Thornton McEnery

President Trump announced Friday that the U.S. will wave through 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef over the next three months with the out-of-quota tariff switched off, and that “this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices.”

Sold by whom went unmentioned. Shipped from where, likewise. Which foreign exporters agreed to any of this is a question the announcement left for later, along with the executive order itself, which the White House says arrives within 2 weeks.

Ground beef hit $6.885 a pound in July, an all-time high and 83% above where it sat in 2017. Take a quarter off and you are at $5.16, which is a genuine improvement and also the going rate in 2023. Relief has become relative.

The cattlemen (who are ostensibly the point of all this) made it to lunchtime before turning on him. National Cattlemen’s Beef Association chief Colin Woodall pronounced himself “disappointed,” warned against “flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market beef,” and pointed out that cattle prices had already fallen sharply that morning. They had. The Great American Beef Herd, so capitalized by the president, took a loss before the announcement finished circulating.

Beef costs what it costs because there are very few cows. Drought, feed bills that would trouble a hedge fund, and a decade of ranchers cashing out breeding stock have left the American herd at its smallest since the Eisenhower administration. A waiver does not restock a pasture because cattle take years to reach a grill and ranchers expand only when they trust that prices will hold, so cheap imported trimmings arriving 10 weeks before an election is a strange way to build that trust. Groceries are on the ballot in November. The cows are incidental.