In early March, when Donald Trump delivered a national address before a joint session of Congress, the president covered a lot of ground, though he seemed especially animated on a specific topic.
“Joe Biden especially let the price of eggs get out of control,” the president declared. “The egg prices, out of control.”
The rhetoric was plainly absurd, since egg prices spiked in response to a bird flu outbreak, and presidents can’t simply snap their fingers and undo the effects of H5N1. Trump nevertheless created an unfortunate and ill-advised standard: The White House, the Republican effectively told the nation, is responsible for what American consumers pay for eggs, and it’s up to the incumbent president not to “let the price of eggs get out of control.”
In the weeks that followed, he kept going. On March 20, Trump claimed that he’d brought egg prices “WAY DOWN.” Last week, he echoed the boast.
If the president was gambling that Americans would reward him for lowering the price of eggs, it was a very bad bet — because as The New York Times reported, egg prices have reached record highs.
For weeks, President Trump has repeatedly boasted that his administration had managed to bring egg prices down. But new data on Thursday showed that egg prices at the grocery store continued to climb in March. Egg prices rose 5.9 percent over the month, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They climbed at a slower rate, though, after rising 10.4 percent in February and 15.2 percent in January. Compared with a year earlier, egg prices were up 60.4 percent.
Wholesale egg prices have come down, but retail prices — what American consumers actually pay at grocery stores — have climbed in recent months. The president, in other words, has not brought egg prices “WAY DOWN,” and if he thought picking this fight would work to his advantage, he apparently thought wrong. As for the larger context, I’m reminded of comments Barack Obama made last week during an appearance at Hamilton College. The former Democratic president said, “I think this is one of the challenges that we have — and I saw this even before the last election. I think people tend to think, ‘Oh, democracy, rule of law, independent judiciary, freedom of the press. That’s all abstract stuff because it’s not affecting the price of eggs.” Well, you know what? It’s about to affect the price of eggs.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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