Trump’s first weeks in office leave much to be desired.
Mostly, Americans desire him to stop. While Trump has failed to deliver on campaign promises that could actually help people, he has doubled down policies that will make lives collectively worse. During his first days in office, Trump stripped back the rights of minorities, illegally fired federal employees, and begun his cartoonishly evil mass deportation plan.
Yet according to Democratic strategist James Carville, Trump has already broken his “number one promise.” Groceries. In an interview on NBC’s Meet The Press, Trump promised that he would bring down the prices of “the groceries” after bizarrely claiming to have popularized the term itself. He told NBC that he would bring grocery prices “way down,” claiming that he won the election based on this promise. A week later, he walked his promise back. In a followup interview with Time Magazine, Trump said that bringing food prices down would be “very hard,” saying that once they go up, they stay up.
While Trump may be crossing his fingers that Americans forget his promise, James Carville sure hasn’t. “Remember the No. 1 promise that Trump made, which he was going to do something about high grocery prices, specifically eggs,” said Carville to News Nation’s Chris Cuomo, “before he took office, he said, ‘Well, I can’t do anything about it.’ Well, thank you for telling us.”
According to Carville, Democrats should use this broken promise to hit Trump where it hurts. Carville praised Democrats for sending a letter to Trump lambasting him for attacking minorities and migrants while doing nothing to lower the price of food during his time in office. “During your first week of office you have instead focused on mass deportations and pardoning January 6 attackers,” read the joint letter from 20 Democratic lawmakers including Elizabeth Warren, “Your sole action on costs was an executive order that contained only the barest mention of food prices, and not a single specific policy to reduce them.” Trump’s only mention of food cost appeared in a memo that the blames “harmful, coercive ‘climate’ policies” for “driving up the costs of food and fuel.”
Carville told Cuomo that Democrats “shouldn’t get distracted” by the political noise that Trump has created as a smokescreen for his policy failings. citing Trump’s much maligned musings to claim Greenland and the Panama Canal through military force. Instead, Carville says Democrats should continue to remind Trump “You’ve got nothing done,” and that food prices have only “gone up since you’ve taken office.”
Food prices have certainly soared. The price of eggs has reached record high levels recently due to an epidemic of avian flu, and are expected to keep climbing well into 2025. The Trump administration has been criticized for potentially exacerbating the problem by ordering that the CDC, the FDA, and the NIH pause their communications with the public—potentially delaying crucial reports about the epidemic as well as response procedures to deal with it.
As Trump continues to roll out his policy plans, food prices are expected to climb even higher. Economists and corporate executives have warned that Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico will further drive up costs of groceries. Walmart CFO John David Rainey along with numerous others retailers have told consumers to brace for cost increases on other goods as well. Trump told his voters time again about his plans to “slash” prices and reduce inflation, and Carville believes it wise for Democrats to ask him to deliver. If he doesn’t, then perhaps even his most dedicated supporters will see him for a fraud.