Hey Trump, Where's the Beef?

In 1984, Wendy's paid an eighty-one-year-old manicurist named Clara Peller to peer under a comically large hamburger bun and demand to know where the beef was. The question has aged well. Forty-two years later the average pound of ground beef costs $6.89, all-fresh retail beef just set a July record at $8.90 a pound, and the President of the United States spent last Friday explaining his plan to fix it: importing somebody else's.

Let us be fair before we are anything else, because the herd math is genuinely not all his. The American cattle herd is the smallest it has been in seventy-five years, worn down by years of drought, interest rates that make holding a heifer back for breeding a luxury, and a screwworm outbreak that closed the border to Mexican cattle. The cycle that produced this shortage started long before January 2025. A president inherits his cattle the way he inherits his deficits, and this one inherited few of either kind of cow.

But he also inherited a price tag of $5.55, and he ran against it. Ground beef cost $3.97 a pound when Joe Biden took office and $5.55 when he left, a forty percent climb in four years that the challenger correctly called an outrage and promised to reverse, starting on day one. Eighteen months later the same pound costs $6.89. That is another twenty-four percent, a faster annual clip than the outrage it replaced, achieved while tariffs raised the price of the diesel, fertilizer, and equipment ranchers buy, and while retaliation shrank the export markets they sell into. Beef exports are down. Beef imports are up. The word for this, in the campaign's own vocabulary, would not have been printable.

The fix arrived in two installments. In February, an executive order quadrupled the tariff-free quota for Argentine beef, adding 80,000 metric tons, which is about six-tenths of one percent of the American supply, a rounding error with a press release. Then last Friday came the big one: 300,000 metric tons of imported lean beef trimmings, tariff-free for ninety days, which the President says foreign exporters have committed to sell at twenty-five percent below current market prices. Committed to whom, in what document, enforced by what mechanism, no one has said, because no counterparty has been named. Five days later the Agriculture Secretary said the conversations were still going on and that she had not discussed the announcement with the President, who declined to say which countries were involved because there are a few. What is verifiable is that cattle futures fell the same day, which means the one price the plan reliably lowered so far is the one the rancher gets.

The people this lands on are not a constituency the President found on the other side. America's farm-dependent counties voted for him at 77.7 percent in 2024, more than in 2020. The cattlemen's own association sends roughly nine of every ten campaign dollars to Republicans. That association's chief executive now says flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market beef is not the way to rebuild the American herd, and the association itself says it cannot stand behind the President while he undercuts the future of family farmers and ranchers. Republican senators from Montana, Nebraska, Kansas and Wyoming, including the Senate's second-ranking Republican, are saying the same thing in politer fonts. Behind them: fifteen thousand farms closed last year, farm bankruptcies up forty-six percent on top of the prior year's fifty-five, and nine in ten Midwestern farmers telling surveyors their finances are worse or no better than a year ago.

One cattleman, in a Western Ag Network video making the rounds last week, put the question with more precision than any senator has managed: everything he buys has gone up, diesel, feed, fertilizer, equipment, insurance, all of it tariffed or inflated or both, so why is his product the one Washington singled out for discount foreign competition? He is right about the arithmetic, and the answer is the part nobody in the administration will say out loud: because beef is the price voters recite in polls, and there is an election in November. His costs are a spreadsheet. His product is a talking point. The policy was never about arithmetic.

Here is the part we are obliged to remember, because the video does not mention it. When the first-term trade war vaporized the soybean market, farmers were told to take one for the team, and twenty-three billion dollars in bailout checks papered over the difference. When the second term's tariffs arrived, the President told the country there would be a little disturbance, and we're okay with that. The applause for that line came from the same counties now filing the bankruptcies, because for a long while the disturbance was arranged to visit other people: federal workers, immigrants, university researchers, blue-state ports, somebody else's grocery bill. The deal was never that the policies worked. The deal was that they hurt someone else first.

Now the disturbance has reached the feedlot, and the people who cheered it as medicine are calling it betrayal. They are not wrong now; they were wrong then, and the distance between those two sentences is the whole story of this presidency's coalition. Meanwhile the President spent that Friday night in Myrtle Beach praising his newest senator for being into the price of groceries, the price of food, the price of beef, which at least confirms the White House knows the number. This paper rates absurdity in clowns. Ground beef is up about three dollars a pound since 2021, so: three clowns, and a fourth for the twenty-five-percent-off coupon signed by absolutely no one.