What did Donald Trump do today?

He pondered the mystery of why beef is suddenly so expensive after he imposed massive import taxes on it.

Continuing his attempts to explain away the sharply increased prices Americans are paying for necessities, Trump posted this to his boutique social media site:

While Cattle Prices have dropped substantially, the price of Boxed Beef has gone up — Therefore, you know that something is “fishy.” We will get to the bottom of it very quickly. If there is criminality, those people responsible will pay a steep price! 

Trump probably meant to refer to the "boxed beef cutout," which is a technical industry term referring to the estimated value of a whole carcass based on the market price of certain cuts. Normally, this price would rise and fall at a similar rate to the price of a live cow. The "fishy" business that Trump is promising to investigate, then, is why the market price of beef is more expensive than the price of live cattle would suggest. The answer he'd like consumers to believe is that it's a beef industry conspiracy.

The actual answer is that the United States imports more than two million metric tons of beef per year, almost all of which is now subject to enormous import taxes as high as 76.4%. This is then passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices for beef overall. 

U.S. beef producers have been hurt on both ends by Trump's trade war against the entire world. Their costs for machinery, fertilizer, fuel, and other expenses have been driven up even as their foreign markets have dried up due to reciprocal tariffs. High retail prices for beef have been the one saving grace, but Trump has been desperate to bring down the embarrassingly high cost of supermarket bills, and his solution has been to quadruple the amount of beef imported from Argentina. That country is the one exception to high beef tariffs because of Trump's friendly relationship with its president Javier Milei. 

Trump has also given Argentina a $40 billion bailout while pleading poverty to avoid having to pay emergency food benefits in the United States.

Why does this matter?

• Solving the problem is more important than finding a scapegoat. 
   
• It is very unlikely that the person "responsible will pay a steep price."