Donald Trump’s secretary of agriculture boasted about falling egg prices in a Fox News interview Monday, contradicting prior predictions from her own department that egg prices would rise by a whopping 41.1% this year.
Brooke Rollins told host Brian Kilmeade that the cost of eggs has “come down 44% since Trump took office.”
And while Rollins’ claim might have a ring of truth, it’s not true for most people’s wallets just yet. NPR reports that while the wholesale price of eggs has decreased, the price tags at the grocery store haven’t budged.
This isn’t the first time Rollins has appeared to be out of touch with what is impacting the American people, though.
When egg prices began to skyrocket due to the ongoing H5N1 bird flu epidemic, people were disgruntled over the prices and frustrated that they couldn’t seem to find eggs on grocery store shelves because since the start of 2025, over 30 million egg-laying birds have been killed in an effort to contain the virus.
A sign notes the limitation on the purchase of flats of eggs in a Costco warehouse Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025, in Sheridan, Colo.
In response to the lack of eggs and chickens, Rollins suggested that people start raising their own chickens.
"I think the silver lining for all this is how do we in our back yards—we've got chickens too in our back yard—how do we solve something like this. And people are sort of looking around and thinking, 'Wow maybe I could get a chicken in my back yard and it's awesome,'" she said during an interview on “Fox and Friends.”
Rollins also missed the mark when the Trump administration pulled $1 billion in funding for schools and food banks to purchase food from local farms. Despite the program benefiting children’s health and the pockets of the farmers who overwhelmingly voted for Trump, the administration decided to ax it altogether.
In an attempt to defend the decision, Rollins went on Fox News (again) and delivered a rambling, seemingly transphobic justification for the cuts.
Rollins compared the program intended to feed children to another axed program that allegedly gave funding to teach transgender farmers about “food justice.”
She called this an “effort by the left to spend taxpayer money that was not necessary.”
However, in the same Monday interview with Kilmeade, she acknowledged that one of the president’s largest voter bases is being hit hardest by his trade war.
“There may be some bumpy times ahead,” Rollins said. “There’s no doubt these farmers are concerned but there's also no doubt these farmers believe in president Trump’s vision and in his leadership. No group has been more with the president from the beginning.”
Trump-supporting farmers in South Dakota are already feeling the pain—and some of them have already gone to their elected representatives to plead for help.
On March 4, farmers in Sioux Falls urged Sen. John Thune to end the trade war sooner rather than later. While they’re hopeful that the president they voted for will deliver, farmers are seeing their profits dwindle.
“(Tariffs) will hurt our pocketbooks, obviously,” Rodney Koch, a soybean farmer north of Sioux Falls, told Dakota News Now. “But will we come out of it better in the long run? That’s the hope.”
Trump hurt farmers with a similar trade war during his first administration. That time, he gave his voter base a bailout. This time—as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency teams up with the GOP-controlled House and Senate to make massive cuts to the government's budget—there’s no bailout in sight.
Scott VanderWal, president of the South Dakota Farm Bureau, told Dakota News Now that his bureau members are willing to handle some "temporary pain" so long as they see some benefit "on the other end."
“But we’ve been careful to help the administration understand that with the current ag economy, we would prefer that the president uses the tariffs sparingly,” VanderWal said.
Campaign Action
