. There are different schools of thought in the family about this, but I’m in the camp that I think it would be smart for us to put out a simple, clear agenda about how we’re going to make people’s lives better and then fight like hell when we’re empowered to implement it.Sargent: You just brought up the tariffs and Democrats and I want to home in on that for a second. This is something you’ve talked about as well. Obviously health care—Democrats feel really comfortable running on. We almost joke about it all the time at this point. But tariffs, less so. You do see some Democrats attack the tariffs and Democrats have been pretty good in some of these congressional votes. And yet you don’t hear that many Democratic candidates in tough races—tough House districts or tough states—really going hard at the tariffs, which is just mystifying to me. Here’s my fear about that, Simon. I fear that a lot of these Democrats see these tariffs as somehow economic populist and therefore a little bit untouchable—that these Democrats fear that Trump is speaking to an authentic sentiment in the electorate that’s pro-tariff and anti-alliances and anti-globalization and anti-trade. And I think Democrats have to get over that. The tariffs are a fucking disaster. They caused the inflation and Democrats shouldn’t be afraid of saying that. Your thoughts on that? Am I right or wrong?Rosenberg: You know, it’s like most times when I join you—you raise interesting and complicated things. I do think I’ve been a little surprised that Democrats have put a lot more energy into the health care discussion than tariffs and inflation, particularly given what Trump promised, and particularly given that we know that inflation hurt Biden in 2024. But I will say that I’ve interviewed most of the battleground-state House and Senate candidates in the last couple of months. And the first thing that comes out of their mouths is tariffs and higher prices. And I want to just make sure your listeners are aware that in these races, here’s what they’re working with as candidates. All these incumbent Republicans voted for the tariffs and higher prices and challenges for small businesses and farmers. They voted for the war, which further increased gas prices and other prices. They voted for the health care cuts—which is, every day that we get closer to the election, those cuts are going to be more biting in every one of these districts. They all voted to fund ICE at unprecedented levels without any reforms. And they voted to cut taxes on the wealthiest people while raising them for middle-class people.I’ve been doing this a long time—34 years full-time—and I don’t know that we’ve ever had so much to work with. And because, to your point, Greg, I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a party so avowedly plutocratic and unconcerned with the welfare of regular people as we’re seeing right now in Trump’s second term.Sargent: Well, I’m really heartened to think that you think some of these Democrats in tough races are engaging on the tariffs. You mentioned a little bit earlier that Democrats are leading on the economy in polls. I agree that that’s an important thing—that it’s actually something of a milestone to have Democrats favored or more trusted on the economy than Republicans. But—and I want to ask you about this—I think the data is a little bit less conclusive than I’d like it to be. You sometimes see polls with Republicans up. And for that to be happening at a moment like this—when again, the case is so clear that Trump’s policies are to blame for economic conditions being so abysmal—for that to happen amid something like that is a little disturbing to me. And I wonder candidly, Simon, how much do you worry about the state of the Democratic brand right now? Obviously it’s not where it needs to be. Let’s face it. So where are you on all that?Rosenberg: Yeah, no, I agree. Let me make three points about what I think is going to happen with the brand. One is I think the further we get away from the election, the sort of ugly hangover from what happened in 2024 will be more in the rearview mirror and it’ll be less of a drag on us. Second is that we’re not running as a party brand. We’re running candidates. And when candidates actually are running against Republican candidates, we’ve been way outperforming the current fundamentals of the election. And that’s because when it’s an actual Democrat and an actual Republican and not the abstract brand, we’re doing much better. You also see that in a lot of the House polling—when you actually name the House candidate, our numbers get a little bit better. And then the third thing is, yes, I think it would be better for us as a national party to have a simple agenda. But what’s going to happen is that the candidates in these races are going to be running on a simple agenda, whatever it is, whether the national party does or not.Sargent: Here’s more of Trump. Here he starts talking about his ballroom being under budget. And then a reporter says the costs have doubled. Listen to what happens next.Donald Trump (voiceover): We’re right now on budget, under budget, and ahead of schedule. You doubled the size of it, you dumb person. You are not a smart person.Sargent: Simon, just to close this out, one thing I don’t quite get is why isn’t there more discussion of what a political disaster the ballroom is for Trump and Republicans? We just learned that vulnerable Republicans don’t even want to vote for the thing, which is pretty staggering. It’s not often that Republicans break from Trump. And here, on something like the ballroom, even though there was an alleged assassination attempt and even though the entire right wing used that assassination attempt as propaganda for the ballroom—none of it worked, and Republicans are running from the project. That’s a political catastrophe for them, though.Rosenberg: Look, I think Trump goes to China in a few days and he’s going to go there in a very weakened position. His tariffs—I mean, the economy, the data on the economy is terrible. His economic program clearly isn’t working. His war has failed. His tariffs, which were a central bludgeon he was using against the Chinese, were just declared illegal for the second time. He’s falling asleep regularly, looking like an old man who’s ready to move on and do something else. Once it becomes clear and understood by all that this war was a failure—as opposed to, like, people, you know—and it did enormous harm to our economy and to our standing in the world, it’s going to further drive Trump away from the American people.So listen, I am optimistic by nature. I think if you’ve been in politics for a long time, you have to constantly—you have to believe that you can make things better, right? That you can improve people’s lives, that you can improve the standing of your party. And I think that right now, the stench of failure around Trump is actually getting far more powerful than any sense that they’re in any kind of recovery right now. And if we put our heads down, I think we can have the election that we all want to have.Sargent: Simon, great to talk to you as always.Rosenberg: Greg, great to be with you. Thanks for your incredible hard work. The hardest-working man in show business. I’ve been calling you that for years.Sargent: I wish I could say that that isn’t true, Simon. Thanks for coming on. Rosenberg: Take care. Thanks, everybody.

