Louisiana shrimper praises Trump tariffs as industry lifeline

HOUMA, La. James Blanchard has been making a living collecting shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico for nearly 50 years.

At about 12 years old, it was all he ever wanted to do, as he accompanied his father, a postman and part-time shrimper, as he spent weekends trawling the swampy waters off the coast of Louisiana. Blanchard loved adventure and splendid isolation.

He made a good living even when the industry around him collapsed. He and his wife, Cheri, bought a comfortable home in a tidy subdivision in the heart of Bayou Country. They helped three children get into college.

But eventually, when Blanchard turned 65 in February, he began to consider forced retirement, selling his 63-foot boat and hanging up his wall of large green fishing nets.

“The amount of shrimp wasn’t the problem,” said Blanchard, a fourth-generation shrimper who routinely hauls north of 30,000 frozen pounds on a two-week trip. “Profits are made because the prices are so low.”

Then came President Trump, his tariffs and his famously itchy trigger finger.

In April, Trump imposed a 10 percent fee on shrimp imports; that rate rose to 50 percent for India, America’s largest offshore source of shrimp. Additional taxes were imposed on Ecuador, Vietnam and Indonesia, other major suppliers to the United States.

Views of the 47th president from start to finish

Tariffs can slow economic growth, roil markets and increase inflation. Trump’s go-it-alone approach to tax and trade policy has put him before the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule by the summer in a major test case of presidential power.

Blanchard snacks on a bag of dried shrimp.

But for Blanchard, these tariffs became a lifeline. Wild-caught shrimp have seen a significant increase in price, from as low as 87 cents a pound to $1.50 or more. That’s not even close to the $4.50 per pound that U.S. shrimpers earned when adjusted for inflation in the 1980s, when shrimp were less common in home kitchens and a luxury item.

But it’s enough for Blanchard to shelve her retirement plans, and for that, Trump is grateful.

“It’s great to write all the bills in the world,” he said of congressional lawmakers’ efforts to support the nation’s dwindling shrimpers. “But nothing is being done.”

Blanchard said Trump did what he wanted.

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Shrimp is America’s most popular seafood, but that hasn’t boosted the U.S. shrimp industry.

Wild-caught domestic shrimp make up less than 10% of the market. This is not a question of quality or overfishing. A flood of imports that were grown on a mass scale, lightly regulated by developing countries, and therefore cheaper to produce, decimated the market for American shrimpers.

In the Gulf and South Atlantic, warmwater shrimp landings, the industry term, were worth more than $460 million annually between 1975 and 2022, according to the Southern Shrimp Alliance, a trade group. (These figures are not adjusted for inflation.)

A boat moves up a canal in La Chauvin.

In the last two years, the value of commercial shrimp fishing has fallen to $269 million in 2023 and $256 million in 2024.

Louisiana, the nation’s leading shrimp producer, has been particularly hard hit. “We’re getting to the point of being on our knees,” Acy Cooper, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Assn., recently told New Orleans television station WVUE.

In the 1980s, more than 6,000 licensed shrimpers worked in Louisiana. Today they number less than 1,500.

Blanchard can see the ripple effects in Houma of businesses closing, a depleted job market and drug overdoses.

Latrevien Moultrie, 14, fishing in Houma, La.

“It affected everyone,” he said. “Not just the boats, the infrastructure, the packaging plants. Hardware stores. Fuel depots. Convenience stores.”

Two of the Blanchards’ three children moved away, seeking opportunities elsewhere. One of his daughters is a law professor at the university. Their son works in logistics for a trucking company in Georgia. The couple’s other daughter, who lives nearby, is applying her advanced degree in school psychology as a stay-at-home mother of five.

(Cheri Blanchard, 64, a retiree from the state Department of Labor, keeps the books for her husband.)

It turns out that the federal government is at least partially responsible for the contraction of the domestic shrimp industry. In recent years, U.S. taxpayers have subsidized offshore shrimp farming to the tune of at least $195 million in development aid.

Sitting at the dining room table, next to a Christmas tree and other holiday items, Blanchard flipped through a series of scribbled notes — a Bible at hand — while he and his wife decried the lax safety standards, labor violations and environmental degradation associated with offshore shrimp farming.

James Blanchard and his wife Cheri like Trump’s policies. His personality is something else.

It’s especially frustrating that their taxes help support these practices.

Blanchard called it “a slap in the face.”

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Donald Trump has slowly grown on the Blanchards.

The two are lifelong Republicans, but they voted for Trump in 2016 because they viewed him as less evil than Hillary Clinton.

They were pleasantly surprised after taking office.

They had more money in their pockets. Inflation was not a problem. Washington seemed less harsh and intrusive. The couple were all for it when Trump ran for re-election, and they happily voted for him again in 2024.

The Republican National Committee’s reading materials sit on the counter in James Blanchard’s kitchen.

Still, there are things that bother Blanchard. He doesn’t care much for Trump’s brash personality and can’t stand childish name-calling. He couldn’t stand listening to Trump’s speeches for a long time.

Cheri chimed in to say, “You haven’t really listened to most of Obama’s speeches,” and James acknowledged how true that was.

“I liked his personality,” Blanchard said of the former Democratic president. “I liked his character, but I didn’t like his policies.”

With Trump, the situation is exactly the opposite.

Unlike most politicians, Blanchard said when Trump says he’s going to do something, he usually follows through.

Like tightening border security.

His wife shook her head and said, “I have no problems with immigrants.” “I have a problem illegal immigrants.” (He echoed Trump in blaming Renee Good, who was killed by an ICE agent last week.)

“I sympathize with them as a family,” Blanchard continued, but crossing the border does not make someone a U.S. citizen. “If I go 70 miles per hour on the highway in a 30 mile per hour zone, guess what happens? I get a ticket… Or if I get in that car and I drink, guess what happens? They put me in jail. So what’s the difference?”

There isn’t much they find fault with between the two — other than Trump’s “trolling,” as Cheri puts it.

Blanchard praised the lightning strike and arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as another example of Trump meaning exactly what he did and what he said.

“They received a reward of 25 million dollars while Biden was in office” [Maduro’s] “But it seems like this was done with the knowledge that it would never be implemented,” Blanchard said.

“No more trash talk,” he suggested.

Like all those years of unfulfilled promises by politicians promising to rein in foreign competition and revive America’s ailing shrimp industry.

James Blanchard on his boat docked in Bayou Little Caillou.

Trump and tariffs have given Blanchard his livelihood back, and for that alone he is grateful.

Before Blanchard gathers his two-man crew and sets sail from Bayou Little Caillou, there is maintenance and repair work to be done on his boat, the Waymaker, to honor the Lord.

He can’t wait long.