President Donald Trump’s latest tweets drive the news in Washington and on the cable networks, but for one of his cabinet members, they don’t matter much at all.
“When I travel across, america, I don’t get questions about the things that everyone in Washington cares about,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said during remarks at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Tuesday.
Trump’s frequent use of Twitter to call out or insult his political rivals has been widely condemned by both Republican and Democratic politicians. An ABC News/Washington Post survey in June found that more than two thirds of Americans find Trump’s tweeting “inappropriate” and “insulting,” and half find them “dangerous.”
But Perdue said the people he meets outside of the political world don’t pay attention to the president’s online activities or even the latest scandals going through the news.
“I don’t get asked about the latest scandal, I don’t get asked about the president’s twitter account and his latest tweets,” Perdue said. “Those are not the things that are on the mind of the American people generally,” Perdue said.
Speaking during a luncheon at the club, Perdue told the audience about his Farm Listening Tour, which has taken him to more than 30 states and six different countries since he was confirmed as head of the Department of Agriculture.
“I don’t want to burst your bubble, but those are the things that seem to be important to the people of this town, which are never mentioned when I go listen to people outside,” Perdue said.
Perdue, former governor of Georgia, said that Washington is like a different world from the rest of America. The “other world is the world of real people outside of this area who don’t know what goes on here and — and honestly, don’t want to hurt your feelings, but they don’t care that much.”
During his tour of the states, Perdue held events with food producers, farm associations and youth councils like the Future Farmers of America, often attracting hundreds of people into small barns on cold mornings.
Perdue sees his role as a listener, commenting that most people don’t want “flashy, glitzy policy proposals,” or a “revolving door showcase of agendas,” but really “a government that works for them.” He wants to build the USDA into the most efficient, customer-focused agency in the government. He’d rather build the government to be like Amazon than the U.S. Postal Service.
The result of Perdue’s efforts will be slow, but he said the department is working on the types of things that are important to people in American agriculture, particularly trade, labor and regulation. Perdue said that the most recent deregulation report sent to the president this fall targets 28 regulations which if canceled or repealed will save the economy $56 million annually.
What farmers want in trade and labor policy isn’t necessarily aligned with Trump’s top-level policy objectives, like disrupting multilateral trade deals and slowing immigration. Farmers make around 20 percent of their profit from foreign exports, and have benefitted greatly from the inexpensive labor of both legal and undocumented Mexican migrants.
But Perdue has hope that the U.S. will be able to negotiate a new North American Free Trade Agreement that benefits agriculture and is also more fair to American manufacturers.
Trump has threatened several times in the past year to withdraw from the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, but each time Perdue and the others in the cabinet were able to convince the president to continue negotiating. Trump’s willingness to change his mind indicates to Perdue that the president has good leadership.
“As directed and forward and as forceful as he is on many things, he has what I think define as the essence of a great leader,” Perdue said. “He always leaves a little backdoor open, for comments that he takes into consideration and is willing to change his mind on that.”
When asked how he has fared when there is a perception that many cabinet members have feuded with the president, Perdue said.
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