By Joseph Mogul This article was originally published by Truthout Hillel has come under fire for coordinating programs that send students to Israel to volunteer with the military. Ryder Glickman’s first day as chair of The New School University Student Senate (USS) was an eventful one. His inaugural act was to call a vote on […]

In his 2024 campaign, Trump promised to hit China harder with tariffs than any other country, but has ended up more cautious.

Democrats—who mostly aren’t talking about climate change—are continuing to debate whether they should talk about climate change.The case against climate-centric messaging usually leans on years of fairly consistent polling. Relatively large segments of the population remain concerned about climate change but prioritize other issues at the ballot box. The point was reiterated earlier this year by the centrist Searchlight Institute, in a report urging advocates and elected officials not to focus on “climate” over more salient topics like affordability and lower energy prices: “While battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them.” Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego has similarly argued that talking about climate change turns voters off, so candidates are better off steering clear. “Honestly, it’s just so loaded,” he told Politico recently. “If our goal is to bring down our carbon footprint—try to restrain climate change—we need to win. And focusing on words versus outcomes, I think, is a real good pathway to losing.”The terms of this debate are confusing. At the most basic level, climate change describes the effect of rising global temperatures caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In U.S. politics, however, “climate” has become a stand-in for everything from tax credits for solar panels to hurricanes, the Green New Deal, disaster relief, ending fossil fuel extraction, multilateral processes, fuel efficiency regulations, and federal funding for certain kinds of scientific research—a long, disparate list encompassing both the problems caused by climate change and a variety of solutions for mitigating, adapting to, and dealing with it.Those advising Democrats to stop talking about climate often point to its prominence during the Biden administration. Democrats, however, have talked relatively little about climate change itself over the last decade. Even the barrage of ambitious climate plans proposed during the party’s presidential primaries in 2020 mostly focused on the promise of an exciting suite of green technologies to create jobs, outcompete China, reindustrialize the Midwest, and reduce emissions. And this was only part of the promise of Biden’s American Jobs Plan, which—thanks in large part to Joe Manchin—became the much smaller and more energy-centric Inflation Reduction Act. There are historical reasons why Democrats started talking about climate change in this limited way, which are too numerous to get into here. The short version is that by 2018, when Democrats won back the House of Representatives, the “climate” had become a shorthand in Washington for Democrats trying to put some kind of price on carbon aimed at reducing the biggest polluters’ emissions. Many of those attempts failed. In large part, those failures were the result of a full-frontal assault by polluting interests like the Koch brothers to turn “climate” into a strictly partisan matter and electorally sanction Republicans who dared to talk about it. Democrats consequently stopped trying to pass climate policies through Congress for the better part of a decade. When progressive climate groups and congressional candidates turned electeds proposed a Green New Deal, enterprising Democrats flocked to Green New Deal–ish proposals as a vehicle to tap into a genuine global zeitgeist: a widespread desire to mitigate the mounting threat of climate change. Under Joe Biden, “climate” was broadcast as a means to several ends. Committed climate hawks in the White House pushed for rapid emissions reductions. Progressive economists saw green manufacturing as a jobs and regional development program with significant benefits for supply chain security. Foreign policy hawks treated green industrial policy as a way to “win” against China—which handily dominates supply chains for solar and E.V.s—and reassert U.S. leadership on an important global issue after four years of losing credibility under Trump. The Biden administration did plenty of good, quiet work to address the realities of rising temperatures, but its public messaging on climate centered on attempts to inflate green asset values, i.e., use modest public funds to spur on massive private-sector investments in wind, solar, electric vehicles, and other lower-carbon technologies. As I wrote about at length last year, that strategy worked pretty well on its own limited terms. Voters mostly didn’t notice, though, and the Trump administration has now dismantled many of those policies, including the clean energy–focused portions of the Inflation Reduction Act.The so-called “climate hushers” are right about some things: The particular way that party candidates and lawmakers have talked about climate over the last several years clearly hasn’t furnished them with electoral majorities. It doesn’t seem to be a huge factor in the party having lost them, either. Democrats won in an election year where “climate” was a big talking point for candidates, including Biden; they lost an election where they barely mentioned it. By my lights, part of the confusion in this debate seems to be that climate change isn’t a political issue so much as the context in which politics happens. Whereas virtually every major political issue is on some level affected by the effects of rising temperatures—often dramatically so—“climate” is treated as a niche concern.Political pollsters accordingly survey voters about climate change alongside a slew of other relatively discrete issues. They don’t typically ask them about capitalism, for instance, and for good reason. Capitalism isn’t a traditional political issue so much as the foundation of—conservatively