Donald Trump’s promise to reduce grocery prices was a keystone of last year’s campaign. Now in office, President Trump faces significant challenges with surging egg prices amidst an avian flu crisis. On this week’s episode, Alex Wagner speaks to farmers and experts in Pennsylvania about the severe impact of the bird flu, its effect on poultry farms, and the controversial strategies Trump proposes to address the issue. Then, Alex catches up with MSNBC colleague Chris Hayes to reflect on Trump’s economic policies and their political consequences.
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View this graphic on msnbc.comNote: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Alex Wagner: The 2024 election was full of some really weird moments. There was Trump on stage dancing to Ave Maria and YMCA for half an hour.
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There was Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off at the RMC.
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There was JD Vance’s extremely awkward doughnut order.
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JD Vance: “Just everything. Yeah, I mean, a lot of glaze here, some sprinkle stuff, some of these cinnamon rolls, just whatever makes sense.”
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Alex Wagner: We all, unfortunately, remember those moments. But equally weird and maybe less remembered, and actually fairly significant, was the day in August when Donald Trump held a press conference standing next to a table of groceries.
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Donald Trump: Let’s go over some big facts and some very substantial truths about where we stand as a country because we’re a failing nation.
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Alex Wagner: There were boxes of Honey Bunches of Oats on the table and Maxwell House coffee, but there was also bacon and sausage, and two gallons of milk. It was definitely strange, bacon and sausage and milk do not belong outside for several hours in the month of August. But the point Trump was trying to make was very clear.
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Donald Trump: Cereals are up 26%. Bread is up 24%. Butter is up 37%. Baby formula is up 30%, and many items are up at much higher rates than that.
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Alex Wagner: Groceries, basic groceries had gotten too damn expensive, and bringing down their costs would be the focus of Trump’s administration.
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Donald Trump: A vote for Trump means your groceries will be cheaper. So many people mention groceries are beautiful, but simple word “groceries.” Bacon is through the roof. They’re all through the roof, the milk, everything is bad, and we’re going to straighten it out. We’re going to bring prices way down and we’ll get it done fast.
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Alex Wagner: Well, today, Donald Trump is president and Americans haven’t forgotten about his repeated promises to bring down everyday costs, especially food costs. And on that front, President Trump now has one very, very big problem on his hands, eggs.
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REPORTER: The cost of a dozen eggs surging 65% from a year ago.
REPORTER: Millions of Americans scrambling from store to store on an egg hunt, as prices soar.
PERSON: They don’t even have eggs.
REPORTER: The popular Waffle House chain adding 50 cents per egg.
REPORTER: TikTok videos showing Costco customers across the country, desperate to buy in bulk.
PERSON: The Costco near me finally put a limit on eggs.
REPORTER: If Costco has a shortage, the struggle is real.
PERSON: If you want to buy your girlfriend something expensive this year, Valentine’s Day, get her eggs.
REPORTER: Egg prices have reached a record high. This time last year, the average price for a dozen eggs was around $3 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By last month, it had risen to around $5. That is a 65% increase, and that’s just the average. If you’re unlucky, eggs could run you $10 or even $20 a dozen, and the egg shortage itself is beginning to spiral.
REPORTER: The drama over the country’s egg crisis reaching new heights. In Western Seattle, so-called breakfast bandits making off with three cases of eggs.
REPORTER: And in Pennsylvania, state police are looking to crack the case of the theft of 100,000 eggs from a distribution truck.
REPORTER: They say the eggs, which have a retail value of about $40,000, were taken from the back of a trailer just before 9:00.
PERSON: I don’t know how someone would be able to do that, like stealing a hundred thousand eggs.
REPORTER: Now there’s a big reason for this egg panic.
REPORTER: America’s bird flu crisis showing no signs of slowing, with new cases just this month emerging in nearly 25 states.
REPORTER: The bird flu sweeping through poultry farms across the United States, with the CDC identifying more than 20 outbreaks detected in the first five days of this month alone.
