PRIME TIME

Trump’s Rose Garden Dinner Menu Item Causes Outrage

The White House doesn’t seem to have heard of the cost-of-living crisis.

President Donald Trump has been called out for hosting a VIP dinner at the White House with a hero item on the menu many ordinary Americans would struggle to afford.

Trump, 80, hosted a BBQ dinner for Republican lawmakers at the Rose Garden on Wednesday, also attended by Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The lawmakers feasted on a “Prime-aged Beef Burger,” just one day after Trump’s executive decree allowing 300,000 metric tons of imported beef to enter the U.S. duty-free for 90 days kicked in. The menu did not state which country the White House’s burger meat came from.

The foreign beef can be sold at 25 percent below the market price, in an effort to win over struggling MAGA meat lovers ahead of the midterm elections.

That decision even angered some Republicans, keen to protect farmers in their districts from losing business to imports.

The price of beef has risen by nearly 10 percent in the past year, with the average retail price of ground beef around $6.89 per pound, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

During CNN’s NewsNight on Wednesday, host Abby Phillip pointed out that 73 percent of Americans said in an SSRS poll that Trump does not have the right priorities and that he has not paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.

“These are bad numbers for the president,” Phillip noted of the July poll.

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MeidasTouch reporter Scott MacFarlane was on the NewsNight panel and pointed out the gaping divide between real Americans and the billionaire president.

“He’s in the Rose Garden tonight eating fine beef, eating a three-course meal, out on the patio,” MacFarlane said.

“The hamburgers cost $6 apiece at the grocery store right now. The box of sugar cereal, which sometimes is dinner, $6 for the box of cereal, $4 for a loaf of bread.”

MacFarlane said Americans are “not being subtle” about what their priorities are as the president is focused on renaming lakes and building his outsized White House ballroom.

“It’s not the culture war c--p,” he said. “It’s food can’t be purchased at the levels you need when you have two teenagers. They can’t afford college, they can’t afford healthcare. Fertilizer costs too much, which means farmers are struggling, which is why Iowa is in play.”

He added, “All of this, all of this transcends the traditional culture war we saw in 2004, and other variants of over time.”

Trump needs to retain conservative rural voters in states like Iowa, Texas and Ohio in the upcoming midterms.

However, after Trump’s imported meat announcement, Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming said “Americans want U.S. beef on the table—not foreign imports,” as reported by the New York Times.

Sen. Tim Sheehy, a Republican from Montana, said he had “advised President Trump against this course of action for a year because American ranchers have been struggling against the packer monopoly for decades, and this will further harm them.”

“Most of whom are MAGA Republicans,” he added.

A CNN report on Trump’s imported beef pointed out that it’s unclear how the agencies in charge of implementing the program can monitor if the foreign meat is being sold at the reduced rate.

“It’ll be some additional pounds on the market that we didn’t have before, and in that context, that could be good for consumers,” Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University who studies meat pricing, told CNN. “But I think it’s easily overstated how much it might help.”

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Tonsor also pointed out that the 300,000 metric tons of meat being imported equates to around 2 percent of domestic beef consumption, going off Department of Agriculture figures. And the tariff exemptions only apply to beef trimmings, which are combined with other cuts to make ground beef, limiting any overall drop in price.

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.

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