Donald Trump said a lot of stuff while he was running for President in 2024. Now that he’s back in the White House, some of his top campaign promises are already falling by the wayside.
As The Associated Press reports:
Two months ago, in his first network television interview after the election, Donald Trump said he owed his victory to Americans’ anger over immigration and inflation, specifically the rising cost of groceries.
“When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press. “And I won an election based on that. We’re going to bring those prices way down.”
But in Trump’s first week back in the White House, there was little in his initial blitz of executive orders that directly tackled those prices, besides directing federal agencies to start “pursuing appropriate actions.” He is taking steps to lower energy costs, something that Trump hopes will have ripple effects throughout the economy. Otherwise, his focus has been clamping down on immigration, which he described as his “No. 1 issue” shortly after taking the oath of office.
“They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue. I said, ‘I disagree,’” Trump said. “I talked about inflation too, but how many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost?” [Pols emphasis]
Trump is banking on voters giving him a pass and continuing to blame former President Joe Biden for high prices.
Trump would lower grocery prices except…Joe Biden. Right.
Democrats have been quick to point out Trump’s disinterest in a key campaign promise. From NBC News:
Donald Trump vowed to slash grocery prices as soon as he took office, yet he has barely addressed the cost of food in the whirlwind of executive orders he signed in his first week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic lawmakers wrote in a searing letter.
The letter, addressed to Trump, accuses the president of backtracking on a campaign promise to lower supermarket bills starting on Day 1 of his term.
“During your campaign, you repeatedly promised you would lower food prices ‘immediately’ if elected president,” read the letter, which was sent to Trump on Sunday evening and shared first with NBC News. “But during your first week of office you have instead focused on mass deportations and pardoning January 6 attackers.”
Trump made inflation and the cost of food a hallmark of his run for a second presidential term, displaying everything from a teeny box of Tic Tacs at a rally in North Carolina to entire tables full of groceries outside his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club to express his commitment to lowering voters’ grocery bills. [Pols emphasis]
But the scores of executive orders Trump has signed since Inauguration Day only briefly touch on food, Warren, D-Mass., said in the letter, which was co-written by Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., and signed by a total of 20 Democrats.
“Your sole action on costs was an executive order that contained only the barest mention of food prices, and not a single specific policy to reduce them,” they wrote, citing a Trump administration memo that commits to helping with Americans’ cost of living by eliminating “harmful, coercive ‘climate’ policies driving up the costs of food and fuel.”
And how did the Trump administration respond? With more vagaries:
In response to the letter, the Trump administration said in a statement to NBC News that it was already working to lower the cost of living for families.
“President Trump immediately took action on day one to unleash American energy, which will drive down costs for families across the country,” said Anna Kelly, White House deputy press secretary. “He has already ended the failed economic policies of the past four years that skyrocketed inflation, which were rubber-stamped by Elizabeth Warren.”
Um, okay.
Trump has vaguely mentioned lowering grocery prices by intimating that his energy policies will trickle down to eggs, but experts say this is a bunch of hooey. Trump’s obsession with threatening tariffs on every nation that looks at him sideways is widely expected to increase the cost of goods for Americans.
Trump’s demands that the Federal Reserve “immediately” cut interest rates could also rapidly increase inflation.
Despite Trump’s lack in interest in curbing inflation and grocery prices, Republicans in the Colorado legislature are nevertheless trying to blame Democrats for rising egg prices. The egg problem is mostly about Bird Flu, another issue that The Big Orange Guy seems to have little interest in worrying about.
As Rex Huppke writes for USA Today:
Perhaps if we were dealing with undocumented Guatemalan chickens, President Trump would find time to address the bird flu issue.
Remember, Trump was returned to the White House by voters who were primarily concerned about the economy and the rising cost of groceries. To those voters who believed Trump actually cared about such things…well, the yolk’s on all of us now.
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USDA issued their predication on egg prices. AgWeb reported
https://www.agweb.com/news/livestock/poultry/think-egg-prices-are-already-too-high-usda-says-retail-egg-prices-could-ju