REPORTER: The American Egg Board says it will take a sustained period with no bird flu detection to stabilize supply.
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Alex Wagner: We are in the middle of one of the worst outbreaks of H5N1, also known as avian influenza or bird flu.
Gregory Martin: Certain types of eggs, for example, organic eggs or eggs from cage-free production might be in short supplies in certain cases.
Alex Wagner: That’s Dr. Gregory Martin, an extension educator in poultry at Penn State. He literally has a PhD in poultry science.
Gregory Martin: But I’m also seeing in the market, as well, pictures of folks starting to hoard eggs, just like we saw with toilet paper during COVID, and that does draw down supplies as well.
Alex Wagner: As of the latest census, there were over 168,000 poultry farms in the United States. For these farms, an infection can be devastating. If an infected bird is found, the whole flock has to be called, essentially exterminated. After an outbreak of avian flu in 2022, millions and millions of birds were killed.
Gregory Martin: I was involved in the outbreak that we saw in Pennsylvania in 2022, ’23 and that was a sizable hit as well, a lot of smaller farms there.
Alex Wagner: But this time, things are on track to become worse, a lot worse.
Gregory Martin: But in the last 30 days, we had seven farms commercially that were hit with influenza and it covered well over 2.3 million birds.
Alex Wagner: 2.3 million birds in a month, just in the state of Pennsylvania.
Abby Bramm runs a 32-acre farm called Pigeon Creek Farm in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The farm is about an hour northwest of Philadelphia, but so far, Bramm has managed to avoid an avian flu outbreak among her animals.
Abby Bramm: Currently, we’re milking 16 cows. That’s about where I would like to be. Our poultry, we did, at one time, have a larger production flock of laying birds. We also used to do meat birds, but we found we wanted to focus on the dairy. So now, we have a flock of probably only about 50 or so laying birds.
Alex Wagner: Like, how many eggs a week is that?
Abby Bramm: Fifty birds would lay approximately 40 eggs a day at a decent production. Forty times seven is going to give you not that many eggs, honestly, in terms of human consumption of eggs at this point.
I’ll give you an idea. We buy in eggs to support our sales here. So I purchased eight cases of eggs last week. There’s 15 dozen in a case, and I sold just on Saturday, over a hundred dozen eggs just in one day --
Alex Wagner: Wow.
Abby Bramm: -- in our tiny little shed that we operate.
Alex Wagner: Wait. Is that unusual? I assume that’s unusual.
Abby Bramm: Yes. So we used to purchase that many eggs then those sales will last just an entire week for our store. So the demand is higher. We’ve been asking our customers why.
Alex Wagner: There just seems to be a run on eggs, generally, right? There feels like there’s a scarcity issue. We, of course, hear about bird flu.
Abby Bramm: Yes.
Alex Wagner: Does it feel like that might be a factor in any of the strong purchases?
Abby Bramm: I do feel like with food production in our country, going more large scale to feed our country --
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Abby Bramm: -- we need to produce food to feed our country. We need large farms. I can feed a very, very small population. So we need those large-scale farms. But then when you have a disease outbreak, it can be a massive impact and for a long time.
Alex Wagner: It’s not just that the flocks are being killed off in massive numbers, resupplying the egg chain in particular takes time.
Abby Bramm: So a chicken doesn’t produce an egg until it’s about 6-plus months old. So a chicken hatching today from an egg to produce its own eggs in the future, we’re talking about six to eight months from now is when it will start to produce that egg. And so, being that we’ve had this avian influenza happen year after year now, and we have more large-scale farms, it just makes a greater impact --
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Abby Bramm: -- because when you lose those birds, you can’t replace them immediately. A meat chicken grows so rapidly. Your food production is back in six weeks --
Alex Wagner: Wow.
Abby Bramm: -- as opposed to an egg production. So that’s why you’re not seeing this impact on your meat birds as significantly because they’re back in our food system so quickly, and the eggs just aren’t.
