Dear Weekend Jolter,
A month ago, Jim Geraghty described the announcement that Waffle House would be adding a 50-cent-per-egg surcharge to patrons' bills as "perhaps the most ominous news of the young Trump administration."
The innovation, implemented in response to rising prices tied to bird flu, turned out to be as shrewd as the decision to make a placemat double as a menu. Many establishments have followed suit. Denny's said in late February that some locations would add a surcharge to meals with eggs. Southern chain Biscuitville is adding the fee. It's not just big chains. A local café group in Minnesota's Twin Cities area just announced it's tacking on the charge. In Santa Rosa, Calif., one deli and café reportedly charges $2 extra for dishes with eggs. The photo above shows another example from a bagel shop in Queens. As is often the case, National Review editors are hardest hit: I had breakfast with the family last weekend at a diner in Front Royal, Va., where a notice on the counter informed customers that the business had "no choice" but to add an extra 50 cents per egg to the price of "all menu items" cooked with what might as well be Fabergé.
Your heart won't be the only thing holding you back from ordering that three-egg omelet.
Of course, it's not President Trump's fault that egg prices are skyrocketing. It's not Joe Biden's, either, for the most part. As Dominic Pino put it on our liveblog during the president's address to a joint session of Congress: "'What are you going to do to get the price of eggs down?' is basically the same as asking 'How are you going to bring 150 million hens that died from avian flu back to life?'"
But Trump made it his political problem during his speech, pinning the blame on Biden for rising egg prices and declaring that his administration is "working hard to get it back down." Presumably addressing the head of his USDA, he instructed, "Secretary, do a good job on that."
So, the president is counting his price reductions before they're ha— . . . never mind. But if prices don't come down in the near future, it will be difficult for Trump to continue to maintain that Biden has got something to do with the price of eggs. The average price for a dozen eggs was nearly $6 in February, and Easter season demand could soon see prices shoot higher. According to the USDA, egg prices in January were up 53 percent year over year and are "predicted to increase 41.1 percent in 2025."
Against this volatility, restaurants' surcharge approach probably beats the alternative of just raising menu prices; Waffle House described its fee as temporary. At the same time, the surcharge is a visible reminder to diners — as if grocery-aisle prices weren't enough — that egg prices are making a range of food items more expensive.
During the height of Biden-era inflation, some restaurants added various fees and surcharges to cope with rising prices, a practice that was bound to annoy diners but also highlight Biden's biggest political problem. Republicans, now in control in Washington, could face a similar challenge. Some Democrats are eager to weaponize eggflation against the president's party, as polls register voter discontent over food prices and the economy — and as the trade wars could make prices rise on other products. Over at NR's Capital Matters, John Shelton urges Republicans to keep food affordability top of mind, noting that while Trump doesn't have to face voters in four years, "his political viability still depends on retaining control of Congress for the second half of his final term."
Demonstrating its attention to the cost crisis, the Trump administration recently outlined a five-step plan including aid for producers, the possibility of increasing egg imports, and additional biosecurity measures, coupled with a $1 billion infusion. Jim notes that one area where the feds might have inadvertently created a perverse incentive concerns a USDA program that pays farmers for birds and eggs that are destroyed but not for birds that die from the virus: "There's . . . a fair question of whether well-meaning USDA policies aiming to minimize the costs of a bird flu outbreak in a flock created a moral hazard and made poultry farmers too casual about the risks of an outbreak." The Trump White House blames that, too, on Biden's administration, since the procedures predate Trump.
On the bright side, some big restaurant brands, including Cracker Barrel and McDonald's, are resisting the egg-surcharge trend. But with the exception of voters who eat exclusively at those chains and never cook, are going the egg-substitute route, or are self-satisfied vegans, the soaring price of eggs is becoming an inescapable economic burden for families. And a growing political headache too.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Lawmakers dust off a useful power: Congress Should Pass the DOGE Cuts
What is the point of this? Trump's Reckless War on Canada
ARTICLES
Andrew McCarthy: What's the Best Argument for Columbia Agitator's Arrest and Deportation?
John Gerardi: Don't Be Fooled: Gavin Newsom Is No Moderate on Trans Issues
Charles C. W. Cooke: Does Trump Know Why He Was Elected?
