Last month, after GOP candidates got shellacked in state and county elections by voters hungry for relief from the high cost of everything, President Trump announced that he was and always has been the affordability president. This month, with poll numbers still slumping, Trump announced affordability is a Democrat hoax; a “con job.” Like the Russia one, only with $5 butter.
I was dubious, but this president knows from con jobs, so yes, the dairy case must be gaslighting me. I see right through you, I whisper at the pork chops. None of this is real, I sagely nod at other shoppers. This is not happening! I yell, shaking my foot-long receipt at the store manager.
Why would my president lie about $16 Publix coffee? Yet there it is, my blue-collar brew gone all uptown price tag. Given Trump’s many grocery-adjacent nicknames — Benito Cheeto, Mango Mussolini — you would think he would have caught that.
Even so, I believe his intentions were sincere at last week’s “Throw-your-red-caps-into-the-air-for-the-affordable-economy!” rally at the Mount Airy Resort and Casino in Pocono, Pennsylvania, where Saturday night stays are currently $350 and up. Perhaps not the best site for an affordability pitch, especially when there are plenty of Pennsylvanians who last ate steak in 2023 and will be bartering their pets for a case of Diet Coke and five lawn chairs, should the president reconsider venue options.
For the record, few red baseball caps were tossed. Most were left behind in a stew being stirred with pencils, the family spoons having been sold to finance dinner. I hope they got a better price for theirs than I got for mine.
But not too many pencils.
“You could give up pencils,” Trump told the rally. “Under the China policy, every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two. They don’t need that many.”
Four more years, fans approvingly chanted. It was an ink and pen crowd.
How the great world spins. When I was a little girl trying to surreptitiously slip my supper to Fido, my mother would scold me. “Think of all those starving children in China!” If I had known of a way to mail spinach, I could have killed two birds with one serving, but now the dinner tables have turned. Now, China flaunts Faber-Castells and a 0.2% food inflation rate. We dine on red brims.
The “cheaper turkey under Republican rule” argument is just one more thing Americans aren’t buying. It’s a cheaper percentage of the holiday meal because everything else is more expensive. That’s not a price cut. That’s losing ground to the yams. Besides, any aficionado of classic sitcoms will tell you the last cheap turkeys in America were tossed out of a helicopter in 1978.
To some degree, Trump, like Biden before him, has stumbled into the Valley of the Vibes. Where Biden’s White House saw a legitimately golden economy, Americans felt eggs. Similarly, the White House can sing all it wants about the shiny stock market, but a gift-wrapped 401k statement under the tree is not the win Trump & Co. seem to think it is.
And I don’t know what they think of all the countries with better recent food inflation rates, among them, Djibouti. The Ivory Coast. Republic of the Congo. Uganda. Swaziland.
Yes. Those countries. The countries with the people Stephen Miller is stamping his little white nationalist boots to keep out. Maybe they don’t want to come. Maybe they want their coffee and their pencils, too. Maybe they know about red cap soup’s bitter aftertaste.
To those who think I am too hard on the Pumpkin Pestilence, I admit he had a good point about steel. Little girls don’t need all those dolls, he admonished rallygoers, but “You always need steel.”
He is right! We do need steel! For ballrooms. For whatever contraption that might keep presidential chins from chest-drooping during cabinet meetings. For voting machines.
Where you can mark your ballot with a pencil — if China will mail us some.