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Alex Wagner: This is “Trumpland with Alex Wagner,” and this week, it’s all about the birds and their eggs. We’ll hear from folks on the ground in Pennsylvania who are reacting to President Trump and his revamped federal government plan to combat bird flu.
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Christian Herr: A transition is not a great time to be involved in what has been the worst animal health outbreak in American history.
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Alex Wagner: And I’ll talk with an old friend who’s been focused on this egg situation for arguably far too long, just to find out what he thinks the political implications might be for all of this.
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Chris Hayes: It was clear that this was the number one issue. On the other hand, it was also clear that Donald Trump was running on a campaign of raising everyone’s prices. This drove me completely nuts.
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Alex Wagner: Good morning to you, Director.
Kevin Hassett: Good morning, my dear. Good morning.
Alex Wagner: So I don’t have to tell you, but the rest of the country saw their egg prices at the grocery store go up or now --
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Alex Wagner: This past Sunday, Kevin Hassett, the newly minted director of the National Economic Council and President Trump’s chief economic advisor, appeared on CBS to talk about the state of the economy, and the one thing Americans can’t stop talking about, egg prices.
To bring prices down, the Trump administration’s best bet is to get the bird flu outbreak under control, and it seems that their plan to do so begins with blaming Joe Biden. Last week, the White House released a statement, criticizing the previous administration for a, quote, “slow and ineffective response.” That was still the line of the attack last Sunday on CBS.
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Kevin Hassett: You mentioned avian flu, President Biden didn’t really have a plan for avian flu. The Biden plan was to just kill chickens and they spent billions of dollars just randomly killing chickens within a perimeter where they found a sick chicken.
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Alex Wagner: After making questionable accusations about random bird slaughter, Kevin Hassett then announced the new Trump policy to tackle bird flu, a plan that will focus not on euthanizing flocks, but instead on biosecurity and medication, or vaccinating flocks.
Kevin Hassett: And so what we need to do is have better ways with biosecurity and medication and so on to make sure that the perimeter doesn’t have to kill the chickens, to have a better smarter perimeter. And that’s the kind of thing that should have happened a year ago and if it had, then egg prices would be a lot better than they are now.
Think about it. They’re killing chickens to stop the spread, but chickens don’t really fly. The spread is happening from the geese or the ducks. So why does it make any sense to have a big perimeter of dead chickens when it’s the ducks or the geese that are spreading it?
Alex Wagner: For years, including during the first Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has recommended depopulating all affected and exposed poultry if a farm gets hit with highly pathogenic avian flu. So this new strategy of medicating birds is a pretty big departure from that. We decided to talk to an expert about all of this and whether this new policy makes any sense.
Christian Herr: We represent about 450 agribusiness companies, mostly here in Pennsylvania.
Alex Wagner: This is Christian Herr, the executive vice president of PennAg, the agribusiness trade association for the state of Pennsylvania.
Christian Herr: Been around for almost 150 years, represent about a hundred percent of the hogs and chickens, and then the companies and businesses that support those industries, the inputs. We also have aquaculture council, agronomic inputs, and we have an equine council also.
Alex Wagner: Wow. It’s 360 degrees of animals in Pennsylvania, basically.
Christian Herr: It is. Yep.
Alex Wagner: So what is your level of concern right now as it pertains to the bird flu outbreak or avian influenza?
Christian Herr: Very high, extremely high. I spent 18 years at our Department of Agriculture here in Pennsylvania, and then have been here at PennAg for the last 20 years or so. And since 2015, fortunately, Pennsylvania was not hit, but it really became prevalent in the Midwest. Fast forward to 2022, when in April, we had our first case here, have been very aggressive, but certainly at this point in time, I would say the anxiety level has never been higher.
Alex Wagner: Yeah. It sounds like this outbreak feels different, feels a lot worse.
Christian Herr: Yes, I think that’s fair. And with it, there’s a lot of uncertainty right now. From a national perspective, it’s certainly on the airwaves. Even in the halls of Congress and with the new administration, a transition is not a great time to be involved in what has been the worst animal health outbreak in American history.
Alex Wagner: Can you give me a broad sense of what that looks like at the state level, to have all these farms affected by, as you say, the worst outbreak in American history?
Christian Herr: I’ve been on a front line. I’ve been on probably 40 farms, where we’ve had to depopulate poultry. You go one minute from going to your kids’ basketball games and baseball games, and the next minute, finding out that your livelihood is in jeopardy.
Alex Wagner: Wow.
Christian Herr: And you’re sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck, with someone from our Department of Agriculture trying to map out exactly how the next couple days are going to go. You feel for the animals.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Christian Herr: You can’t be a farmer if you didn’t have some sense of empathy for them, first of all, seeing them as sick as they get and then knowing that the humane thing to do is to, as quickly as possible, euthanize them.
So, yeah, it’s a wide range of emotion. There’s days as it goes on, where I do think the mental aspect of it is a real thing --
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- among the farmers, among the support industries, those that are involved in agriculture. It’s definitely a real thing.
Alex Wagner: It sounds like the current administration, the Trump administration is adopting a new strategy that’s less focused on mass calling of infected flocks and concentrating on, I think, its enhanced biosecurity measures and medication to control the virus. Can you talk to me about just kind of the difference between these two approaches from the Biden administration to the Trump administration?
Christian Herr: Well, that strategy is about a day and a half old. I think it was really announced on a Sunday morning program.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Christian Herr: There has been, from my perspective, a fair amount of frustration with, first of all, the transition. USDA has always been a great partner. There’s certainly been a lull in some of the decision-making processes that have happened. I’d love to be at the table to understand better where this new strategy is coming from.
These aren’t birds that you can medicate. I’ve stood in a barn where in a matter of two or three hours, birds go from incredibly healthy to barely being able to breathe. The criticism that there was mass calling done by the last administration, at least from someone on the ground, it’s a little bit unfair. There’s not an alternative. There’s no bringing them back. There’s no medicating them.
Now, can we talk about a longer range strategy that involves vaccination? Absolutely. That should be on the table. And for reasons related to trade, that has been off the table for many years, but I think there’s a push to do that.
Alex Wagner: One quick note here, the poultry industry has resisted bird flu vaccines for years, mostly because they could mess with exports and cost a lot of money. For example, some countries won’t take imports from places that vaccinate, fearing the vaccines might hide the virus.
I wonder what you think of the director of the National Economic Council on CBS this Sunday, Kevin Hassett is his name. He said that most of the spread is happening, quote, “from the geese and the ducks.” And so why does it make any sense to have a big perimeter of dead chickens when it’s the ducks and the geese that are spreading it?
Christian Herr: Well, I would have to take a little bit of issue with his reading of that. There is a perimeter set up, and within that perimeter, birds are tested. It’s only the premise where actual avian influenza has been detected that is euthanized.
So, again, if I was sitting across the table from him, I’d have to ask that question. I think it’s a little unfair to characterize some circumference of 5 kilometers or what have you, that all birds are put down. That’s not accurate.
Now, there have been some cases in Europe where that method was used, but that’s not what’s happening here.
Alex Wagner: Are you at all concerned about like how this is being dealt with/spoken about at the federal level, and how it’s actually being practically dealt with at the state and local level and a potential disconnect there?
Christian Herr: Well, it’s become a pretty emotional issue for me. I mean, I’ve helped, unfortunately, euthanized 40 or 50 farms. It’s very personal. I think getting the information right is pretty darn important right now.
When some of these cavalier perspectives are put out there, where one administration unnecessarily killed a hundred million birds, and we’re not going to do that, well, those birds weren’t going to live past a certain period of time. I’ve had great relationships with some of the humane organizations and had this discussion. When you’re looking at the welfare of animals, doing the right thing, as unpleasant as it may seem from a public perspective, euthanizing whether it’s your family pet or birds that aren’t going to come back from this virus, it’s a matter of the right thing to do.