Charles C. W. Cooke: Usually, a Car Is Just a Car
Ryan Mills: Democrats Propose $20K Fines for Gas Stations That Don't Warn Customers About Climate Change
Audrey Fahlberg: EPA Administrator to Overhaul Obama-Era Finding on Greenhouse Gases, in Major Deregulatory Move
Audrey Fahlberg: In the Air with President Donald Trump
Jack Butler: Five Years On: Covid-19 Made Skeptics of Us All
Jeffrey Blehar: I Can Only Look Back in Anger
Rich Lowry: Canada Is Not the Enemy
John Fund: Stop Subsidizing Our Junk Food Culture
Dan McLaughlin: The Ukraine War in a Nutshell
Dan McLaughlin: Beware Zombie McKinleyism
David Zimmermann: DHS Retools CBP One App to Encourage Illegal Immigrants to 'Leave Now and Self-Deport'
Liam Siegler: The Right's Andrew Tate Problem Is a Wake-Up Call
Haley Strack: The Gal Gadot 'Controversy'
CAPITAL MATTERS
Veronique de Rugy asks: What's the plan here? MAGA's Manufacturing Nostalgia
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen, in Paris, checks in on the city's triumphant restoration project: Notre Dame, Back to Life After the 2019 Fire
Armond White, on the latest from the Parasite director: Bong Joon-ho's Lavish Nihilism
DAS EXCERPTS
Dan McLaughlin, revisiting the history of the Ukraine war, has produced a helpful guide to understanding the conflict and its potential resolution:
What is Ukraine fighting for? Its survival as a sovereign state. Sure, there is a laundry list of other things important to the Ukrainians. They'd very much like all their land back. They'd like to join the EU, an economic window to the West. They'd like to join NATO, which would greatly increase their defensive security. But none of those things is essential, and as the record of the early peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in spring 2022 appears to illustrate, all of them were negotiable to Ukraine at the outset of the war. One thing was a deal-breaker, and should be a deal-breaker: any settlement must preserve not just Ukraine's survival at the end of this war but also its capacity to deter or repel future Russian invasions aimed at extinguishing it.
Anybody who tells you otherwise isn't really interested in peace; he's selling more war.
What is Russia fighting for? No just cause. Of course, Vladimir Putin wants to reclaim as much of the old Soviet lands in Ukraine as he can, with particular attention to ethnically Russian enclaves and a secure route to Crimea and the Black Sea. It's true that Ukraine's borders and the distribution of its ethnic population are artificial products of the Soviet empire rather than organic historical developments, but it's not as if Russia can complain that it had nothing to do with the many crimes committed against Ukraine by the Soviet Union.
As for the idea that Putin is justified in going to war because he fears having a NATO member on his doorstep, he already has Estonia and Latvia on his border (and Poland and Turkey not far away), and this war has pushed Finland into NATO. Other than Turkey, these are all former parts of the Russian empire. More to the point, NATO, with the exception of the U.S., is a defensive alliance full of decrepit militaries, and the past two decades have vividly illustrated how shallow the alliance's political will is. The notion that NATO presents an aggressive threat to Russian security of the sort posed by an expansionist tyrant is fanciful.
Why do Americans care? First, we care because Russia is our enemy. It was our enemy before this war started, and it is likely to remain our enemy for the foreseeable future. It was our enemy back when Hillary Clinton was presenting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a "reset" button, when Barack Obama and Joe Biden were sneering that "the Eighties called" because Mitt Romney had called Russia a threat, and when Obama was promising Dmitry Medvedev "more flexibility after the election." Three related things about Putin's regime have become increasingly clear since the late 2000s: it has revanchist ambitions to recapture former Soviet and/or tsarist territories, it sees the existence of free and democratic states as a threat to its own internal security and conducts foreign operations against the West accordingly, and it is aligned in a de facto axis with China and Iran that is held together principally by a shared hostility to the West. . . . Second, we care because an international order in which states do not invade one another for territory or conquest — and, if they try, pay a price imposed by a large segment of the world's economic and military powers — is in America's interests to preserve.
Rich Lowry urges the president to change course on his tariff threats and taunts against Canada:
The madman theory has much to recommend it . . . when dealing with Hamas or the Houthis. No one heretofore has thought it has similar benefits when handling relations with Ottawa.
