How Trump made a 'very bad bet' with this 'plainly absurd' campaign promise: columnist
President Donald Trump outside the White House on February 22, 2025 (Joshua Sukoff/Shutterstock.com)
During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump relentlessly hammered then-President Joe Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris on inflation. Trump blamed them for high prices, including the price of eggs, and promised to lower them on "Day 1" if he won the election.
Trump's messaging on the economy worked, and he narrowly defeated Democratic nominee Harris by roughly 1.5 percent in the national popular vote.
Now, President Trump is claiming that he made good on his promise to lower egg prices, but MSNBC's Steve Benen fact-checked that claim in his April 11 column and stressed that egg prices for consumers, in fact, have only gone up under Trump's watch.
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During his 2025 State of the Union address on March 4, Trump told lawmakers, "Joe Biden, especially, let the price of eggs get out of control. The egg prices, out of control." Then, on March 20, Trump claimed that egg prices were "way down."
"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," Benen argues. "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 his column, Benen is careful to make a distinction between wholesale and retail egg prices.
"If the president was gambling that Americans would reward him for lowering the price of eggs," Benen explains, "it was a very bad bet — because as The New York Times reported, egg prices have reached record highs…. 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."
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Steve Benen's full MSNBC column is available at this link.