Alex Wagner: You talk about the emotional impact of this, the frustration, the sense of paranoia and fear I’m sure that you’re feeling from farmers and people at the very center of all this. What’s it like for you?
Christian Herr: Certainly, I’m proud to represent some of the best people in the world. This is their livelihood. This is what they do.
The one buzzword coming out the last couple days has been we’re going to enhance biosecurity. Well, some of the best biosecurity in the world is on these farms. We’ve done a tremendous amount towards that end, and it’s not a time to point fingers. I was pleased that a letter was just signed today by both our U.S. senators, asking the secretary of Agriculture to do certain things. We have a Democratic Senator and a Republican Senator, and they’re both on board. I know it’s a politically-charged time in America, and this is not the political football to be tossing around in too cavalierly way.
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Alex Wagner: The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Tuesday said that over the weekend, it had accidentally fired several agency employees who are working on the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak. In a statement, a spokesperson said the agency is working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters.
We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be right back.
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Alex Wagner: Our next guest is an old friend of mine, not to mention a colleague, and he may be more than anyone else I can remember on TV and even in my circle of friends, has thoughts about the price of eggs and this whole situation.
Chris Hayes: Throughout the election, the price of eggs became a shorthand for the perceived failures of bionomics. But despite his promises, he did not bring prices down starting on day one. In fact, in the demolition derby, he has been running over the past two weeks. It feels like the only thing he has not done is stop rising grocery prices.
Alex Wagner: If you don’t recognize that voice already, I’m talking about the great MSNBC host, Chris Hayes.
Chris Hayes: Hey, guys.
Alex Wagner: There he is.
Chris Hayes: You guys got me?
Alex Wagner: We got you. I spent this week talking to farmers and poultry experts, and just trying to get a sense of the problem that’s unfolding in front of us. As a country and as a country of egg consumers, and also as people who follow politics, I have very distinct memories from the 2024 election cycle, where for people who don’t know, you and I share a studio, and I see a lot of your show as an MSNBC viewer. But I could always hear like a fair bit of it, sitting in the chair across the room for you, and nobody else on the network was as singularly and I think rightly focused on the question of inflation, cost of goods, and specifically eggs and the price of groceries, no one was more focused than you. I wonder as you kind of think back to then, and you look at the conversation we’re having now specifically on eggs, what do you think?
Chris Hayes: Well, the most maddening part of the campaign, and there were many maddening parts, but to me, the most maddening part was that it was clearly the case, the number one issue for voters was the high cost of living.
People had experienced the highest rate of inflation in 30 years. They didn’t like it. They didn’t like it anywhere in the world. And even though it was coming down, the way that inflation works is the actual prices weren’t coming down. The rate of change was declining. So that’s not the same as prices going down. They’re building up more slowly.
So on one hand, it was clear that this was the number one issue. On the other hand, it was also clear that Donald Trump was running on a campaign of raising everyone’s prices.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: This drove me completely nuts. I mean, in the end, didn’t do a good job enough communicating it, but --
Alex Wagner: It wasn’t all on you, man.
Chris Hayes: There was a town hall where he got up, I think it was in Michigan, this woman says, what are you going to do about the price of groceries? And his response is, we are going to put in a lot of tariffs, meaning we are going to put a sales tax on all imports, including the things that show up in your supermarket like avocados and whatever. And I was just like, this is so maddeningly incoherent. So that’s thing one.
Thing two is he made a promise that he can’t keep, which is I’ll bring prices down.
Alex Wagner: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: You could bring inflation down, which the Biden administration and Jerome Powell did remarkably well better than anyone else in the world.