It's important to realize the magnitude of the threat Trump is making. As Sean Speer writes at the lively and smart website The Hub, Trump's tariffs would subject Canadian exports to rates that are "ahistorical." They'd be higher than the pre-NAFTA rates and higher than the rates prior to the Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement in the late 1980s. The only comparison would be the rates under Smoot-Hawley.
About three-quarters of Canadian exports go to the United States, accounting for 20 percent of Canadian GDP. The Fraser Institute, a Canadian free-market think tank, noted that when the 25 percent tariffs seemed imminent, the Canadian economy was about to "absorb the biggest external shock in a century (apart from during the initial phases of the COVID pandemic)."
One estimate has the effect of the U.S. tariffs, coupled with Canadian retaliation, reducing "the level of Canadian real GDP by at least 3 percent over 2025-26." This, the Fraser analysis continues, would represent "a permanent output loss, meaning it is national income we will never recoup. Business fixed non-residential investment falls by 12 percent, with exports dropping by nine percent. Unemployment rises significantly and job creation downshifts."
This is the kind of thing that a much larger country does to a miscreant nation when it is punishing it for pursuing an illicit nuclear weapon, invading a neighbor, or engaging in grotesque human rights abuses.
Canada's sin is to be party to a free-trade agreement — the USCMA — that it negotiated in good faith with the same U.S. president that is now browbeating it.
It's clearly a case of "you f***ed up, you trusted us," although it's not as though Canada has anywhere else to go. It has a long border with the United States, not, say, Germany (something to be profoundly grateful for), and it has bridges connecting it with the United States, not Sweden. On sheer geographic grounds alone, a deep trading relationship with the United States makes sense.
Defenders of Trump's approach to trade tend to cite China as an example of how pure free-trade theory doesn't work in the real world — China is an authoritarian society, engages in massive intellectual theft and other unfair practices, and can't be trusted not to cut off supply chains in a crisis.
None of this applies to Canada, a friendly, English-speaking country that shares our values and fights wars alongside us, not against us.
Audrey Fahlberg has a reporter's notebook–style dispatch from last weekend's ride on Air Force One and trip to Mar-a-Lago. Some color:
Reporters board and deplane Air Force One from a separate set of stairs near the back of the aircraft, walking past the luggage compartment as they make their way to the press den. Inside the reporter compartment, journalists have assigned seating and can pick and choose between snacks — which ranged on Friday from Starburst and Tic Tacs to bananas and Fig Newtons — as they settle their belongings before departure.
Flight staff get a kick out of the exhilaration even experienced journalists and aides feel when boarding the presidential aircraft: First-time poolers receive a packet of souvenir Air Force One matchbooks to commemorate the trip, along with instructions on how to receive an Air Force One flight certificate by mail.
Reporters are also treated to a mid-flight meal with all the fixings of a White House press pool dinner, complete with mini salt and pepper shakers and drinking glasses with the presidential seal. During Friday evening's trip to West Palm Beach, reporters, TV producers, and photographers dined on steak over alfredo pasta with a side of arugula parmesan salad and a cheesecake dessert. The trip home Sunday evening featured another tasty meal — lobster tacos, corn salad, and Lindt chocolate — which reporters enjoyed as a muted Fox News broadcast played on two screens at the front of the cabin.
Participating in the 13-member traveling White House Press pool — also known as the protective pool — is very much a hurry-up-and-wait gig. The privilege of traveling with the president and his motorcade often requires long days and infrequent bathroom breaks while on the road until the White House calls a lid. Curmudgeonly photographers warn rookie poolers against chugging too much coffee ahead of 6:30 a.m. call time here in West Palm Beach, after which reporters often hold court in press vans with press wranglers in anticipation of the president's morning moves.
On Sunday afternoon, a chipper and golf-attire-clad White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt paid pool reporters an unannounced visit inside the Palm Beach County Library, where she talked shop off the record and confirmed publicly that Trump dined at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend with Elon Musk and Marco Rubio (newly engaged Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Ainsley Earhardt also stopped by the table, Leavitt said).
CODA
In honor of the word being widely adopted in the news lately to describe Trump tariffs and the general "vibes" nowadays, please do enjoy some "Whiplash." That's a metal cover. Here's the jazzy title track, of the same name.
No comments: