A shrimper in deepest red Mississippi was begging President Donald Trump to lower diesel fuel prices before the whole shrimping industry goes kaput.
“Whether he wins midterms or not, we need you,” said Mississippi shrimper Maynard Dubuisson, a longtime Trump supporter who says soaring diesel costs are pressing fishermen and small shrimp-related businesses to the edge of disaster. “We voted for you. We put you in office and we depended on you. We have no other choice. There is no other choice.”
Dubuisson said marine supply stores, like shrimping vessels, are not “moving products.”
“The supplies for these boats cost a lot of money because of the high cost of shipping. Everything’s very expensive, and they’re not selling anything. Those stores are just about to go out of business also,” Dubuisson told Bulwark editor Will Sommer. He added that the same doldrums are hitting everything from processing plants to local grocery stores.
“Let me school you up on this: Baylor, Alabama is the shrimp capital of the United States. They have … 300 registered, permitted boats in Bayou La Batre. Not all of them are shrimp boats. That’s shrimp boats and fish boats, but they got these commercial fishing boats,” said Dubuisson. “But they’re not out here. They’re not out here. So that means they’re not buying groceries. This boat right here, that’s $4,000 to $5,000 worth of groceries every trip for this boat, okay? So that’s money that’s not being spent at … your local supermarkets.”
Supplies and tackle and items for boat maintenance usually runs $3,000 a trip per boat,” he said, but supply stores for these boats are now unable to sell “millions of dollars of stock.”
“I mean, they got millions of dollars of supplies in stock that’s not moving. It’s just sitting there idle,” he said. “… People can’t buy it because they’re not working. … All your shipyards. It’s not just commercial fishing. Look it up. Do some research. Ingalls Shipbuilding right there in Pascagoula, Mississippi. That’s a very huge business. They’re even having trouble, you know? It just … Everything’s going down.”
Despite all the doom and pain, Dubuisson said Mississippi fisherman, like many of Trump’s MAGA faithful, still “love” the presdient.
“We all still support him. We love him. We just — we’re all kind of, we’re disappointed. We’re disappointed,” he said, while adding that Republican fishermen still hope Trump will “do something about it after the midterms,” but only if Republicans win the midterms.
“If they don’t, then we’re probably pretty much in trouble,” said Dubuisson. “There’s a lot of things he’s going to do after the midterm election, if the Republicans win, but if they don’t win, he’s not going to do them because he’s not going to go — he don’t want to go to prison.”
It was Dubuisson’s argument that Democrats will begin “trying to put him in prison” if they take Congress.
