I list three statements. Tell me who said them.
Who Said What?
A. “Actions must be taken immediately to protect Consumers, combat Illegal Monopolies, and ensure these Corporations are not criminally profiting at the expense of the American People.”
B. Meat packers are “corporate criminals” and Tyson Foods is abusing its “corporate market power and raking in record profits by jacking up meat prices.”
C. Meat packers are using “their position as middlemen to overcharge grocery stores and, ultimately, families.”
Those are three statements from three different politicians.
Given the statements are so similar, any of the three could have said any of them. In fact all three could have said all of them.
The unpleasant answers are A: Warren, B: Biden, C: Trump.
Q: Unpleasant?
A: Yes. Especially for Trump supporters. How else do you describe Trump sounding just like Warren and Biden?
Beef Is Now Political Red Meat
The Wall Street Journal discusses the statements in its commentary Beef Is Now Political Red Meat
President Trump is doing his best Biden-Warren imitation these days, as he tries to shift blame for rising prices. On Friday he ordered his Justice Department to investigate meat-packing companies for driving up the price of beef.
Beef prices have increased 15% over the past 12 months, and Mr. Trump called this “fishy” on social media. He told the DOJ to investigate meat packers for “illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation.” In other words, round up the usual suspects. Memories can be short in these frenzied times, so maybe Mr. Trump has forgotten that Mr. Biden also directed his Justice Department to scrutinize meat packers for anti-competitive behavior.
Readers might want to know the real reasons sirloin prices have shot up. The U.S. cattle herd has been shrinking for years owing to drought and rising costs for ranchers. Meat packers have turned to Mexican cattle to meet Americans’ growing demand for beef. But the Department of Agriculture this spring suspended Mexican cattle imports after the screwworm parasite was detected in herds south of the border.
A winnowed cattle supply has driven up prices. Live cattle prices have soared 24% over the past year, which has compressed meat-packers’ margins. Their profits have fallen, not increased, Mr. President. The Administration’s 50% tariff on Brazil and quotas on Argentinian beef imports also contribute to higher prices.
The real beneficiaries of higher beef prices have been U.S. ranchers, not meat packers. Ranchers have been pressing the Administration to continue its ban on Mexican cattle imports and to use his national-security authority under Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act to restrict beef imports, as if Argentinian steaks endanger the homeland.
Mr. Trump garnered angry moos from ranchers when he proposed last month to increase the quota for Argentinian beef to help lower prices. It was a good idea. Even better: Remove all quotas and tariffs. As Joe Biden learned the hard way, attacking business won’t reduce the price of hamburger.
Sad Reality
Joe Biden never learned anything about the price of food (or the price of anything else).
Neither did Warren, and neither will Trump.
Trump’s Economy Now
The political reality is simple: “It’s Trump’s economy now.”
Trump loved attacking Biden. Now Trump is in the same hot seat, giving the same feeble replies as Biden and Warren.
Consumers saw through Biden’s lies. And Now Trump is telling the exact same lies as Biden.
Spare me the accurate sap about inflation being higher under Biden. It was. So what? Trump ran on a pledge to fix things and didn’t.
Housing is extremely unaffordable and the price of food keeps rising.
Housing may only be fixed by a hard recession. Part of the food problem is Trump’s inane tariff policy drives up the price of fertilizer, farm equipment (via parts, steel, and aluminum tariffs), and the price of food itself.
Labor Supply
The price of food and eating out is also a function of labor supply.
Please recall Trump’s immigration raids at meat packers. The Cult cheered.
ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Do They Do Now?
On July 27, 2025, The New York Times reported ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Do They Do Now?
For more than a decade, Glenn Valley’s production reports had told a story of steady ascendance — new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone. Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska.
“It’s a wipeout,” said Gary Rohwer, the owner. “We’re building back up from ground zero.”
It had been almost three weeks since dozens of federal agents arrived at the factory’s door with a battering ram and a warrant for 107 workers who they said were undocumented immigrants using false identification — part of a wave of workplace raids carried out by the Trump administration this summer.
Rohwer, 84, had always used a federal online system called E-Verify to check whether his employees were eligible to work, and Glenn Valley Foods itself had not been accused of any violations. Rohwer was a registered Republican in a conservative state, but he’d voted for a Democrat for the first time in the 2024 election, in part because of Trump’s treatment of immigrants. Rohwer couldn’t square the government’s accusations of “criminal dishonesty” with the employees he’d known for decades as “salt-of-the-earth, incredible people who helped build this company,” he said.
“I’m still furious about what happened to our people, but we have to keep the machines running,” Rohwer said. “We need more people trained and ready to go.”
“Trained by who?” another manager asked. “We lost every supervisor out there. If you ran a machine or checked temperatures or did anything important, you’re gone.”
Glenn Valley paid well, with an average hourly wage of almost $20 and regular bonuses, but the work was repetitive and demanding. Employees who came mostly from Mexico and Central America stood on a manufacturing line for as much as 10 hours a day, six days a week, and processed hundreds of pounds of meat through dangerous machinery in a cold factory.
Ever since videos of the raid spread across social media, Rohwer had answered dozens of calls from strangers who accused him of “stealing American jobs.” But Nebraska was experiencing a work shortage, with only 66 qualified workers for every 100 positions. Almost every one of the company’s new applicants was also a Hispanic immigrant.
The Homeland Security Department had accused many of the company’s former employees of working under stolen IDs, which E-Verify didn’t always catch if the ID number itself was valid. Rohwer had met with officials after the raid to ask for a better system, and they told him to keep using E-Verify. One agent gave the company a hotline number to call for hiring questions. Hartmann tried it once and waited on hold for 57 minutes before giving up.
“They said the only thing we can do is verify, verify, verify,” Rohwer said.
“But we’re already doing that,” Hartmann said. “How do we avoid ending up in the same situation?”
“They arrested 76, which doesn’t include the ones who were too shaken up to come back,” he said. “How does that happen if you E-Verify and do everything right?”
That’s a free link if you want to read the rest.
What’s the cost of meat packing labor now? What’s the cost of harvesting? What’s the cost of labor at small restaurants?
Trump won’t change, so don’t expect Trump to fix anything. Do expect more Bidenesque excuses as his own policies drive up prices.
Related Posts
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Hooray! Free money.
November 10, 2025: Trump Proposes 50-Year Government-Backed Mortgages, I Propose Something Else
The FHA head said the proposal is a “complete game changer.” Yeah right.
November 10, 2025: Consumer Sentiment Drops Again, Current Conditions Hit New Record Low
What’s the matter with these people? Trump says the economy is humming.
“The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under ‘Sleepy Joe Biden,’ and the prices are way down,” he said of his predecessor in remarks to reporters last week.
“We had the greatest economy in the history of our country,” Trump said of his first term in an interview with Norah O’Donnell for CBS’ “60 Minutes” a week ago. “But my second term is blowing it away.”
Hoot of the Day
Trump says he does not want to talk about affordability because it’s great.
Excuse me, but if affordability was great, Trump would not shut up about it.
Instead, he sounds just like Biden. The cult cheers.
