Donald Trump owns the economic misery his terrible administration is causing - high egg prices symbolic of his failures

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Nicholas Kristof.

Maine Writer opinion:  I believe the media created the eggs=economy analogy.  Moreover, the myth was emphasized when on 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley interviewed a restaurant owner who said she was a Democrat, but would not vote for Kamala Harris for President because of how much she was paying to keep eggs on her business' menu. This fake argument, in my mind as nonsensical as creating an economy like "tulip bulb mania in the 16th century", nevertheless, somehow became as viral as the bird flu. 

But I believe the media created the political egg rational as a reason why Democrats did not prevail during the 2024, election. Now, Nichols Kristof in this opinion essay is backpeddling out of what the media created. In fact, Democrats did not create a counter argument against the "eggs" myth, but now playing political defense about what could have been done. Perhaps, a focus on Trump's serial bankruptcies would have been a good counter argument to the cost of eggs, but Monday morning quarterbacking, just my opinion. 

Kritoff: If there are Martian scholars examining the United States right now, they might be puzzling over the great Trump paradox.

It’s that President Trump is doing immense long-term damage to the United States by undermining democratic norms, vandalizing the federal government and siding with alleged war criminals in the Kremlin, yet if support for him falls, I doubt it will have anything to do with all this. Rather, it may be … egg prices.

American voters have been, to my mind, surprisingly comfortable with a felon who pardons other, violent felons and engages in reckless attacks on our rule of law and the global system that we created in 1945 and that has hugely enriched and empowered us. Trump doubled down on his, er, “cultural revolution” in his speech to Congress a few days ago, and about three-quarters of those who watched the speech approved of it to some degree (largely because those who watched were disproportionately Republican).

Attacks by Democrats on Trump as undemocratic never got much traction among working-class voters; they cared less about issues at 30,000 feet and more about economic and cultural concerns at three feet. So in a strange way, what may impede Trump and preserve American democracy is not popular revulsion at the historic damage that he is doing to America but rather alarm at the myriad banal impacts on our daily lives because of Trumpian mismanagement.

Trump’s tariffs, even if partly delayed, presumably will raise consumer prices and hurt the financial markets and thus our retirement savings; they will create a mess of supply chains for manufacturing goods. 

One gauge of what to expect: The latest estimate from the Atlanta Federal Reserve is an astonishing 2.4 percent decline in American G.D.P. in the first quarter of 2025.

Americans may put up with a president calling journalists enemies of the people, may even accept a president pardoning felons who club police officers while trying to overturn an election. But historically, they’ve not been very forgiving of presidents who preside over recessions.

What’s more, Republicans are now apparently preparing to slash Medicaid to pay for continued tax cuts for the rich. Sure, Trump denies up and down that he will cut Medicaid. Republicans insist that they’re just cutting waste and fat, that they’re simply promoting work requirements and the like, that they’re not cutting Medicaid as such but just the block grants to the states that pay for it.

But the unarguable fact is that the federal government would be providing less money to pay for health care for the roughly 72 million Americans on Medicaid. The essential reality is that the plan appears to cut health care for the poorest Americans so that the richest Americans can get a big tax cut — and this is not just morally outrageous but also politically fraught.

Elon Musk’s critique of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,”😡👿 accompanied by Trump’s making false claims of widespread fraud in the program, accompanied by talk of selling Social Security offices, seems even more likely to worry voters.

More broadly, while many of us would welcome a savvy review of federal staffing and an effort to prune regulations and the bureaucracy, Trump’s attacks on the federal government are being undertaken with a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel. Trump and Musk may think that federal employees pushed out of their jobs are faceless bureaucrats who won’t be noticed, but when they are health workers at a V.A. hospital, patients will notice. When they manage agriculture programs, farmers will notice.

Cuts in the Federal Aviation Administration and in the National Weather Service and NOAA will make flying less safe, James Fallows argues persuasively; at a time when extreme weather events are becoming more common, it’s bizarre to reduce our ability to predict hurricanes, tornadoes and heat waves.

In Western states, we’re already fearful of the ways the Trump cuts will hamstring firefighting during the next fire season. It won’t always be evident whether a plane crash or raging fire can be fairly blamed on Trump. But given that Trump and Musk have been exceedingly careless, mixing up millions and billions, and initially cutting programs for Ebola control and nuclear arms management before rushing to try to rectify those problems, they may not get the benefit of the doubt.

In short, Trump-Musk incompetence and recklessness may — just may — discredit the vandals in Washington and rein them in.

Is it actually reasonable to blame Trump for rising egg prices❓ Perhaps not. That has more to do with long-running avian flu than with tariffs or anything else he has done. 

But, what is true is how Trump has undercut the surveillance system for avian flu and Robert Kennedy Jr.’s skepticism about vaccines will make us more vulnerable to bird flu if we face a pandemic. But Trumpian mismanagement isn’t a major factor in today’s rising egg 🥚 prices. (But, the current unprecedented high cost of eggs is symbolic of his many failures including a series of bankruptcies.)

So would I rather voters rise up in outrage at Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine, his threats to NATO and his campaign to undermine democracy❓ Of course! But I welcome indignation of any kind. Maybe we can be rescued from our nation’s disastrous course by chickens.