Trumpty Dumpty has laid an egg with his ‘plan’ to import 100 million eggs from Turkey. Faced with the problem of inflation and rising food prices, especially eggs, Trump ‘worked a deal’ with Turkey. Hooray! Trump saved the American Breakfast!

Stop and think, how eggsactly was this going to work?

Chicken eggs are a perishable food item which the US Department of Agriculture says should be consumed within 45 days. Once laid, the clock is ticking. Since most whole eggs are exported in ships, Turkish egg producers need to collect, clean, package and prepare them for shipment. They then have to get them from a Turkish farm to a Turkish port. Once in port, they need to be palletized then loaded onto boats for shipment to the US. During this entire time, it is required by US law (who cares about that anymore?) that eggs be refrigerated. Differences in standards over washing or handling eggs presents more problems. For example, Poland, the world’s 2nd largest egg exporter, has the necessary health certificates for eggs intended for processing in the U.S., but not for retail sales in stores. The U.S. has almost doubled imports of Brazilian eggs, once used only for pet food. The Netherlands is the largest egg exporter, but in February, Trump revoked their import license (oops). Turkey is 3rd largest. I sure hope US Customs egg inspectors weren’t on the DOGE cutting block.

The website, Searates.com will provide estimated times and distances for a shipping container if you provide the port of origin and the destination. I chose Izmir, Turkey on the Mediterranean coast as the port of origin and Baltimore as the destination. It is the most direct route. The fastest average transit time is by Sealand at 24 days. Maersk will take 36 days.

Assuming it took no longer than 4 days for the Turkish producer to get the eggs ready for export (which is a pretty big assumption), you now only have two weeks at best, after they reach the US, to unload, inspect, and distribute these eggs across the country before they aren’t fit to eat. That is if you chose Sealand as your shipper. If Maersk gets them, these eggs will become unhealthy by the time they are passing the Azores. If you happen to be shopping at Tops or Wegmens and pick up a dozen eggs labeled “Product of Turkey”, I’d put them back.

Stop and think; is this any kind of solution? Is 100 million eggs going to make any difference? It sounds like a lot, but in reality (a place Trump and his supporters rarely visit) it is one egg or less for every 3 Americans in a one-time deal. Does this sound like a Golden Age to you? Trump’s egg solution, just like his other lame-brain ideas, seems just a bit scrambled.

Like most of Trump’s schemes, this ‘plan’ is more of a sound bite to make the MAGAs feel better than actually making us better off. This ‘stable genius’ works a ‘deal’ with Turkey to import eggs to supposedly lower the cost, then slaps a tariff on them. This is the kind of solution you’d expect from someone who wants to reduce the debt by giving a tax break to billionaires, which alone will add $4 trillion to the debt. This is the kind of ‘plan’ you’d expect from an incompetent president, one more interested in looking imperial than solving real problems for real people.

The price of a dozen grade A large eggs jumped from February’s $5.90 to a record high of $6.23, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was $4.95 per dozen in January when Trump took office. Trump is asking the American people to endure some ‘short-term’ pain while he goes golfing at his luxury resort most weekends, costing us $800,000 each trip. Where is DOGE when you need it?

As opinion columnist Tom Friedmand said, when you hire clowns, expect a circus. A minority of American voters, 49%, many without thinking, chose Trump and elected him president. We are now seeing, almost daily, the pain, chaos, and damage this choice is causing and learning just how much it will cost us.

Tom Meara is a Jamestown resident.