John Moolenaar chairs the House Select Committee on China. It is the most visible job he has ever had, and he has used it to do one thing above all: push tariffs.

He backed Trump's tariffs the day they were announced in April 2025. He wrote his own bill, the Restoring Trade Fairness Act, to revoke China's normal trade status and impose tariffs of 35% to 100% depending on the product. And in February 2026, when the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs Trump had imposed under an emergency law, Moolenaar's response was to demand Congress pass his bill instead:

"Tariffs on China level the playing field for Americans, and President Trump has demonstrated, since his first administration, that tariffs are one of the few meaningful tools in the U.S. economic security toolkit for confronting China."

Level the playing field for which Americans? Let's check with the ones he represents.

Year three of the losses

Michigan's 2nd District is farm country. Statewide, Michigan has more than 10,000 soybean farms generating over $1 billion a year, and Gratiot County — which sits entirely inside Moolenaar's district — is one of the state's leading soybean producers. Michigan's farm exports run about $2.6 billion a year.

Here is where that stands, as of February 2026:

• Michigan farmers are in the third straight year of significant losses in the soybean market, per the American Soybean Association.
• China — the largest buyer of American soybeans — stopped buying U.S. soybeans and switched to Brazil.
• The National Soybean Association estimated a 52% decline in soybean exports because of the trade war.
• USDA forecast that 2026 wouldn't look much better than the two years before it.
• The average tariff rate on the inputs farmers buy rose from 1% to 12%.

Read that last one twice. Farmers got hit on both ends: the stuff they buy costs more, and the biggest customer for what they sell walked away.

There was a bailout — a $12 billion Farmer Bridge Assistance program. Soybean growers got less out of it than rice and cotton growers did. That's the deal Michigan farmers were handed: lose the market, pay more for fertilizer and equipment, and stand in line behind other states for the check.

None of this is a surprise. It's the same thing that happened during Trump's first term, when China shifted its soybean buying to Brazil and never fully came back. Everyone in agriculture knew what retaliation looks like, because they had already lived it once.

Moolenaar's answer: more of it

The Supreme Court threw out Trump's emergency tariffs in February 2026, ruling that the 1977 law he used never gave a president that power. The government now owes roughly $166 billion in refunds — money going to Apple, Ford, Nike, Amazon and General Motors, the importers who paid the tariffs, not to the farmers who lost the export market and not to anyone who paid more at the store.

That ruling was a chance to reconsider. Moolenaar's take, issued the same day, was that Congress should quickly pass the Restoring Trade Fairness Act — his 35%-to-100% tariff bill — "to put American workers first."

He is entitled to that view. What he is not entitled to is pretending the bill is free. A tariff is a tax collected at the border, and China's answer to tariffs, every single time, has been to stop buying American crops. His own district is the proof.

Minnesota Republicans have been running the same play — Brad Finstad spent two straight years calling the damage "short term" while southern Minnesota kept paying, and Michelle Fischbach got booed at Farmfest for defending tariffs the Supreme Court had already thrown out. Moolenaar's version is louder, because he's the one holding the gavel.

And then he went after the farm trade group

In April 2026, Moolenaar sent a letter to the United States Heartland China Association — a Midwest nonprofit whose work includes exactly the kind of thing farm groups do to keep an export market alive. His committee's own description of the letter lists what it was asking about: "agricultural roundtables, business seminars, student forums and trips to China hosting U.S. elected officials."

He asked for "verifiable assurances that the organization is not acting as an unregistered agent" of the Chinese government, demanded records going back to 2021, and told it to cut its partnerships:

"Heartland China should immediately terminate its relationship with all CCP United Front actors and cease serving as a pawn in the subnational influence operations of our foremost foreign adversary."

The organization says he has it wrong. Executive Director Min Fan told Domino Theory the group "look[s] forward to clarifying the committee's misunderstanding of our important work," and vice chair Susan Thornton said staff were working with attorneys "to dispel the Committee's misunderstanding of the organization's work."

No charges have been filed. No finding has been made. What exists is a letter from a committee chairman, and a nonprofit that now has to pay lawyers.

Whatever you think of the merits, notice the shape of it. A Midwest farm-state member of Congress spent April 2026 demanding five years of records from a Midwest group that ran agricultural roundtables with China — during the third straight year in which Midwest farmers could not sell to China.

Who this is actually working for

Moolenaar sits on the House Appropriations Committee, including the subcommittee that writes the budget for agriculture and the FDA. That is real power over farm programs. Agricultural PACs fund him accordingly — the Michigan Sugar Company growers' PAC and the National Association of Chemical Distributors have each given him $40,000, and the National Pork Producers Council and Farm Credit Council PACs are on the list too.

So he has the committee seat, the money, the gavel, and the national platform. What Michigan farmers have is a third year of a closed export market, inputs that cost twelve times more in tariffs than they did, and a bailout that shorted soybeans.

Moolenaar says tariffs level the playing field. Somebody should ask him whose field he means.

Sources

• Soybean tariffs challenge Michigan growers — Madison Merrell, Capital News Service / Spartan Newsroom, February 20, 2026. Photo: Michigan Agricultural Council.
• Moolenaar: "Tariffs on China Level the Playing Field for Americans" — House Select Committee on the CCP, February 20, 2026
• Select Committee Investigates Heartland China Association — House Select Committee on the CCP, April 20, 2026