It's Monday, October 27th, I'm Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day.
The show that read a Wall Street Journal piece about how the big thing holding robots back is that researchers can't create an equivalent to the human hand and thought,
I'm actually okay that robots do not have humanoid hands.
Actually, I'd rather they never have humanoid hands.
On today's show,
President Donald Trump finds a private billionaire donor to pay U.S. military service members during the government shutdown.
And U.S. beef farmers beef with Trump over... beef.
But let's start with tariffs, one of Donald Trump's favorite things.
That view is probably not shared by most American farmers.
Farmers who are getting hit hard by Trump's trade war with China,
the predominant buyer of American soybeans.
Trump is in Asia this week, and on Sunday,
Chinese and American negotiators announced that they had agreed to a,
quote, framework of a deal on tariffs.
If you're like me,
that sounds a little bit like Trump's concepts of a plan on health care from 2024 and doesn't answer the real anxieties thousands of American farmers are feeling right now.
Remember that during Trump's first term in office,
a trade war with China resulted in price declines for soybeans hitting 30%,
which led to massive bailouts like $32 billion in 2020 alone massive.
And now farmers are facing more of the same, with no certainty of another bailout this time.