Surely one of the questions Farmers Union will pose to South Dakota’s gubernatorial candidates at tomorrow’s debate on the State Fair Freedom Stage in Huron will be How will the President’s plan to import more foreign beef affect South Dakota livestock producers and consumers, and what can you do as Governor to mitigate the destructive effects of that hare-brained and corrupt plan?
O.K., Farmers Union probably won’t ask the second part, at least not with those adjectives.
But we know Democratic candidate Dan Ahlers is ready to give the right answer—Trump’s plan stinks!
“What it really does is it hurts our farmers and ranchers,” Democratic candidate Dan Ahlers said Thursday. “And it doesn’t address the real problem out there, which is the monopoly on meatpackers” [Dan Santella, “Ahlers, Rhoden Look at Taxes, Beef, Data Centers,” KELO-TV, 2026.09.03].
Rebut that, Larry! Oh, wait—
“Quite honestly, I think it was wrong-headed, and I, it’s hard to be critical of Trump,” Republican candidate Larry Rhoden, who currently holds the office, said Thursday. “I think he’s done a lot of great things and made a lot of wise decisions. That wasn’t one of them” [Santella, 2026.09.03].
Correction: it’s hard for Republican sycophants to be critical of Trump without having to coat their real opinion in a bunch of cowardly and unsupportable praise of their dictator.
But Larry Rhoden still manages to man up just enough to agree with straight-talking Dan Ahlers and with every other South Dakota public figure who’s gone on the record on this issue. All four of South Dakota’s big Republican elected officials—Johnson, Rounds, Thune, and now Rhoden—say that Trump’s beef-import/communist-price-control plan is bad for South Dakota.
Ahlers’s and Rhoden’s agreement that Trump is wrong on importing beef should be all the more reason for Farmers Union to ask about Trump’s plan, to emphasize to the ag-flavored State Fair crowd the universal recognition that Trump’s beef policy is bad for South Dakota.