Late last week, Donald Trump announced a controversial new policy, seemingly out of nowhere. According to an online statement the president published, his administration would import foreign beef without imposing a tariff and below current market prices.
Asked hours later which foreign countries were involved in this agreement, the Republican refused to say. He also failed to explain the need for secrecy.
The pushback was immediate — MS NOW reported that the president had “angered the American beef industry and Republican lawmakers from Western and Midwestern states” — and the pushback remains ongoing this week. Complicating matters, while Trump’s move was apparently intended to help consumers ahead of the midterm elections, there’s no reason to assume consumers would notice an immediate difference.
As the debate unfolded, however, a separate question lurked overhead: Are we sure Trump’s policy is even real, or is it just another fleeting thought he published to his social media platform with no substantive foundation in reality?
Politico reported that beef industry groups and even some top Department of Agriculture officials “were blindsided by Trump’s post, and had not received any briefings or details on the plan. Industry leaders also said they are not sure which countries even have 300,000 metric tons of beef trimmings available to meet Trump’s request.”
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who would be presumably in a position to shed light on such a policy if it existed, was asked during a Spectrum News interview on Tuesday about where the imported beef would come from.
“I am actually not part of any of those conversations,” the Cabinet secretary replied.
Later, Rollins held a brief Q&A with reporters outside the White House, where she was again asked “which specific countries” are a part of the announced deal.
“I am not privy to talk about that,” the secretary said. “I think the conversations are still going on. And that’s [U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer], who’s finalizing what exactly that looks like, and I think the president’s involved in that, as well.”
So let’s take stock. Trump said on Friday morning that he “concluded a deal” that would “substantially lower” beef prices for American consumers through foreign imports. Since then, as Roll Call reported, no foreign countries have announced any new agreements with the United States related to beef. What’s more, neither the president nor anyone on his team have been willing to offer any details about the policy; no one in the industry has been briefed on the policy; and Trump’s own agriculture secretary said officials are still “finalizing” the policy as part of ongoing “conversations.”
Last week, all kinds of good questions followed in the aftermath of the president’s missive. How would this affect the industry? Will consumers benefit? Which countries are exporting cheap beef to the U.S.? Doesn’t this contradict everything the White House has said about tariffs and consumer prices?
But this week, a more foundational question needs an answer: Does the policy only exist in Trump’s mind?
Let’s not forget how common it is for the president to make bold declarations about measures that are not real. Just two days before the beef announcement, Trump, looking for ways to end the war with Iran, announced “the MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY!” That operation, we soon learned, was effectively meaningless and amounted to little more than another round of underwhelming threats.
Weeks earlier, Trump issued a similarly bold declaration about birthright citizenship and the Supreme Court, which we later learned was also imaginary.
The bottom line is unsettling but simple: The incumbent president often just … says stuff. Maybe he intends to do what he says, maybe he just enjoys making declarations that sound good in his mind or maybe he tries to follow through but can’t find officials willing to go along with his weird schemes.
Whatever the explanation, let this be a reminder to anyone looking at his statements and wondering whether they reflect reality: Watch what Trump does, not what he says. Just because the president said he “concluded a deal to substantially lower the price of ground beef” doesn’t mean that he necessary has reached such an agreement.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post There’s new reason to wonder whether Trump’s new imported beef policy actually exists appeared first on MS NOW.
