Knee That Jerk: Rounds Says Trump Foreign-Beef Plan Hurts American Ranchers

Congressman Dusty Johnson immediately criticized Donald Trump’s still vague but definitely dumb plan to import hamburger and sell it under communist price controls. Now Senator Marion Michael Rounds joins the near-universal panning of Trump’s foreign beef support, although South Dakota’s junior Senator tries to shift the blame to some unnamed White House advisor:

U.S. Senator Mike Rounds said he believes the president got “really bad advice” and called the move a “knee jerk reaction.”

“The problem with it is markets don’t like instability, and in making that move, the price of cattle, that price just went down today. It’s a terrible message to send to producers out there that we’ll have a stable market over an extended period of time,” Rounds said. “We didn’t need that. So, I think whoever gave the president that suggestion as a way to do a short-term fix, the amount that he’s putting in is not that large of an amount. But it sent a really bad message to producers out here” [Jackson Dircks, “Rounds Calls Trump-Backed Foreign Beef Import Plan a ‘Knee-Jerk Reaction’,” SDPB, 2026.08.31].

Hey, Mike, what ever happened to “The Buck Stops Here”? The President of the United States has lots of advisors, and properly so, to provide all sorts of brainstorms and perspectives and diverse information and research to inform the President’s decisions. But we elect the President to evaluate all that diverse advice and make those decisions. If there’s a knee-jerk reaction, that’s the President’s fault, not some unnamed advisor’s. And if we’re going to knee any jerk over a plan that hurts American beef producers and probably won’t achieve its stated goal of lowering the price of beef at Hy-Vee (except maybe as a short-term mid-term election stunt), we shouldn’t knee the jerk who suggested it; we should knee the jerk who decided to do it.