But to bring prices down, you need a recession. There’s some indication that maybe that’s what they want. I mean, literally, Kevin Hassett, the head of the National Economic Council, the other day said, we’re going to --
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- bring down aggregate demand, which is another way of saying we’re going to cause a recession.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That seems strange to me. And then the third thing is just that, first of all, it’s not just price of eggs, oil and gas have gone up. Like, that’s really wild.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Gas is up like 50% of gallon in some places. But the egg thing that’s so wild is it’s exactly the same thing with bedevil Biden, which is it’s a supply problem. There’s a supply constraint because there’s a bird flu epidemic. In the same way, there were supply constraints after COVID and it turns out there’s not a lot you can do.
Alex Wagner: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: And so he’s sitting there watching the egg crisis. The Reuters pool today, 10% dip in approval, I think it does have an effect.
Alex Wagner: When you talk about Kevin Hassett and he was talking on CBS this Sunday, blaming the Biden administration for egg prices, saying that if the bird flu response had been more comprehensively or competently managed by Biden, they wouldn’t have had this problem. And then he accused them of having no plan and just randomly killing chickens.
I will just say for the facts, euthanizing infected flock of birds is USDA policy and it has been since Donald Trump was president, right? But there’s a narrative that they’re trying to establish and I kind of wonder in the same way that, I guess, maybe it’s sort of the inverse, right? Because Biden, when it came to the price of goods and inflation, a lot of that was like post COVID hangover, right? Supply chain issues.
Nobody understood that or cared to give Biden credit for all the things he was doing to create a less inflationary environment. I wonder whether you think Trump and his allies can go out there and say, this is a Biden problem that we inherited. It’s not our fault. If you don’t like the cost of a dozen eggs, blame Joe Biden.
Chris Hayes: It’s a really good question. I think the clock is ticking on that, and I thought when that awful plane crash happened over the Potomac, they immediately recognized this is bad and we have to find a way to show responsibility. And so, they ran out to say, this is a DEI problem, which is like both disgusting, wrong and racist.
But it was in a window of like the first week and a half. It was a little hard to be like, well, this is the Trump FAA and Trump air travel, even though it is. They go to the government on January 20th. They clearly feel insecure about the price thing. When the CPI print came out the other day, the first thing he did was to go to Truth Social and say, Biden inflation. And again like --
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- it was the January print, so okay, fine, 20 of both 30 days, are Biden. Fair enough. We’ll give them that. But that doesn’t last that long, and I think you’re going to see it. I think that right now, there’s a lot of economic uncertainty, much of which they’re causing.
I mean, the grand irony here, the grand irony is that the guy, like many things in his life lucked out, the guy has just rolled sixes over and over and over again in his life. He gets born a wealthy family. He basically gambles it all away. He gets basically saved by a TV show. He wins a presidential election with like a straight flush in the electoral college, even though he’d lost by two points. He gets handed an economy that was finally growing and had dug out from a great recession, leaves it in ruins in COVID, gets handed another economy that had been prepared by his Democratic predecessor --
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- and does seem bizarrely, and I would say this is even a little surprising to me, bizarrely intent on destroying. And I really mean that, like I thought they would be more worried about the macroeconomic effects of what they’re doing, even though he clearly--
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- has like a real, genuine zealous belief in terrorists. But I think it’s going to be harder and harder. And every day that goes by, makes it harder for them not to own whatever has happened.
Alex Wagner: I want to ask you two questions on that note. One is the sort of weird Trump, what do we call it? The spell, either cast that he’s part of in and around pandemics. Like, I know you focused on this a lot on your show, like this idea that Trump was running against Biden by saying, are you better off now than you were four years ago?
And it was like four years ago, we were in the throes of a pandemic creating mass death that spiraled out of control, in part, because I’m trying to be as euphemistic as possible, the ineffectual response from the Trump administration, right?
And he won. Trump won, right? Like, people didn’t blame him for his gross and deadly mismanagement --
Chris Hayes: No.