speaking—most issues that voters care about, from inflation to wages to health care costs. Climate change is likewise already shaping everything from housing and insurance markets to migration. That’s because we live in a world where capitalism and climate change are now structural features of existence. In the United States, at least, discussions of structural forces as such tend to be pretty academic. It’s instructive, actually, to compare discussions of climate change and capitalism. Putting aside any deeper connections between the two, the analogy offers a different way for politicians to treat “climate.” Socialist politicians—who are typically anti-capitalists—tend to start from first principles. They don’t ask voters to support them because they are socialists; they don’t ask them to believe in socialism or oppose capitalism. Successful socialist politicians, such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, stick to issues that people in their districts care about, like making life more affordable and expanding public services. There are of course other socialists who debate whether this approach represents a betrayal of socialist values. But a key factor in the relative success of socialist politicians over the last decade has been a willingness to speak concretely and with conviction about their plans for improving the lives of ordinary people. Importantly, they also don’t shy away from the label. Mamdani ran and won with the enthusiastic backing of New York City’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. “I will govern as a democratic socialist,” he said proudly in his inaugural address. “Call it Pothole Politics. Call it Sewer Socialism,” he wrote this week on social media, announcing that his administration had closed an inherited $12 billion budget deficit. “It’s government that delivers for the people who make this city run.” To govern according to their principles, socialist electeds find common cause with non-socialists who support things like taxing the rich and bolstering collective bargaining rights. One needn’t identify as a socialist to support the things that socialists do. Figures across the political spectrum frequently voice their disagreements with the worst excesses of capitalism, like extreme wealth inequality, wage theft, and insider trading.Republicans have their own version of this. Even though a majority of voters in the U.S. (54 percent) hold positive views of capitalism, successful right-wing candidates by and large do not campaign explicitly as capitalists. Some might flaunt their credentials as successful businessmen or their commitment to “free market principles,” but capitalism itself remains a somewhat abstract concept for people who haven’t spent their careers writing about its merits. Republicans are frequently eager to draw attention away from their fringe-y, extreme capitalist economic views and toward so-called cultural issues precisely because things like giving tax cuts to the rich are so unpopular; 64 percent of registered voters disapprove of how Trump is handling taxes. Democrats wary of being accused of being socialists may well be more likely to self-identify as capitalists than their opponents. Days before the 2024 election, Kamala Harris took the time to assure voters, “I am a capitalist. I am a pragmatic capitalist.”So should Democrats campaign on climate change? They arguably shouldn’t make canvassers knocking doors ask prospective voters if they believe in climate change. Advertising oneself as primarily a “climate candidate” probably isn’t a great strategy. “Fight climate change” is as intangible a message as “fight capitalism.” Although, as an eco-socialist, I agree with the need to do both, I also don’t think those slogans are especially helpful for building the durable, hegemonic majorities necessary to accomplish those goals. Avoiding that kind of rhetoric is very different from being cowed by the right into pretending that climate change doesn’t exist. The reality of the climate crisis is that it’s strengthening the deadly heat waves, storms, and fires that are saddling people across the country with higher electricity bills and insurance premiums. The Iran war has been a sobering reminder that the fossil fuel economy isn’t a great deal, either. Contra Trump, so-called “energy independence” hasn’t freed drivers from having to pay higher prices at the pump. Showering coal, oil, and gas CEOs with even more giveaways won’t make your commute less expensive anytime soon, or stop automakers from charging exorbitant fees at the dealership for useless features. You don’t need to know a great deal about atmospheric science to understand that summers are getting hotter, and—if you live somewhere like New Orleans—that the seas are rising. A few years ago, a friend in the Bay Area recounted sitting with her newborn in the bathtub to keep cool as temperatures reached into the 100s—highs that have been so rare there that many homes don’t have air conditioning. Going outside wasn’t an option because nearby wildfires were making the air dangerous to breathe. Leaders should help accurately interpret these phenomena rather than pretend they’re tragic isolated incidents. The right’s alternative is something we might call the climate politics of fools: blaming the deadly and disorienting effects of climate change on Jewish Space Lasers while defunding FEMA, and then, when utility bills soar in a heat wave, scapegoating solar panels and wind turbines.Populist policies to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis are thankfully pretty popular. They’re also too big—and too threatening to elites—to be quietly enacted by politicians claiming their only concerns are affordability and lower energy prices. Keeping people safe in a climate-changed world means fighting with Republicans and the monied interests that pay the GOP to defend their interests: a blank check to extract fossil fuels and accumulate wealth indefinitely. Denying the realities of a warming planet by keeping certain words out of your mouth won’t make the powers that be look the other way.  

