Updated Dec. 10, 2025, 10:59 a.m. ET
President Donald Trump and his team of advisers spend all day, every day, seeking adversaries to tangle with, so they can assign blame for any problem in America that Trump cannot or will not fix.
The truth is never an obstacle when Team Trump feels an acute need to affix blame anywhere but on Team Trump.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt demonstrated that yet again on Dec. 9 in the safest of spaces for her particular brand of prevarication – a televised interview with right-wing broadcaster Newsmax.
Leavitt touted what she called Trump bringing home “another huge win for our farmers” after he backed off on his disastrous tariffs in an October meeting with China’s president, Xi Jinping, who agreed to resume the import of American soybeans and other agricultural products.
Either Karoline Leavitt doesn’t know what she’s talking about – or she lied
Then Leavitt attempted to pivot to a time and experience that never existed, with a tall tale too tantalizing to be stymied by truth.
The real blame for the real harm done to America’s soybean farmers, Leavitt claimed, belongs to … former President Joe Biden, for problems caused by Trump’s senseless trade wars.
“President Trump convinced President Xi to continue purchasing, or begin purchasing again, American soybeans, which is something China wasn’t doing under the last administration because they had no respect for our president, Biden, or for the country at the time,” Leavitt told Newsmax.
Two possible explanations for all that: Leavitt is either so profoundly uninformed on this subject that she didn’t know her claim could be easily disproven, or she just liked the sound of her lie and didn’t expect, or receive, any pushback from the Newsmax hosts conducting the interview.
The timing makes this all so absurd. Trump had just announced a day earlier a $12 billion bailout for America farmers, paid for by American tax dollars, to help them attempt to recover financial losses caused by Trump’s tariffs.
The facts about soybeans and Biden are easy enough to find
Let’s debunk Leavitt’s lie about soybeans, China and Biden.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service website, which is under the control of Trump administration appointees, clearly shows that China has been the largest customer for American Soybeans for the decade from 2015 to 2024.
That, of course, includes the four years that Biden served as president. China’s peak in importing American soybeans in the past decade came in the middle of Biden’s term, at nearly $18 billion in 2022 – something Leavitt tried to claim never happened.
In any market with peaks, there are valleys, too. China’s lowest investment in American soybeans, at $3.12 billion, happened in the middle of Trump’s first term in 2018. And that, too, was blowback from his fixation on tariffs back then.
Guess what else happened in 2018: Trump had to fund a $12 billion bailout that year for American farmers feeling the economic harm of foreign countries cutting their imports of our crops because of Trump’s tariffs.
See the pattern here? Trump takes office, imposes sweeping tariffs, sets off financial calamity for American farmers, uses American tax dollars to bandage that wound and then backs down on tariffs.
Leavitt thinks that makes him a hero.
China spent most of 2025 buying soybeans from anywhere but America. In one particularly galling instance for American farmers in September, China purchased a quarter of Argentina’s annual soybean crop during the same week when Trump authorized a $20 billion infusion of American dollars into that country’s central bank to try to stabilize a wobbly economy there.
Why do farmers even need a bailout? Whose fault could that be?
Here’s what Newsmax didn’t ask Leavitt: If Trump is such a savvy player with tariffs, why do American farmers need a $12 billion bailout to help them recover from his economic policies? And why is this the second time in seven years that American farmers need a $12 billion bailout because of Trump’s economic policies?
I asked the White House’s press team on Dec. 9, after Leavitt’s Newsmax interview, for an explanation of how she got the story of American soybean sales to China so very wrong.
Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly told me in an email that “Karoline is right,” because Team Trump thinks Xi didn’t respect Biden. She also took some shots at Biden’s trade policies.
See the dodge?
Kelly didn’t attempt to explain why Leavitt claimed something that was absolutely untrue and easy to debunk with government information maintained by Trump appointees. That would have muddled the message that someone else – and never Trump – is always to blame for the harm Trump inflicts on American farmers.
Leavitt later touted on social media a write-up by Newsmax of her interview that quoted her saying this about Trump and the economy: “The best is yet to come.” That article didn’t repeat Leavitt’s lie about China not buying soybeans when Biden was president.
Instead, it just flatly asserted that China’s agreement to resume buying American soybeans, in Leavitt’s words, “reflected increased confidence in Trump’s posture on trade.”
That’s a weird way to describe Trump’s surrender on his disastrous tariffs after the harm was already felt by American farmers. But sure, China should have “increased confidence” that Trump would fold on tariffs. Because that’s what he does.
Telling the truth to Newsmax would have required Leavitt to place the blame on Trump. But Team Trump knows there’s always another adversary out there to blame. And the truth will never stop them from trying.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.
