Waffle House adding a 50-cent fee per egg explains Trump’s America.

Waffle House, an iconic diner chain with thousands of locations dotted around the pro-Trump rural communities of this country, is risking revolt by announcing they have to levy a new 50-cent egg surcharge for a little while. Oh, who is to blame? Is it us pesky leftists? No. Immigrants? No, that’s not it, either. Is it gay chickens? No, it isn’t—sadly. 

Oh, I know! It is President Donald Trump indirectly, and that asshole is making the situation much worse. Let me explain a bit.

First and foremost, nothing President Trump can do will instantly bring down the price of eggs. This was the case during his presidential campaign, and it applies to every single person who has preceded him, including Joe Biden, and every single person who succeeds him—God willing.

Some of you readers may ask, “Why does any of this matter to me?”

The answer is simple. It’s because of this very sexy little phenomenon we call the basic functions of a mixed market economy. As such, supply and demand govern price points.

Since about August 2023, the average price of eggs has surged to $4.10 per dozen by December. The Department of Agriculture forecasts a 20% rise this year — outpacing the expected 2.2% increase for overall food prices — so costs are set to climb higher.

And like what an Economics 101 professor would teach a small-handed orange tyrant at Wharton, prices will rise if the supply doesn’t meet the demand. This is happening in real-time as I write this column. As the new Trump administration is focused on upending our democratic systems in a neo-Nazi, tech-bro coup d’état, a bird flu outbreak ravages chicken populations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that at least 156,254,271 birds have been impacted since the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreak was declared in 2022. It is now February 2025 — years later.

Emily Metz, president and CEO of the American Egg Board, told The Tennessean, “No one expected the current outbreak to last this long, but this virus has proven more virulent and resilient than ever before. … Bird flu is devastating to egg farmers and has severely impacted the national egg supply. In the U.S. we’ve lost nearly 50 million laying hens in the past year to bird flu — and more than 14 million hens in the last four weeks.” Data from the World Organization for Animal Health further confirms that “9.1 million poultry birds died or were culled during the month, mostly in the Americas” in December 2024.

Other factors contributing to an egg shortage include economic woes linked to Trump’s tariffs and his looming trade war with two of our closest allies in the Western hemisphere, Mexico and Canada. One Fortune columnist probed this issue further, pointing out how customers panicked and flooded membership stores like Costco, buying expensive eggs. 

Another columnist for USA Today characterized the Waffle House surcharge as a “tariff,” jokingly, that seems to not bother Trump due to his obsession with anti-DEI efforts and his bid to instill a Christian nationalist administration atop a country that was never built on the concept of being a “Christian nation.” So, how do we address the schmucks we all know who only voted for Trump over Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, ostensibly over the price of eggs and food at the grocery store? Honestly, we don’t. Millions of morons who continue to, or at one period, tried to justify their vote for Trump have literal egg on their faces. This is a symptom of the United States under Trump, and it has nothing to do with how Trump is ruining our economy, imposing a far-right agenda on the private sector, and propping up a racist, nativist, and elitist class of neo-Nazis and “DOGE” lost boys.

It has to do with Trump’s beliefs in manufactured hysteria and moral panic.

Waffle House has to implement its own “egg tariff.” At the same time, the government is more focused on criminally investigating companies that have diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in their culture programming, which is a gross, horrendous reality.

President Trump’s team — augmented by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the new leader of OMB, Russ Vought — simply doesn’t care about real-world issues like the HPAI crisis and its impacts on national food supplies in the United States. If some matters don’t deal with using artificial intelligence to scrape Social Security numbers from a highly classified government database or to gut funding to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for them simply using a youth’s chosen name and pronouns, they don’t give a shit. Hopefully, the so-called Waffle House egg tariff will change some peoples’ minds. But even that is a lofty thing to believe in these days. We’ll see, though.