29th December 2025 - (Los Angeles) The Southern California News Group (SCNG) has condemned the Trump administration's trade policy as a costly failure, arguing that a US$12 billion relief package for farmers exposes the damaging impact of the former president's tariff strategy on the United States economy.
In an editorial published on Sunday under the headline "US$12 billion payout to farmers is a tariff‑based disaster", the SCNG Editorial Board questioned why a rescue package was needed at all if tariffs and trade conflicts were supposedly beneficial.
"If President Donald Trump's tariffs and trade wars are so great for the American economy, then why does he have to shell out, as he did this month, 12 billion U.S. dollars to farmers adversely affected by tariffs and trade wars?" the piece asked.
The board argued that the answer was straightforward: tariffs and the trade wars they trigger are never advantageous for the US economy or any other. Instead, they function as an additional tax burden on American consumers, rather than on foreign governments or businesses. "They are additional taxes - as if we needed additional taxes - on the American consumer, and no one else," the editorial stated.
The opinion article described Trump's approach to tariffs as fundamentally misguided, rooted in an outdated view of global commerce. It noted that, in an era of deep economic interdependence, tariffs no longer serve as a major source of federal revenue but instead disrupt supply chains and raise costs domestically.
Citing economist Jay Shambaugh of the Brookings Institution, the editorial warned that Trump's trade war would be "disastrous" for the US economy. It said such policies would harm consumers through higher prices, injure some of the country's most productive companies, slow overall economic growth and strain Washington's relationships with partners around the world.
The SCNG board characterised the US$12 billion payout as an attempt to mask problems created by the administration's own decisions, calling it an inequitable and insufficient response. It pointed out that much of the assistance was earmarked for producers of "row crops" such as soybeans, which previously had been exported smoothly to trading partners before the imposition of retaliatory tariffs.
The editorial stressed that the bailout would not reach every part of the already pressured U.S. agricultural sector suffering from the impact of the trade war. It highlighted the example of tractor manufacturer John Deere, which has estimated that tariffs will cost the company US$600 million in 2025, underlining that industrial and equipment manufacturers are also bearing substantial losses.
Concluding that the bailout was effectively a costly patch for self‑inflicted damage, the editorial argued that American taxpayers and businesses were paying the price for a tariff policy that had failed on its own terms.
The Southern California News Group is a regional media organisation overseeing 11 daily newspapers across five counties in the greater Los Angeles area, making its editorial stance influential in one of the United States' largest economic regions.