In the runup to the November election, eggs took on an almost mythical status, their price tags acting as both a kind of poster for the Trump campaign and a symbol for Democrats’ perceived inability to speak directly to inflation, the issue we were told most concerned voters.
In the election’s final days, the average retail price of a dozen eggs was $3.65, according to the Federal Bank of St. Louis.
A majority of voters, polls showed, identified Trump as the candidate they most trusted to guide the U.S. economy. Meanwhile, polls showed many felt fears espoused by his critics — that he would overstep the bounds of his presidency, act as a dictator, violate rights and reason while carrying out his promise to deport millions of undocumented residents, and surround himself with both incompetent sycophants and conflicts of interest — were overblown.
Well, Trump entered the 100th day of his second term as the Journal went to press April 29. Let’s take stock.
By all measures, Trump is cratering the economy he was entrusted to guide. His across-the-board tariffs, rolled out in trademark haphazard fashion, have upended the global economy. The S&P 500 is down almost 8 percent and has shed nearly $4 trillion in market value, wreaking havoc on pension funds and retirement investments, while economists everywhere predict consumer prices will spike.
The U.S. auto industry, which Trump had vowed to protect and bolster, is caught in chaos, facing tariffs on the 60 percent of its parts that are imported as his efforts to stymie electric vehicle production and unwind climate crisis policies are discouraging clean energy investment. American companies have already abandoned more than $6 billion in battery manufacturing projects, including a $1.2 billion factory in Arizona and another valued at $1 billion in Georgia.
Trump, despite Republicans holding a majority in both houses of Congress, has issued more than 140 executive orders, a record, with many attempting to stand in for the law-making and appropriations authorities the Constitution vests in Congress. In the case of the executive order attempting to nullify birthright citizenship, he is trying to nullify a constitutional amendment. Courts have already paused scores of these orders, deeming them illegal and/or unconstitutional.
His legally dubious Department of Government Efficiency, meanwhile, has created chaos in the federal government, nullifying grants for everything from fire prevention projects to cancer research, and gutting federal agencies. (While using dubious accounting and acting in opacity, it has also fallen woefully short of its stated savings goals, lowering its cut target from $2 trillion to $1 trillion and now $150 billion.)
And the deportation effort we were assured would initially target violent undocumented criminals has cast a predictably wide net, deporting more people without criminal records than with, according to scores of reports. Trump has gleefully (given the tone of his social media posts) deported people to a notorious El Salvadorian prison without due process and seemingly in direct violation of a court order. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deported multiple people here on legal student visas because the administration didn’t like how they exercised their free speech rights. And in perhaps the most egregious case — well, other than the administration’s apparent defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court’s order to “facilitate” another deportee’s return — the administration deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen over her father’s objections after her mother reportedly attended a “routine check-in” with ICE. The toddler was deported, in the words of a judge Trump appointed during his first term, with “no meaningful process.”
In these first 100 days, Trump has also gutted Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs, tried to legally erase the very existence of transgender people, attempted to bully universities across the country, pardoned some 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, including those who violently assaulted police officers, promoted his family’s crypto business in what experts call the greatest conflict of interest of the presidency, acted as an apologist for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and seen more than 2,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in an ongoing war he’d promised end on Day 1 of his presidency. Speaking of Day 1 promises, Trump pledged to end inflation immediately but it was up 2.4 percent in March.
All this reasonably leads one to ask, what’s the real price of eggs? As of March 1, the average price of a dozen was $6.28, which doesn’t include the cost of our nation’s soul.
This article appears in From Garden to Table in the Hall.
