As farmers across America face financial heartache from Trump’s erratic policies, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue continued to blame farmers and discredit their hardship.

Trump’s secretary of agriculture called the number of farm bankruptcies — which has skyrocketed to near a record high — “relatively small.”

Perdue: “While we are seeing more bankruptcies, the overall number is still relatively small.”

Perdue: “You know if you start with two and you go to three, that’s a fifty percent increase.”

Perdue called farmers’ legitimate worries “emotional” and accused them of looking for a scapegoat.

Perdue: “I know that emotionally people want to talk about it. You got to have something to blame in farming, if you’re a farmer you’ve just got to have something to blame.”

Perdue: “Farmers, many of them, three, four, five years ago weren’t having to borrow any operating money. And then you have to borrow, and that’s a change that really reflects the psychology and emotion and it makes you feel like you’re doing a lot worse than you are.”

Perdue: “So we’ve had this trade war for a couple of years and a lot of people like to use that as a reason or an excuse, but these prices have been going down, there’s been economic stress.”

Meanwhile, farmers across the country continue to hurt because of Trump’s broken promises.

“We’re losing all this money, and we’re just supposed to like, be patriotic?” – Wisconsin corn and soybean farmer

“[Y]ou hear they get together and get some positive news out of D.C., or whoever they’re negotiating, and you have a little bit of hope, and a week later it blows up with a tweet sometimes or the Chinese say ‘no, we’re not going to honor that deal.’” – Iowa soybean, corn, and alfalfa farmer

“We [have] worked for years and years and years to build relationships and grow markets, and they can be destroyed with the stroke of a pen in the political realm.” – Iowa corn and soybean farmer

“I’m concerned because reading stories of other farmers either losing their farms or committing suicide just hits home that the struggle is real.” – Iowa soybean and corn farmer