Brett Neibling leaned against the door of his small office space, facing the array of computers and instruments that controlled several mechanical functions on his farm. The room was little more than an air-conditioned box, with scattered stools and a whiteboard on one wall. One of his farm dogs, a brown Labrador and known menace, idled outside the door.His roughly 2,500-acre farm in Highland, Kansas, in the northeast corner of the state, functions because of the equipment in this room. A machine to Neibling’s right facilitated movement of harvested crops into specific grain bins, while one to his left controlled the drying of corn, a necessary preparation before it could be sold. The office has another purpose: It is where Neibling calculates how to keep his family-run farm afloat.Soybean farmers have been hit particularly hard during President Donald Trump’s second term. The global trade war the president launched shortly after returning to office last year resulted in massive retaliatory duties on U.S. commodities from a number of major consumers, notably China. The Iran war has only made things worse: The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital global shipping channel, in March led to a massive spike in oil and fertilizer costs.When I spoke to him on an exceedingly windy day in late March, Neibling described the current economic situation for farmers as “tough” more than a dozen times. That situation is often compounded by the president’s chaotic social media announcements, which can move billions more or less instantaneously. “It seems like we’ve got a market around tweets sometimes,” said Neibling, who is the president of the Kansas Soybean Association.Some farmers say the situation is more severe than the 2018 trade war with China in Trump’s first term, when Kansas farmers alone lost nearly $1 billion in sales of soybean and sorghum, another major crop in the state.In the first eight months of 2025, soybean exports to China had fallen to around a quarter of what they were the previous year, and from the end of May through November 2025, the United States exported no soybeans whatsoever to China. Brazil, the largest producer of soybeans in the world, now provides the vast majority of China’s soybeans.“We’ve seen soybeans become much more of a geopolitical pawn than a trading discussion, than a market discussion,” said Jonathan Coppess, an associate professor of law and policy at the department of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.Soybeans aren’t simply a commodity in Trump’s second term—they are a crucial front in a global trade war and a key part of a grinding fight with China that will shape the future of geopolitics. Family farms like Neibling’s, moreover, offer a window into the costs and consequences of the president’s economic and foreign policy for regular Americans. Prices are rising for everyone, but farmers have been hit particularly hard. For them, the global is now local. The decisions made by the Trump administration may be temporary, but their consequences will be lasting. They are already devastating.Despite their unhappiness with Trump’s trade policies, many farmers haven’t lost their trust in him. This is in line with attitudes toward farming itself, which is an exercise in optimism amid myriad adverse conditions. Similarly, there’s a prevailing hope that the White House and Congress will address farmers’ needs in the long term—even if all evidence points to the contrary.Farmers have always struggled with the impact of political turmoil. Older farmers speak about the economic stresses they felt nearly half a century ago, during the Carter and Reagan administrations. The 1980s were defined by a full-blown agriculture crisis that resulted in a dramatic loss in farmland value, mass foreclosures, corporate consolidation, and rural flight.Supporting American farmers through federal subsidies has been a priority for the federal government since the Great Depression. Cognizant of farmers’ importance to the economy and as a voting bloc, even the Trump White House has attempted to insulate farmers from the full impact of its trade war. Last December, the administration announced the distribution of $12 billion in onetime payments to farmers. Around the same time, roughly $11 billion was dedicated to the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program, which particularly targeted corn and soybean farmers. Kansas received $888 million in payments through this program, the third-highest amount of any state; as of April, the state had received $773 million in payments.The farmers with whom I spoke in late March described the aid in existential terms. “Right now, my financial projections for the year are to break even, and that included the aid payment. Without the aid payment, I basically would have been looking at a loss of that same amount,” said Ryan Johnson, referring to the amount of the per-acre payment rate offered by the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program. Johnson is a corn and soybean farmer in Berryton, roughly a 15-minute drive south of Topeka.Soybean farmers have received massive subsidies in recent years. Coppess, for instance, noted that the massive payments farmers received in the wake of the 2018 trade war were followed by significant Covid-era assistance. In 2020 and 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided roughly $31 billion to offset losses for nearly one million producers across the country. In recent years, farmers have been able to rely upon the expectation that they will receive generous government assistance.But simply distributing payments during times of hardship—in amounts that may not even fully cover