Trump signed an order flooding the market with cut-rate imported beef. The very next night, his own guests sat down to a three-course meal built around a burger nobody could say the origin of.
The “End of Summer BBQ” brought Republican lawmakers, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the Rose Garden for a meal that sounded more ambitious than your average backyard cookout. It started with heirloom tomato and burrata salad, followed by a “Prime-aged Beef Burger,” before ending with frozen strawberry curd. Nowhere on the printed menu did it say which country the burger meat actually came from.
Trump’s executive order allowing 300,000 metric tons of duty-free imported beef into the country for 90 days had taken effect just one day earlier. His guests ate their untraceable burgers the very next evening.
National averages for ground beef sit at $6.89 a pound, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, up nearly 10% in a single year. Trump pitched the import flood as a fix, promising the foreign beef would undercut market prices by 25% ahead of November’s midterms.
Stay up-to-date with the latest news!
Subscribe and start recieving our daily emails.
His own party wasn’t fully sold on the plan.
Wyoming Senator John Barrasso told the New York Times: “Americans want U.S. beef on the table — not foreign imports.” Montana Senator Tim Sheehy said he’d spent a year trying to talk Trump out of it entirely. “American ranchers have been struggling against the packer monopoly for decades, and this will further harm them,” he said, before adding a line aimed squarely at Trump’s own voters: “Most of whom are MAGA Republicans.”
CNN’s NewsNight covered the dinner that same evening.
Host Abby Phillip cited a July SSRS poll showing 73% of Americans think Trump has the wrong priorities, calling the numbers “bad” for the president on air.
MeidasTouch reporter Scott MacFarlane, sitting on the same panel, spelled out the comparison. “He’s in the Rose Garden tonight eating fine beef, eating a three-course meal, out on the patio,” he said. “The hamburgers cost $6 apiece at the grocery store right now. The box of sugar cereal, which sometimes is dinner, $6 for the box of cereal, $4 for a loaf of bread.”
“It’s not the culture war c–p,” MacFarlane said. “It’s food can’t be purchased at the levels you need when you have two teenagers. They can’t afford college, they can’t afford healthcare. Fertilizer costs too much, which means farmers are struggling, which is why Iowa is in play.”
Kansas State agricultural economist Glynn Tonsor told CNN the import volume amounts to roughly 2% of total domestic beef consumption, based on USDA figures. “It’ll be some additional pounds on the market that we didn’t have before, and in that context, that could be good for consumers,” he said. “But I think it’s easily overstated how much it might help.”
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
