We don’t know what’s going to happen in the midterms. But we know for a fact that today you can watch the hilarity of the collapse of so many of Trump’s plans and cheap, or corrupt, midterms gambits. Even the inside D.C. sheets can sense the energy. Here’s a piece — Trump officials weigh rolling back beef import plan as GOP midterm panic spreads. A picture of an angst-ridden, wayward Trump adorns the article. This is the plan Trump rolled out last month to institute a 90-day import bonanza of foreign beef that was apparently some kind of sweetheart deal with a Brazilian beef lord named Joesley Batista. The Wall Street Journal has a good story on that part of the tale. Here’s a New York Times op-ed questioning the safety of what was first called Trump’s mystery meat. In any case, the point was to engineer an extremely short-lived drop in the price of hamburgers. But it drove beef producers — an extremely GOP constituency — crazy since, of course, the whole point was to lower the price of the product ahead of the midterms. Now they’re getting so desperate at the White House they’re apparently considering scrapping the whole plan, with, I guess, a sort of mass deportation of beef.
Meanwhile the White House seems to be hurtling toward a 90-day ban on exports of diesel fuel despite the fact that no one seems to think that will reduce prices and actually stands a very real chance of hiking them. There’s an international market in diesel fuel. The regional U.S. markets are also international. So, at best, the plan seems likely to reduce imports rather than prices. And U.S. refinery capacity is already maxed out. The whole policy seems driven by GOP candidates extremely short-term need to say, something, anything about prices even if it’s stupid and might be discarded after a few days.