the depth of losses—will in the long-term “create a situation that allows us to kind of not make tough decisions or have difficult conversations,” said Coppess. The farmers I spoke to recognized that, in the long term, economic aid is unsustainable. “I kind of view it as filling your gas tank. You can take that money, it fills your gas tank, but immediately you start [pumping] from that gas tank. And then, unless you have the markets in place to keep it full, it runs out,” said Scott Gigstad, the chair of the Kansas Soybean Association.Many of them believe that Congress has shirked its duty by not passing the Farm Bill, the massive omnibus legislative package that governs agricultural, nutrition, and conservation policy and delivers subsidies to farmers and food assistance to those in need. (Roughly 80 percent of the Farm Bill is devoted to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the program formerly known as food stamps.) The most recent Farm Bill expired in 2023, and Congress has simply extended its provisions in subsequent years without updating or expanding it.The result, Coppess said, is a situation in which the federal government was essentially treating farmers as “pass-through entities”: The aid it delivers is immediately transferred to landlords, multinational fertilizer and chemical companies, and seed companies.“We’re going into this planting season,” Coppess said, but nothing has been done to fix the larger problems farmers are facing. “We haven’t tried anything—[just] talk about more payments and complain about the fact that costs stay high,” he said.“We’re going into this planting season,” Coppess said, but nothing has been done to fix the larger problems farmers are facing. “We haven’t tried anything.”Making a onetime payment to farmers can help keep them afloat, but it won’t solve the larger economic and geopolitical issues created by tariffs and international conflict. Other countries’ loss of faith in the United States as a trading partner won’t be addressed by offering money to producers when they can’t sell their goods internationally. Coppess compared the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program to a painkiller, treating a symptom, not an underlying cause.“Going forward, making payments will make it all worse,” he said. “You sort of use payments when you expect to get back to normal. There may not be a back to normal in this situation, in which case payments are really problematic.”Still, frustration with Trump’s trade policies does not necessarily translate to disapproval of the president himself. Initially skeptical of Trump, Johnson voted for a third-party candidate in 2016. But he found the president’s first term to be “effective” and supported him in the 2020 and 2024 elections. Today, he said he was “generally” pleased with Trump’s second-term performance, adding that he was “shocked by how much [Trump] accomplished” last year.Joe Newland, who is the president of the Kansas Farm Bureau, is less enthusiastic but still supportive: He’s “probably not [supportive of] 100 percent [of Trump’s actions], by any means—maybe not 75 percent.” But he believes that administration officials working on trade are “some of the best minds that we’ve had in probably many years.” There has been some recent good news. Last fall, China also pledged to buy at least 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans in the final two months of 2025, and at least 25 million metric tons in each of the three subsequent years—although these levels are lower than what China has imported in years past.“Do we have his ear all the time? No. I mean, nobody does, let’s face it,” Newland said, referring to Trump. “But if you have the Cabinet’s level ear, that’s huge.”The president has reneged on some signature campaign promises, such as not entering any new international conflicts, and ensuring lowered gas prices. But Nick Levendofsky, the executive director of the Kansas Farmers Union, observed that Trump was honest about his intention to implement higher tariffs throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, and that farmers knew what was coming down the pike.“Trump has always said that he’s going to do tariffs, you know, and we’re going to get into a trade war. If there’s anything he didn’t lie about, that’s it,” said Levendofsky.The journey from harvested soybean crop to oversize jug of vegetable oil in the pantry is long and meandering, involving careful timing and precision planning. It also includes regular field trips to local grain elevators, which store and occasionally process the grains and negotiate large bulk sales, essentially acting as a middleman between producers and buyers. Thousands of pounds of soybeans will cascade from the bottom of an 18-wheeler truck into a pit with an overwhelming clatter reminiscent of being trapped in a gigantic rainmaker, from whence they will be aptly elevated into huge multistory silos. Selling commodities is somewhat akin to a futures contract on the stock market—that is, farmers agree to a price with a grain elevator before transporting the product. Farmers already have a “limited window to manage risk” when writing contracts, said Johnson, who worked as a financial adviser before entering agriculture.   “Politics can go back and forth, and if prices are a manifestation of politics, then you have to take advantage of the opportunities when they’re given to you, because sometimes those opportunities don’t last very long,” said Johnson. This is true of fuel and fertilizer purchases, as well. Tom Giessel, who farms around 950 acres of wheat, corn, soybeans, and alfalfa in Larned, western Kansas, recalled a recent conversation with a local seller about purchasing urea, a nitrogen compound used as fertilizer. The dealer gave a price for the urea, around $860 a ton. When Giessel asked how long that price would be stable, the dealer responded: “Thirty minutes.”The tariffs and the long-term consequences of the war in Iran are not the only Trump administration actions affecting farmers. Farming has been plagued with labor shortages, particularly for manual work, in recent years, positions that are frequently filled by migrants. The Trump administration’s crackdown on legal and illegal immigration—as well as difficulty reforming the H-2A visa program, which supports bringing agricultural workers to the United States—has exacerbated those shortages.Even Trump’s cuts in foreign aid have affected farmers. Giessel called the functional closure of USAID, an agency that helped provide food assistance across the world, a “gut punch.” USAID was a major purchaser of grain sorghum grown in the state through the Food for Peace program.Kansas produces more than half of the world’s sorghum. Without a buyer, millions of pounds of milo were left on the ground in 2025, with no place to store them.“There are literally mountains of grain sorghum out here piled on the ground,” said Giessel.The upshot of this uncertainty for younger Kansas farmers is a persistent sense of dread. “The pressure on them is so great. ‘Am I going to be the generation that loses the farm?’” explained Newland. “Dealing with the weather, dealing with commodity [prices], dealing with the government, with the bank—there’s so many different things that’s weighing on them.”Indeed, over the years, farming has increasingly become an old-timers’ game. The median age of farmers is 58, and in 2025, 40 percent of U.S. farmland was owned by farmers aged 65 and older.Around 15,000 farms nationwide closed in 2025, including 700 in Kansas, which also saw a 10 percent increase in Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings, designed for family farmers and fishermen. Such challenges can weigh heavily on young farmers. Newland knows of half a dozen suicides within a 30- to 40-mile radius, most recently a 22-year-old who lived nearby.The economic instability of the current moment could also lead to greater corporate consolidation of farms—as more producers retire, their buyers may be larger companies rather than family members or new entrants into the industry. Even as the number of farms has decreased in recent years, the size of the remaining farms has increased, indicating consolidation of land into larger operations.Meanwhile, many of the old-timers are thinking of throwing in the towel. “A lot of these guys are wanting to get out of this, because they’ve been through a lot of hard times over their lifetime, and now it’s like, ‘OK, I’m done with this,’” said Levendofsky.But many, like Neibling, are determined not to give up, no matter how bad things are. “I don’t want to say it’s in your blood, but it’s in your blood. You know, it’s just like there’s that draw to the ground that you’ve been connected to,” he said. “There’s so much pressure on us anyway; there’s so many things that we can’t control that we’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis.”He added: “It’s tough right now.”

Ron Rosenbaum’s latest book, Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed, is not a biography. It is instead a “kind of biography”—which is a distinction with a difference. It is, in keeping with Rosenbaum’s long record of fine-tuned literary analysis mixed with historical and, yes, biographical detail, a study of Dylan’s songwriting and a reckoning with his moral, philosophical, and religious imagery and fixations. “Dylan has remade American speech, American thought, American attitude,” Rosenbaum writes. Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed is an examination of how he remade those things, with a particular emphasis on “theodicy” and what Rosenbaum calls Dylan’s “argument with god.” Steering clear of the usual cloud of hagiography that hovers above most writing about Dylan, it’s a book that instead focuses on what makes him unique. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Rosenbaum and I discussed Dylan’s lyrics, voice, and music; the moral and philosophical content of his songs; and our own fandom. I wanted to start by talking about one of the most controversial—maybe the most controversial—things about Bob Dylan: his voice. It is one of the most derided and mocked singing voices of all time, but I was really heartened reading your book to find that you are also a fierce defender of Dylan’s singing. There are still people in the comments section on YouTube who say, “This guy can’t sing! He has no voice!” I describe it as an “iron ore bucket voice.” It’s a rasp, but it’s a really human rasp. There’s no other voice like it. I’ve found that, strangely enough, there’s a region in what is now Russia—it was once Poland—where violinists like Jascha Heifetz came [from]. The only violinists in the world who could make their instruments talk like a human voice come from this region. And I have a feeling that far back in the past there was a Dylan [ancestor]. On the other hand, there are some really cruel things that are said about Dylan’s voice that just don’t understand that melodious bluebirds singing is not what he’s after. I sometimes joke that there are only really three covers of Dylan songs that are as good as the originals and only one that really surpasses it—Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower.” But it’s always struck me that more talented singers approach Dylan’s songs differently than he does. Before I heard Dylan sing a song, I heard Joan Baez’s cover of “Boots of Spanish Leather.” What a beautiful song—talk about remorse and regret. It’s funny, there were a lot of lefties who left the city and started giving me Weavers albums, things like that. Joan was not really particularly a leftie, but she came along with that. So I heard a lot of Dylan before I heard Dylan. That song in particular struck me dead. But what makes Dylan Dylan, he doesn’t go for these big brass cymbal-crashing anthems—he sings to another person, not to the whole wide USA. And the voice to me is utterly sincere, even if the persona also isn’t. He does have this thing about authenticity and sincerity. I think he’s a metaphysician. When he keeps telling me or telling everyone, “That person [Bob Dylan] doesn’t exist; I’m not there, etc., etc.,” it’s like a metaphysical trick to be able to say this is the first time I’ve sung it. Those people in the past don’t exist. You get the refreshment of authenticity every time. I don’t know if he believes it, but it kinda works. You mentioned listening to Baez and the Weavers covering Dylan. What are your early memories of Dylan himself? I lucked out and heard his August ’65 performance at Forest Hills, where he debuted “Desolation Row.” There was a song that no one has ever done. I called it a “funeral march for Western Civilization” [in the book]. Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.… I was just stunned by something completely new. There were rumors that they were booed. I was there. The band was not booed the way they were in Newport. People in New York City are more sophisticated than these folkie rubes at Newport. I know the first time I heard “Like a Rolling Stone” I thought, “Oh my god, he’s speaking to me.” And “Like a Rolling Stone,” I think is great because it’s both about the princess who loses everything and the greatness, in a way, of being out on your own. You only learn something by being out on your own. The so-called “Dylanologists” come in for a lot of deserved scorn, but I do think a lot of the songs are less complicated than people make them out to be. In his post-Jesus period, he did a lot of songs that were disconnected, [with fragmented phrases], you couldn’t make plain sense out of them. And then someone told me a story about when he had a movie contract and all these movie people—supplicants—came to see him saying, “What do you want, Bob? What do you want, Bob?” He would take out a cigar box and turn it over and dump it out so there was a snowflake storm of little cuttings, pieces of paper, stuff like that. It suddenly occurred to me that they were unified in some way by his consciousness. For some reason, every little bit meant something to him. He just put them in a song even if it didn’t make sense to anyone else; it made sense to him. The box become sort of famous. I first figured this out when I was trying to figure out the song “Things Have Changed,” which had 11 different voices. Twelve—at least that’s what you say in the book. They’re not connected, but it seemed to me that they were connected in his mind—that it all made sense to him. Someone once talked about the one consciousness of Dickens, how everything in Dickens in some way related in some way to everything else even if it didn’t make complete sense. There’s one consciousness of Dylan—in his mind, it’s all related. I think of John Ashbery and the abstract expressionists who don’t make sense to anyone but themselves—but they do in some beautiful way. It’s genius, I suppose. I find when I talk to people who are geniuses that they all say that they have some system they hang onto. It’s really not true. It’s really their own genius and talent, but they want to give people something they can hang onto.He always surprises you with what he can do with words—and music. It’s really interesting to me that he claims he’s not a melodist, that he has no real ability to come up with melodies—that he just steals from old music, old folk songs—and comes up with something great and immortal. One of the things that frustrates me is when people reach for descriptions of Dylan that omit the music—that he’s a “poet.” But he isn’t! He’s a songwriter. That strikes me as being at the core of what actually makes him great. I think a hyperfocus on his lyrics—in my opinion at least—often obscures more than it reveals. That’s very true. But I also think that if you stripped away the music and you compared it to what passes for contemporary poetry you would find that his work outdoes [it]. Why is it that contemporary poetry has never really grabbed anyone, really? Dylan managed to grab not only hundreds of thousands of people here but all over the world. That talent is unique. I don’t know of anyone who has that talent. I can’t speak for the poets, but it is true that his written work—Chronicles, especially, but also the Nobel Prize lecture—is often extraordinary. The Nobel Prize really makes you work! He had to write a lecture about what books influenced him as Mr. Nobel Prize in literature. He told them Moby-Dick and The Odyssey. And All Quiet on the Western Front, which you write about.[In my book], I was searching for what made Dylan Dylan—the dark, sarcastic, sardonic Dylan. The enemy of propriety, of official civilization. He said [in the Nobel lecture that] as a youth he read All Quiet on the Western Front and that it convinced him that civilization is a morass of butchery and that all the philosophers—Aristotle, Plato, Socrates—did nothing to protect us from the horror that we allowed ourselves to fall into. People wonder what Dylan’s so upset about. Why isn’t he nicer? In my book I find it almost impossible to separate who Dylan is and who Erich Maria Remarque is in the trenches. I lose track of it. He writes his most ferocious prose or poetry, whatever you want to call it, [on that subject]. I think I set out in writing this book in some way to find out what made Dylan Dylan, and I think curiously, unexpectedly, All Quiet on the Western Front really is the source of his dyspeptic view of civility.  