Donald Trump suddenly has a big beef with, well, Big Beef.
After days of being hammered over his failure to lower prices on everyday grocery staples — and just about an hour after being pressed on the matter while sitting next to Hungary’s strongman leader Viktor Orban in the White House — the president unleashed on U.S. meat producers Friday, accusing them of artificially inflating prices and saying he’s ordered a Justice Department probe into the beef industry.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump said he’d asked the Justice Department to “immediately begin an investigation into the Meat Packing Companies” who he claimed “are driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation.”
The president went on to claim that American ranchers were unfairly taking blame for the actions of what he called “Majority Foreign Owned Meat Packers, who artificially inflate prices, and jeopardize the security of our Nation’s food supply.”
“Action 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. I am asking the DOJ to act expeditiously,” he added.
He subsequently claimed in a second post that something was “fishy” because “the price of Boxed Beef has gone up” even while cattle prices were stable or falling.
The president’s Friday afternoon rant came weeks after he floated — and quickly abandoned — a plan to have the government purchase Argentine beef in an effort to lower prices and also prop up the Argentine beef sector ahead of last month’s elections in the South American country.
“We would buy some beef from Argentina,” he told reporters during an October 20 media availability on Air Force One en route from Florida to Washington. “If we do that, that will bring our beef prices down.”
US beef prices have been stubbornly high for a variety of reasons, including drought and reduced imports from Mexico because of a flesh-eating pest in cattle herds there, as well as tariffs Trump has placed on beef imports from Brazil to punish the Brazilian government for imprisoning his friend, ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, for having attempted a coup to remain in power after losing an election.
But the plan met with swift opposition from the American beef industry as well as Republican senators from cattle-producing states.
One senator, Deb Fisher of Nebraska, said in a statement at the time that the Argentine beef proposal “wasn’t the way” to address high prices.
“Right now, government intervention in the beef market will hurt our cattle ranchers. The U.S. has safe, reliable beef, and it is the one bright spot in our struggling ag economy. Nebraska’s ranchers cannot afford to have the rug pulled out from under them when they’re just getting ahead or simply breaking even,” she said.
Vice President JD Vance was subsequently “bombarded” with questions about President Donald Trump’s new beef deal with Argentina during a lunch with Republican senators last week, leading the VP to reportedly ask if any senators had “questions NOT about beef” at one point.
Trump’s outburst over high beef prices also follows devastating losses for his party’s candidates in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races at the hands of voters who expressed anger over his administration's failure to address rising prices contributing to an ever-higher cost of living in the U.S.
Citing New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill and Virginia Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger’s laser-focused campaigns which centered on “affordability” just one year after voters cited higher prices as the reason for returning him to the White House in the 2024 presidential election, Trump complained that the Democrats’ focus on “affordability” was “a con job.”
“The Democrats are good at a few things, cheating on elections and conning people with facts that aren’t true,” said Trump, who then proceeded to rattle off a list of baseless assertions about the prices of this year’s Thanksgiving dinner staples and gasoline, the latter of which he falsely claimed is available to Americans at $2 per gallon.
“Prices are down under the Trump administration, and they're down substantially ... gasoline is way down, and the other big thing is ... inflation is way down ... we did a great job on groceries and affordability. The The only problem is the fake news. You people don't want to report it,” he said.
“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.”
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