So God Made a Meme...
Paul Harvey's 1978 "So God Made a Farmer" is suddenly everywhere. Each new iteration is darker than the one before.
Though his name is seldom being mentioned, Paul Harvey has become the source of one of the most prominent political memes of this election year. If Harvey is unfamiliar to you, you’re probably under 40, but by now you’ve heard his voice — at least as reconfigured by artificial intelligence.
Just in the last year, a particular piece of Harvey’s audio legacy — a speech he delivered in 1978 known as “God Made a Farmer” — has been reimagined first by Ron DeSantis’ campaign, then by supporters of Donald Trump (and distributed by Trump himself), in both cases to claim that the Republican candidates were quite literally anointed by God to lead America. The anti-Trump Lincoln Project then made their own version to warn of Trump’s dictatorial intentions.
The original is a powerful piece of oratory, and at about 2 minutes long it can be easily reconfigured into an ad. In truth, “God Made a Farmer” is less about God than it is a tribute to farmers, and you don't have to believe in a deity to find it moving; Harvey was a great storyteller and skilled orator. Astute readers will recall that I’ve written before about the 2013 Super Bowl ad for Ram trucks that used “God Made a Farmer”; the ad ends with the tagline “To the farmer in all of us,” the point being that you, Suburban Dad, can acquire some of that strong and virtuous rural masculinity by buying an absurdly large and expensive pickup.
But the new political use of Harvey’s speech is much more dark and divisive. While Harvey may have wanted everyone to revere farmers and Ram wanted everyone to buy a truck, Republicans are using this appeal to convince their own supporters that they are engaged in an apocalyptic struggle in which they have the blessing of heaven and therefore anyone who opposes them must be acting in service of evil.
Let’s dive into the varying iterations of “God Made a Farmer, starting with the version Harvey delivered in his speech. Since the text is not that long, I thought I’d go ahead and reprint it in full. Or you can just watch this video, which gives you a sense of what made Harvey such a compelling radio presence — the deep baritone, the pregnant pauses, the variations in speed, all giving it the feel of a mesmerizing sermon:
And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker." So God made a farmer.
God said, "I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board." So God made a farmer.
"I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait lunch until his wife's done feeding visiting ladies and tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon — and mean it." So God made a farmer.
God said, "I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, 'Maybe next year.' I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of haywire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. And who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, then, pain'n from 'tractor back,' put in another seventy-two hours." So God made a farmer.
God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds and yet stop in mid-field and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor's place. So God made a farmer.
God said, "I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadowlark. It had to be somebody who'd plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk and replenish the self-feeder and finish a hard week's work with a five-mile drive to church.
"Somebody who'd bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says he wants to spend his life 'doing what dad does.'" So God made a farmer.
Harvey died in 2009 after one of the most remarkable careers in the history of radio, one that lasted over 70 years. His shows News & Comment and The Rest of the Story were carried at their peak by around 1,300 radio stations across the country, though he appealed mostly to a certain kind of conservative midwestern radio listener, those who liked morality tales and tributes to God and warnings about the threats to America that, for all Harvey’s (mostly) right-wing politics, seem almost quaint by the standards of today’s crypto-fascist Trump cultists.
I don’t know how many listeners of Harvey’s original “God Made a Farmer” would have taken it literally, to mean that God was apportioning occupations one by one to fill particular needs. In Harvey’s story, the divine hand is a vehicle for the real message: his loving description of all the virtues farmers embody, the combination of strength, skill, compassion, caring, and commitment. The point of the story is simply to make you admire farmers, not to see them as warriors in a holy crusade.
“God Made a Farmer” goes political
But the idea of a religious battle was precisely what Ron DeSantis’ 2022 reelection campaign invoked when it released this ad, in which Harvey’s tribute to farmers is rewritten and run through an AI program to make something resembling Harvey’s voice extoll the alleged virtues of the Florida governor. Now it’s “God Made a Fighter”:
If God put Ron DeSantis on the earth to save us, you’d think He would have given him a little more charisma so he could rally more GOP primary voters to his crusade. But hey, mysterious ways, right?
In its text, this video actually posits DeSantis less as a fighter than a force of stability in uncertain times, referencing his (eventual) ending of covid lockdowns. He will “look a mother in the eyes and tell her that her child will be in school. She can keep her job, go to church, eat dinner with friends, and hold the hand of an aging parent taking their breath for the last time.” The still photos are full of DeSantis and others smiling and happy; there isn’t much “fighting” in evidence.
Trump takes it to the next level
Enough time had apparently passed since 2022 that some of Trump’s superfans, part of an online troll collective that toils to create pro-Trump memes, took “God Made a Farmer” and did the same thing as the DeSantis campaign, producing a video that Trump then presented to the world through his Truth Social account. Since even the barest hint of subtlety will not do, in this version it’s simply “God Made Trump”:
The adaptation of Harvey’s script is crude at best, adding absurdities and leaving in what should have been deleted. When Harvey’s voice says that Trump has arms “gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild,” your mind brings up the horrifying image of Trump, who once said that men who change their kids’ diapers are “act[ing] like the wife,” delivering a baby. It says God wanted “someone who can shape an axe but wield a sword,” neither of which Trump could do if his life depended on it. It’s full of angry language (“God had to have somebody willing to go into the den of vipers”), a weird mixture of the concrete (tariffs and manufacturing jobs are mentioned) and lofty, and the laughable suggestion that Trump “finish[es] a hard week’s work by attending church on Sunday.”
So then the Lincoln Project, which is its own kind of troll collective, made their version, this one called “God Made a Dictator”:
Now that we’ve reached the point where people are making fake Paul Harvey videos mocking other fake Paul Harvey videos, maybe enough is enough. But what matters here is that Trump and his supporters are leaning heavily into the Christian nationalist message, that he was not only anointed by God to lead, but that God wants Trump to smite his enemies and create a new version of America that is, if not quite a theocracy, at the very least a country in which Christians rule for Christian purposes and everyone else is allowed to be here only with their sufferance.
One might say that this is another moment when we shouldn’t take Trump literally; he’s just goofing around and trying to bait the libs. Yes, he’s doing that. But many of his supporters don’t think it’s a goof. They think it’s God’s honest truth.