When it comes to the price of bacon, Donald Trump is absolutely right: it's too expensive. What he doesn't tell you when he mentions it on the campaign trail is that… a lot — is that the sharp surge was heading our way while he was in the White House.
Opinion columnist
Granderson Landing Station
LZ Granderson writes about culture, politics, sports, and navigating life in America.
In 2018, 61% of California voters approved Proposition 12, which required that space for raising pigs and their piglets be expanded to a new standard, which only 4% of pork suppliers met at the time. Essentially, the industry had to choose between spending money to meet the new requirements or risk losing the country’s most populous state as a customer.
The industry challenged the constitutionality of the new law. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 in favor of California and The law came into full force just over a year ago.Two of the judges in favor were selected by Trump.
“While the Constitution addresses many important issues, the type of pork chops that California merchants may sell is not on that list,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote.
California's law isn't the only factor driving up bacon prices. There's also Trump's initial handling of the pandemic.
On February 7, 2020, after speaking with the President of China, Trump was interviewed by journalist Bob Woodward. In the recording the former president said“It’s transmitted through the air, Bob. That’s always harder than touch. You know, touch… you don’t have to touch things, right? But air, you just breathe it. That’s how it’s transmitted. And that’s very tricky. It’s very delicate. It’s also more deadly than your… you know, your… even your debilitating flu.”
However, on February 10, he told the country that “a lot of people think that will go away by April.”
By “that” he meant COVID-19.
On March 30, he insisted: “Stay calm. This will go away.”
He later told Woodward: “I always wanted to play it down. I still like to play it down because I don’t want to create panic.”
This illusion was not an effective containment strategy.
In April 2020, Tyson and Smithfield, two of the country’s largest meat processors, were forced to close plants because their employees were getting sick.
Even on August 31 of that year, Trump was still telling the country, “It’s going away.” (Update four years later: He hasn't gone away.)
But in 2020, thousands of people were dying daily, the supply chain was crippled, and tens of thousands of pigs were being euthanized due to plant closures. When have you ever seen big companies suffer a loss of revenue? We know it’s usually passed on to the customer unless the competition keeps prices reasonable. When Prop 12 passed in 2018, 70% of the market was controlled by four pork processing companies.
And just like clockwork, in January 2021 the average cost of a pound of bacon was $5.83, and in October it was $7.31. Consumers took notice. In an attempt to reach voters struggling to make ends meet, Trump has focused on the cost of bacon as an anecdote to use when attacking Biden’s economic policies. He couldn’t have picked a worse example to make his case: The price of a BLT was set to go up now regardless of whether Trump or President Biden were in office. And it was Trump’s own handling of the pandemic that exacerbated the issues around the cost of bacon.
In April 2020, House Democrats introduced the Preventing Price Gouging Act to try to stop American companies from taking advantage of the pandemic to boost their profits, but Trump kept telling the country that “this is going away.” The bill failed due to Republican opposition. Although Senate Democrats, including then-Senator Kamala Harris, sponsored a companion bill to coincide with the House initiative.
We saw the same script with gas prices. In 2022, House Democrats passed a bill against gas price gouging. Senate Republicans did not get on board with solving the problem facing consumers; they wanted to make sure Trump could campaign by complaining about gas prices.
That's where the “America First” slogan comes in, right?
It is very telling that Trump believed that misleading voters about the pandemic was a better campaign strategy than winning over voters by guiding them through it. During her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Harris warned the nation that Trump is not a serious man, but that re-electing him would have serious consequences. His rhetoric around the price of bacon is the perfect example.
In March 2020, Trump himself issued an executive order aimed at preventing price gouging. Today, he calls Harris’s call for a nationwide price gouging ban “communist,” even though 37 states (including those that voted for him in 2016 and 2020) already have similar bans. Trump likes to complain about today’s America as if he’s a new face with a new vision, but he has a track record we can refer to. In January 2017, bacon cost $5.18 a pound. That September, as Trump issued “Citizenship Day” proclamations, the price of bacon hit a record high of $6.36 — and, surprisingly, he didn’t blame the White House.
That's because pointing out the cost of bacon would not have seemed right to him at the time. Looking at the current facts, they don't seem right to him either.