Alex Wagner: -- of the COVID-19 pandemic. Right now, we have pretty strict protocols in place for what to do when there’s an avian flu outbreak in flocks, and it’s creating a problem for him in terms of politics and economics because it’s raising the price of a basic grocery staple, which is to say eggs.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Alex Wagner: And his response here is to maybe give these birds medication to stop doing mass euthanasia, to focus more on protective gear getting in and out of these farms. And I guess my question to you is, does he get blamed for mismanaging this pandemic if in fact that’s what happened? I’m not saying in terms of deaths because we don’t know how this can affect the human population, but just in terms of what one poultry scientist I talked to said, this is the most desperate time we’ve seen in terms of bird flocks and flu.
Chris Hayes: Well, I think before we get to the question of blame, there’s the question of what happens.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Because the blame, like what happens is going to matter a lot for the political effect. You just pointed to something that’s my worst nightmare. Remember when COVID had happened, he was like a date grader and that all he cared about was like getting through the day to the next news cycle.
And so it was like there was that cruise ship, he’s like, I don’t want them coming off the ship because if they come off the ship, that’s going to add to the case count. At that point, it was like a hundred people. And I kept being like, buddy, in two weeks, there’s going to be 10,000 cases. It doesn’t matter if they come off the ship right now. You don’t understand. It’s growing exponentially.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: There was the day that he did in COVID where he brought every CEO to the Rose Garden and just did this whole song and dance about how you are going to get testing at drive-thrus in CBS and Google, and made a website. It was like all completely fabricated. In fact, multiple CBS had to put signs up being like, we don’t have testing. I don’t know what the president was talking about.
And again, it set the stock market shooting up, and he printed out the Dow that day and signed it for one of the Fox business host. I forget which one. And again, I kept being like, dude, it doesn’t matter what the Dow closes at today.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: This won’t go away. To a cellular level, he couldn’t get that. And so the reason I’m giving this whole big prolog is my biggest fear is that he just says, we needed egg prices down. He has the USDA tell farmers and poultry, like, just pretend like it’s fine. Just pretend like it’s fine --
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- so we get supply --
Alex Wagner: And don’t worry about it.
Chris Hayes: -- and that massively exacerbates the epidemic, and I’m really worried about that. I also think R. Redfield said today, who used to be head of the CDC, that we’re getting a bird flu pandemic that’s going to be worse than COVID. He runs the CDC of Trump.
This is not an empirical thing. This is not fact-checkable. This is a healing in my gut that is like almost religious. But like in a biblical sense, I feel like God is going to send us another pandemic.
Alex Wagner: Oh, my God.
Chris Hayes: I feel like, basically, what’s going to happen is that he’s going to be like, I tried to teach you, people, and you wouldn’t listen. And now, you’re back with this guy.
Alex Wagner: Maybe she would say that.
Chris Hayes: Maybe she’s saying that. And so, I really do worry at this just like narrative level, but also at the sort of policy level that what he’s going to do is say, whatever it takes to get egg prices down, I don’t care about the bird flu part of it --
Alex Wagner: Right. I just want --
Chris Hayes: -- and end up making things much worse.
Alex Wagner: It’s just like getting the Dow signed by exactly Maria Bartiromo, whatever.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. It’s that.
Alex Wagner: Having those eggs on the shelves, see, I told you. I got one more question for you just because the bigger picture of all of this is he is, as you outlined before, I mean, taking a sledge hammer, maybe that’s being a bit too violent, but like he’s cutting the federal workforce. He’s freezing spending. He’s threatening tariffs. He’s gutting agencies like USAID, which helps American farmers. All of these things --
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Alex Wagner: -- help a very specifically pro-Trump constituency in the ag world, in red states. COVID touched everybody, right? I wonder if you think there’s real political peril in a potential mismanagement of this one because it is more specifically affecting a group of people who are specifically traditionally pro-Trump.
Chris Hayes: It’s such a great question. I mean, I go back and forth on this. I think for things to get through, they need to be at a scale that’s enormous. So like COVID and inflation --
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- which basically touched every price that every person in the country paid for years. Right now, what he’s doing, I think, is unbelievably, politically fraught and perilous. But in a country of 330 million, it’s still, relative to COVID and inflation, like small enough groups of people.