From the very beginning, he always seemed intertwined with literature and literary sources as much as he was with the folk tradition—Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, whatever. He’s a great reader. I think from the time he was a couch-surfing guy in the Village and lived with these autodidacts who had 15,000 books—he would read all 16,000 verses of Byron’s Don Juan and learn to rhyme. He picked up everything.You know there’s an interesting parallel that I hadn’t realized until I found in an old anthology a story of how, in 1961 or 1962, when Dylan had just arrived in New York, he was at a Village party, curled up on the floor, telling people he was going to play Holden Caulfield in the movie [adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye]. Of course that never happened and probably was not true in any way. Nonetheless, we later learned that Salinger’s life was changed by being in the American Army unit that liberated Dachau when the ashes were still warm, and his daughter or his wife said that Salinger never got the smell of that smoke out of his nostrils. In some way, Dylan has that, you might call it “secondhand smoke.” I think that Dylan and Salinger are two people who helped change the language. Their saturnine, sarcastic, eye-rolling speech when someone pretends to civility is something that really wasn’t there in the ’50s when I grew up, but it’s there now. No one speaks straight anymore. They’re all aware that’s bullshit. This is a country founded on war, that participated in horrible butchery. Even if they were on the right side, that was something that was inseparable from being American. I think they’re responsible for black humor.…I did this book Explaining Hitler, in which I spent a lot of time with Jewish and Christian theologians about this question—why did God not lift a finger to save his people from the Holocaust? None of them were able to give a good answer. I think Dylan was aware there was no good answer. Theodicy is an important through line between that book and this one. I have a chapter title, “Dylan’s Argument With God.” I think a very serious but not advertised part of his sensibility is this theodicy. The epigraph of my book is, “God said to Abraham, ‘kill me a son’ / Abe said ‘man you must be putting me on.’” This is like the fundamental basis of both Christianity and Judaism, the sacrifice of Isaac—a defense of child murder. I go off into an attack on Kierkegaard, whose Fear and Trembling is a defense of the absurd leap of faith that allows Abraham to just about put the blade to Isaac’s neck until God, who is a prankster, almost, [stops him]. You interviewed Dylan during one of those arguments—on the Warner Bros. backlot, right as he was converting to Christianity. What was that like? He was having a lot of trouble. His marriage was breaking up. He had thousands of feet of film [he had shot for Reynaldo and Clara]. He hated me when I called it a “conversion”—well he didn’t hate me, he objected to me. But that was I think driven by his anger at the Old Testament God for failing to lift a finger to rescue his—capital H-i-s—people from the Holocaust. Not that the New Testament God did anything, either. But nonetheless, he was brought up as a Jew and taught that the Jewish God was all powerful, had superpowers, was just, was loving—and yet abandoned a million and a half children in the Holocaust. I think a turning point in my thinking about theodicy and this book was my interview with a guy named Yehuda Bauer who was at that time recognized as the foremost historian of the Holocaust. He was a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He said this thing I still can’t get over. He said, why do I need this God, who allows the Holocaust, who has superpowers and does nothing—he is either Satan or a nebbish, meaning a fool.I talked to allegedly pious and brilliant Jewish theologians—Emil Fackenheim being one of them; Yitz Greenberg being another. Yitz Greenberg was the source I believe of Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People. This was a pretty bad thing. Basically, Yitz Greenberg’s answer was, “Well God did nothing, but he was a presence there.” I remember Yehuda Bauer saying, “I don’t need a presence, I need someone to rescue my people!” You make a pretty provocative argument about the song “Mississippi,” arguing that it’s—at least in part—a song reckoning with his Christian period. He put three versions of that song on [The Bootleg Series Vol. 8—Tell Tale Signs]. The line that I think was the turning point was in the refrain: “Stayed in Mississippi, just a way too long.” I think it’s him saying, “I stayed in this Christian mishegoss just too long.” He also says, “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” That’s the thing—I think he came back more than all the way. “Mississippi,” for what it’s worth, is my favorite Dylan song, and I think it’s his best one. It’s certainly one of the best songs ever written about regret. I have a line in my book—Dylan owns regret. His songs of regret are some of his most beautiful. From the beginning, “Girl of the North Country”—he regrets the fuck out of this. He does another on Blood on the Tracks—“If You See Her, Say Hello,” which is, again, a post-breakup song where he just wonders if it’s possible that something can happen to bring them together again. Remorse in particular is his emotion.