The Trump administration this past week welcomed farmers and ranchers to the White House lawn for an agriculture-forward event, then posted something strange to social media.
“Curious how American farmers are benefiting right now — or exactly how much each state has saved?” the post read. Then, in all caps: “ONLYFARMS.GOV.”
Yes. An official government website named after OnlyFans.
The domain, which redirects to a White House agriculture page, is a deliberate branding choice, a knowing wink at the subscription platform that has come to be associated, in large part, with porn.
The OnlyFarms page itself is fairly tame by comparison: a searchable state-by-state map of estimated farmer savings, some bullet points about the One Big Beautiful Bill, and a note about a new SBA loan program bumping federal guarantees to 90% for agricultural lenders. No paywalled hay bales. No exclusive tractor content. Strictly institutional.
But it went viral almost immediately, and the internet did what the internet does. The White House, presumably, got the attention it was looking for.
What made OnlyFarms genuinely strange was the timing. American farmers are not, at this particular moment, flush. Fuel and fertilizer prices have climbed sharply as the ongoing US war with Iran rattles energy markets. Trump’s tariffs have closed off export markets that American agriculture had spent decades cultivating. The $40 billion in farmer assistance the OnlyFarms page cheerfully highlights is, critics were quick to note, largely compensation for disruptions the administration itself created.
The bailout tracks the damage
The relationship between American farmers and federal assistance has never been simple. Government payments have been a feature of agricultural policy for a long time. It’s a safety net built into the system to buffer against weather swings, jerks in commodity prices, and the volatility inherent in feeding a country and an export market. What’s changed in recent years is the source of the instability. The payments that spiked during the first Trump administration were explicitly labeled trade-damage compensation, an acknowledgment baked into a program name that the government owed farmers something for the losses its own policies had caused.
The math hasn’t changed.
But back to the website, a distraction from the real issues on-the-ground. The backlash came to it came from an unexpected corner. Rep. Thomas Massie, the libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican who has made a habit of irritating the Trump White House, did not find the branding charming.
“Your tax dollars are paying for the USDA to parody a porn site,” he wrote on social media. “They should delete the tweet and the URL.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene, not usually an ally of Massie’s, agreed: “This administration was elected by conservatives who are opposed to porn, rapists, and pedophiles yet protects Epstein class pedos and rapists.”
In the midst of all this, it’s perhaps good to keep in mind that the farmers themselves are a mostly different constituency than the terminally online. They were there on the South Lawn of the White House because they represent important economic players whose business has been roiled by the very people in power.
The site didn’t inform anyone. It didn’t change any policy or reach farmers who weren’t already at the White House. What it did was generate a blip in the cable news cycle in which the administration’s own base was dunking on it.
This kind of political branding has become is not communication directed at a constituency, it’s performance directed about one. The farmers at the White House were props in a content moment, not a key audience being informed or helped.
Farmers have historically been a reliable Republican voting bloc, and they’ve had a complicated relationship with this particular Republican president.
The tariffs have hurt. The trade deals haven’t fully materialized. The $12 billion Farmer Bridge Assistance program was, to some, welcome relief; to others, a Band-Aid on a wound the administration opened.
So the White House did what political communications shops do when the news is mixed: it made a website, gave it a cheeky name, and hoped the memes would do the work that the policy couldn’t.
The memes might have delivered. But was much else?