That said, people talk to each other, stories get out, like information happens, and I think that they’re courting real disaster. Like, if they fire 220,000 federal workers, that will absolutely cause negative growth and a cascade that will, if not cause a recession, cause growth to contract rapidly. If they put 25% tariffs on our two largest trading partners, that will have immediate negative economic facts.
There are things that they’re doing that they’re maybe not quite the scale of COVID or the post COVID inflation spike, but they’re already big and pretty bad. When you think about the outer concentric circle of voters who are the least tuned into the news and went for Trump by the most, the people that said they watched zero political news, went to Trump by plus 15. People who say they watch a ton of it, went to Kamala Harris, plus 6.
In that outer concentric circle, what gets to them is the question.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I don’t know what information gets to them, but the country actually is starting to go into recession.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So again, I find myself in a weird position. I am truly, with every fiber of my being, rooting for them to fail politically, but --
Alex Wagner: Right.
Chris Hayes: -- there are substantive catastrophes they may be courting, where we’re all on the same boat like --
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: You know what I mean? Like --
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- I don’t want World War III. I don’t want a deep recession. I do not want another pandemic. No, thank you. No, thank you. No, thank you. And I’m worried about all those things.
Alex Wagner: I just think I remember in 2020, leading into that election, going to the gas station in a red part of New York, and there were those stickers next to the gas prices, that had Joe Biden’s face on, and they said, I did this.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: And it was a way of just tagging Biden with gas prices. Now, Biden went on to win in 2020. But there is this thing of when the American consumer runs headlong into a reality in their day to day life, that to me feels like it breaks through, right? Like, the idea that --
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Alex Wagner: -- there are people pulling off egg heist in Pennsylvania and Washington state. And the L.A. Times is reporting that people are confiscating eggs at the U.S.-Mexico border, because people are trying to bring them in --
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: -- onto a black market of eggs. There’s a reason you’re sensing panic in the Trump White House --
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Alex Wagner: -- because they know --
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Alex Wagner: -- that those people that don’t pay attention to the news, that did vote for Trump in large numbers, they like eggs.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Alex Wagner: They go to the grocery store. There’s a reason we talk about these metrics. There’s a reason you talked about them, I think, really essentially in the lead up to the election. I don’t know, this one is a thorny one for him, in a way that few things for a guy who’s been rolling sixes the entire time, few things are real for Donald Trump. This one feels real.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. That’s why it does feel like COVID because it was like --
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- I can just use my reality distortion field that’s worked for me my entire life and it didn’t work there, and I’m like, oh, look another infectious disease.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Turns out we have the same lessons.
Alex Wagner: Can we just not relearn the same lessons?
Chris Hayes: I would like to not. I would vote to not relearn the same lesson, but that was part of what the last election was about. I mean --
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- I don’t know. The variance possible in outcomes is wider than I can even begin to comprehend.
Alex Wagner: Well, the journey of a thousand scenarios begins with one podcast.
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
Alex Wagner: Thank you for taking the time to do this, my friend. You are indispensable on these big picture questions, and it’s always great to talk to you.
Chris Hayes: My pleasure. Thank you.
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Alex Wagner: We’ll be back next Thursday with a new episode of “Trumpland with Alex Wagner.” To get this show and other MSNBC podcasts ad-free, be sure to subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts. As a subscriber, you’ll also get exclusive bonus content.
“Trumpland with Alex Wagner” is produced by Max Jacobs, along with Julia D’Angelo and Kay Guerrero. Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez. Additional production support comes from Hannah Holland. Our audio engineers are Bob Mallory, Katie Lau, and Mark Yoshizumi. Bryon Barnes is head of audio production. Matthew Alexander is the executive producer of Alex Wagner Tonight. And Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio.
And I’m your host, Alex Wagner. We’ll see you next week.