Like Biden, Trump Does Not Control the Price of Eggs
Though he promised to lower costs on Day 1, Trump remains just as beholden to the laws of supply and demand as his predecessor.
When President Donald Trump won a second term in November, the economy topped most voters' concerns. Many felt the pain of higher prices, and they voted with their wallets.
Trump talked repeatedly about runaway grocery prices during the campaign, pledging that if elected, paying over $4 for a carton of eggs would be a thing of the past. "When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day 1," he pledged.
But after winning reelection, Trump shrugged that it would be "hard" to bring grocery prices down "once they're up." Now, just days into his new administration, egg prices remain high and are likely to go higher. As it turns out, anyone who cast their vote thinking the president could unilaterally change grocery prices was buying into a fantasy.
"Eggs are one of the primary drivers of food inflation," The Wall Street Journal's Patrick Thomas and Jesse Newman wrote the day before Trump's inauguration. The price of a dozen eggs hit $4.15 in December, twice what it was just 14 months earlier.
"I wish I had good news about eggs, but alas, I do not," Business Insider's Emily Stewart wrote this week. "No one knows when prices will come back down."
Since 2022, avian flu outbreaks in the U.S. have devastated the population of egg-laying hens. The poultry industry is no stranger to avian flu, but "the problem with the current iteration is that it's not going away," Stewart wrote. "Once one chicken tests positive for the bird flu, the entire flock has to be culled (as in killed). Some farms have been wiped out several times over the past few years, and so many places have been affected that repopulation—getting new chickens to get the farms up and running again—is increasingly difficult."
It's as simple as supply and demand: Facing a greatly curtailed supply, egg prices went through the roof—especially amid heightened demand during the holiday baking season.
But throughout Joe Biden's administration, Democrats blamed one of their favorite targets: corporations.
"Inflation is coming down," Biden said in January 2024. "The cost of eggs, milk, chicken, gas, and so many other essential items have come down. But for all we've done to bring prices down, there are still too many corporations in America ripping people off." As Biden may or may not realize, while the rate of inflation may have fallen, it was still higher than when he took office.
Just this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), along with 20 other House and Senate Democrats, sent Trump a letter complaining that he had not focused on food prices in his first week in office: "You have tools you can use to lower grocery costs and crack down on corporate profiteering, and we write to ask if you will commit to using those tools to make good on your promises to the American people."
Republicans, on the other hand, solely blamed Biden for rising costs. Granted, the massive increase in federal spending during the COVID-19 pandemic did contribute to the 2022 spike in inflation—one analysis found that 42 percent of the inflation could be attributed to government spending—but plenty of that spending happened under Trump, as well.
Collectively, the Trump and Biden stimulus bills "amounted to something like 20% of GDP," Desmond Lachman, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told USA Today. "That is the largest fiscal stimulus we've had in peacetime. That, I think, is a big part of the story."
Besides, inflation alone can't explain the price of eggs: According to the Consumer Price Index, the price of food as a whole increased 2.5 percent during 2024 while eggs rose a whopping 36.8 percent. Federal spending alone would not cause the price of eggs to so heavily outstrip all other food.
Instead, continually high egg prices are largely the product of supply and demand, as the poultry industry continues to contend with a shock to its supply. Trump could take certain actions that on the margins would help or hurt—for example, imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico would raise food prices even further—but overall, the president is just as beholden to the vicissitudes of the market as the rest of us.
Biden's inability to tame runaway food prices may have contributed to Trump's victory, but anyone voting for Trump believing he could truly bring down prices "immediately…on Day 1" was sold a bill of goods.
