I’m a city boy, so I never write about agriculture. The only thing I know about cattle ranchers comes from movies like Red River and Shane. The good news is that we live in an era of instant expertise, so my ignorance is not disqualifying. If others can play amateur lawyer, I can be an amateur rancher or some such shit.
The featured image shows Lisa Simpson pondering one of the most memorable moments of the 1984 campaign: When Fritz Mondale asked Gary Hart, “Where’s the Beef?” It was not a Gary Hart libido joke but a spin on these classic Wendy’s commercials:
In 2026, beef state Republican senators are up in arms over a Trump regime plan to lower ground beef prices by flooding the market with imported beef. The Wendy’s question has been updated to where’s the beef from?
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins refused to speak on what countries President Trump plans to import tariff-free beef from amid growing backlash over his emergency effort to lower beef prices as midterm elections approach.
“About the beef imports, what specific countries have been in talks with the U.S. about stepping up those beef imports, aside from Mexico?” a reporter asked Rollins on Tuesday.
“I am not privy to talk about that. I think the conversations are still going on, and that’s Ambassador [Jamieson] Greer who’s finalizing what exactly that looks like, and I think the president’s involved in that as well,” she said.
They even keep secrets from one another. Why isn’t the Agriculture Secretary in the loop?
Republicans from beefy areas are pissed off over the latest slap in the face from Team Trump. They keep enacting policies for short-term gain that inflict long-term pain on rural areas that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
Senator Tim Sheehy, Republican of Montana, said in a lengthy statement that 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.
The cascade of statements — including from Senators Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Steve Daines of Montana and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi — amounted to an unusual chorus of protest from Republicans who have otherwise routinely deferred to Mr. Trump on nearly every major issue, from the war with Iran to his trade wars.
I love the smell of MAGA disarray in the morning. GOP infighting is helping Democrats politically. One could even say things are moooving in our direction.
As to the source of the imported beef, my hunch is Argentina because of Trump’s infatuation with fellow right-wing populist with bad hair Javier Milei:
Argentina is way down this list:
The beef flood isn’t flowing from the first four nations since they’re on Trump’s shit list. Argentina is not because they have a right-wing president.
All this beefy chatter makes me wonder if President Pennywise has mad cow disease. The symptoms are similar to what ails him. All I know about mad cow disease comes from William Shatner as Denny Crane in Boston Legal. He used it as an excuse every time he fucked up. I hope I’m not giving the Kaiser of Chaos any ideas. Silly me: His head is where ideas go to die.
I was being facetious. Denny Crane didn’t have mad cow and neither does Trump. His madness is lifelong but it *has* worsened with age.
That concludes my take on the beef beef. It’s time for me to leave the countryside and resume writing about urban stuff. Perhaps I should have made more meat jokes but that might have made me look tallow callow…
The last word goes to Randy Newman:
