Forget about a tariff rollback, price gouging ban or investment in research and development, the Trump administration has another recipe for making groceries affordable. According to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Americans can save money if they eat one piece of chicken, broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other thing. According to Rollins, on our dime her department has run over 1,000 simulations to come up with this suggestion, a nutritious meal that will cost just $3.
As she told News Nation in an interview on Wednesday:
“We’ve run over 1,000 simulations. It can cost around $3 a meal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, corn tortilla and one other thing. And so, there is a way to do this that actually will save the average American consumer money.”
Despite her boss saying the day before that inflation has been defeated, Rollins made this “Depression meal” suggestion on national television with a straight face.
She was not the only cabinet secretary to careen wildly off-message while making the media rounds yesterday.
Health & Human Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was also out on the stump, speaking with Katie Miller, wife of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. When she is not predicting the imminent US takeover of Greenland, Miller hosts top administration officials and MAGA supporters on her podcast. During his appearance, Kennedy riffed about the president’s “unhinged diet” and questioned how, given his consumption of “really bad food,” he is still “alive.”
“The interesting thing about the president is that he eats really bad food, which is McDonald’s, and, you know, candy and Diet Coke. He drinks Diet Coke at all times. He has the constitution of a deity. I don’t know how he’s alive.”
This might be all fun and games if Trump was approaching 50 or even 60, but he is entering his 80th decade in just a few months. As a result, many on his team have been working hard to make the case that he is healthy and vibrant. They have likewise dismissed concerns about his health, shutting down talk about how he shuffles, his recent MRI, his tendency to doze off during meetings and the bruising on his hands. Given all of this, it is hard to imagine the White House wanted the person in charge of the nation’s health publicly ruminating about what a wonder it is that he is still alive.
Speaking of the president and nation’s health, all this while despite promising to release a framework to lower healthcare costs this week, the administration has yet to do so. Nor has the president expressed any real interest in extending Obamacare subsidies or engaging much with GOP Senators involved in bipartisan health care talks on Capitol Hill. This is likely why congress is no where close to a deal on the subsidies that lapsed at the end of December, leaving millions either uninsured or unable to pay the exorbitant costs. Instead of reaching a deal, the Senate is leaving town for the long weekend, just as open enrollment for the marketplace ends.
All that really difficult to address policy-making aside, it seems to me Trump is on solid ground if he chooses to push back on Kennedy. After all, where does someone who just put out an inverted food pyramid with meat at the top, get off criticizing anyone for having a cheeseburger?
