Popping through the McDonald's drive-thru this morning, because I am a plainspoken good American person unlike all the rest of you elitist bums, and I notice that my local outpost will not be serving salad for a while. This is because of the romaine lettuce plague that descended on the country over the last two weeks. (Ed. Note: To me, romaine lettuce always has tasted like an algae bloom.) How, you may ask, did this horror come about?

Is it because we are Making America Great Again?

Why, yes. From Wired:

For more than a decade, it’s been clear that there’s a gaping hole in American food safety: Growers aren’t required to test their irrigation water for pathogens such as E. coli. As a result, contaminated water can end up on fruits and vegetables. After several high-profile disease outbreaks linked to food, Congress in 2011 ordered a fix, and produce growers this year would have begun testing their water under rules crafted by the Obama administration’s Food and Drug Administration. But six months before people were sickened by the contaminated romaine, President Donald Trump’s FDA – responding to pressure from the farm industry and Trump’s order to eliminate regulations – shelved the water-testing rules for at least four years.

Nancy Nehring Getty Images

Despite this deadly outbreak, the FDA has shown no sign of reconsidering its plan to postpone the rules. The agency also is considering major changes, such as allowing some produce growers to test less frequently or find alternatives to water testing to ensure the safety of their crops. The FDA’s lack of urgency dumbfounds food safety scientists. “Mystifying, isn’t it?” said Trevor Suslow, a food safety expert at the University of California, Davis. “If the risk factor associated with agricultural water use is that closely tied to contamination and outbreaks, there needs to be something now. … I can’t think of a reason to justify waiting four to six to eight years to get started.”

As I left the drive-thru, I heard on the radio a story about how General Motors—which, because it is a modern corporation, is more dedicated to enriching its stockholder than in having anything to do with, you know, motors—is taking an ax to its North American operations.

Is this because we are Making America Great Again?

Why, yes, it is. From the New York Times:

The plants include three car factories: one in Lordstown, Ohio, that makes the Chevrolet Cruze compact; the Detroit-Hamtramck plant, where the Chevrolet Volt, Buick LaCrosse and Cadillac CT6 are produced; and a plant in Oshawa, Ontario, which primarily makes the Chevrolet Impala. In addition, the company will halt operations at transmission plants in the Baltimore area and in Warren, Mich. Some of the affected plants could resume production, depending on the outcome of contract negotiations with the United Auto Workers union next year.

That last sentence is almost assuredly pure crapola designed to knuckle the UAW preemptively. Anyway, about that Making America Great Again business:

The companies have also paid a price for the tariff battle that Mr. Trump set in motion. In June G.M. slashed its profit outlook for the year because tariffs on steel were driving up its costs. The company does not import a great deal of steel into the United States, but the increased demand for domestic steel has raised prices.

Luckily, President So Much Winning was able to snark those pesky Canadians in the name of all good plainspoken Americans who can't eat romaine lettuce at McDonald's anymore. From the CBC:

The Oshawa operation became a talking point for U.S. President Donald Trump during Canada-U.S. trade negotiations, according to a Toronto Star report about an off-the-record aside during an interview with Bloomberg News over the summer. "Every time we have a problem with a point, I just put up a picture of a Chevrolet Impala," the U.S. president was reported to have said.

Settling in for the blogging day, I came upon a story about the plucky soybean. The plucky soybean is in trouble, and so are the people who grow the plucky soybean.

Getty Images

Is this because we are making America great again?

Why, yes, it is. From Reuters:

For Louisiana farmer Richard Fontenot and his neighbors, the solution was a costly one: Let the crops rot. Fontenot plowed under 1,000 of his 1,700 soybean acres this fall, chopping plants into the dirt instead of harvesting more than $300,000 worth of beans. His beans were damaged by bad weather, made worse by a wet harvest. Normally, he could sell them anyway to a local elevator - giant silos usually run by international grains merchants that store grain.“No one wants them,” Fontenot said in a telephone interview. As he spoke, he drove his tractor across a soybean field, tilling under his crop. “I don’t know what else to do.”

Across the United States, grain farmers are plowing under crops, leaving them to rot or piling them on the ground, in hopes of better prices next year, according to interviews with more than two dozen farmers, academic researchers and farm lenders. It’s one of the results, they say, of a U.S. trade war with China that has sharply hurt export demand and swamped storage facilities with excess grain. In Louisiana, up to 15 percent of the oilseed crop is being plowed under or is too damaged to market, according to data analyzed by Louisiana State University staff. Crops are going to waste in parts of Mississippi and Arkansas. Grain piles, dusted by snow, sit on the ground in North and South Dakota. And in Illinois and Indiana, some farmers are struggling to protect silo bags stuffed with crops from animals.

The president* kept one campaign promise. All across America, lettuce growers and soybean farmers, and auto workers and parts salespeople, and everyone who tries to eat semi-healthy fast food, join in a swelling chorus to tell the president* that they are Tired of All This Winning. They yell it louder and louder, mainly to drown out the other voice that keeps greeting them with the sun each and every dawn, saying:

Good morning, suckers.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io