Donald Trump’s secretary of agriculture boasted about falling egg costs in a Fox Information interview Monday, contradicting prior predictions from her personal division that egg costs would rise by a whopping 41.1% this 12 months.
Brooke Rollins advised host Brian Kilmeade that the price of eggs has “come down 44% since Trump took office.”
And whereas Rollins’ declare might need a hoop of fact, it’s not true for most individuals’s wallets simply but. NPR studies that whereas the wholesale worth of eggs has decreased, the value tags on the grocery retailer haven’t budged.
This isn’t the primary time Rollins has gave the impression to be out of contact with what’s impacting the American individuals, although.
When egg costs started to skyrocket because of the ongoing H5N1 hen flu epidemic, individuals have been disgruntled over the costs and pissed off that they couldn’t appear to search out eggs on grocery retailer cabinets as a result of for the reason that begin of 2025, over 30 million egg-laying birds have been killed in an effort to comprise the virus.
In response to the shortage of eggs and chickens, Rollins instructed that individuals begin elevating their very own chickens.
“I think the silver lining for all this is how do we in our back yards—we’ve got chickens too in our back yard—how do we solve something like this. And people are sort of looking around and thinking, ‘Wow maybe I could get a chicken in my back yard and it’s awesome,'” she mentioned throughout an interview on “Fox and Friends.”
Rollins additionally missed the mark when the Trump administration pulled $1 billion in funding for colleges and meals banks to buy meals from native farms. Regardless of this system benefiting youngsters’s well being and the pockets of the farmers who overwhelmingly voted for Trump, the administration determined to ax it altogether.
In an try and defend the choice, Rollins went on Fox Information (once more) and delivered a rambling, seemingly transphobic justification for the cuts.
Rollins in contrast this system supposed to feed youngsters to a different axed program that allegedly gave funding to educate transgender farmers about “food justice.”
She referred to as this an “effort by the left to spend taxpayer money that was not necessary.”
Nevertheless, in the identical Monday interview with Kilmeade, she acknowledged that one of many president’s largest voter bases is being hit hardest by his commerce conflict.
“There may be some bumpy times ahead,” Rollins mentioned. “There’s no doubt these farmers are concerned but there’s also no doubt these farmers believe in president Trump’s vision and in his leadership. No group has been more with the president from the beginning.”
Trump-supporting farmers in South Dakota are already feeling the ache—and a few of them have already gone to their elected representatives to plead for assist.
On March 4, farmers in Sioux Falls urged Sen. John Thune to finish the commerce conflict sooner reasonably than later. Whereas they’re hopeful that the president they voted for will ship, farmers are seeing their earnings dwindle.
“(Tariffs) will hurt our pocketbooks, obviously,” Rodney Koch, a soybean farmer north of Sioux Falls, advised Dakota Information Now. “But will we come out of it better in the long run? That’s the hope.”
Trump damage farmers with a related commerce conflict throughout his first administration. That point, he gave his voter base a bailout. This time—as Elon Musk’s so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity groups up with the GOP-controlled Home and Senate to make large cuts to the federal government’s price range—there’s no bailout in sight.
Scott VanderWal, president of the South Dakota Farm Bureau, advised Dakota Information Now that his bureau members are keen to deal with some “temporary pain” as long as they see some profit “on the other end.”
“But we’ve been careful to help the administration understand that with the current ag economy, we would prefer that the president uses the tariffs sparingly,” VanderWal mentioned.
