Of course, Trump is not going to come out and say he was wrong, so he quietly removed tariffs on many items that have gone up in price because of his stupidity, believing that other countries pay the tariffs. I do the grocery shopping, and other than a few items, almost everything is so much more expensive than what they were at the beginning of the year.
The Trump White House rarely admits defeat. It prefers the posture of inevitability: broad shoulders, big hands, and economic proclamations delivered with the rhythmic confidence of a real estate listing. Thursday morning, that posture cracked.
Buried in a late Friday news dump, President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order exempting more than 100 food items from the reciprocal tariffs he once insisted were essential to safeguarding America’s economic security. The order itself makes clear why: domestic demand, production capacity, and trade negotiations all made these exemptions “necessary and appropriate.” In other words, the policy had become politically and economically untenable.
The administration calls this “targeted modifications.” It is anything but. This is a visible, sweeping retreat on a signature policy that affects products Americans buy and consume every week. Grocery prices are a weekly referendum on economic competence—and Trump knows it.
Coffee, beef, citrus: these weekly essentials are immediate, personal, and politically combustible. Rural lawmakers and agricultural groups, Trump’s traditional backbone, are unnerved. Swing-state voters are feeling the pinch. Governors in key states, already pressured by local farm bureaus, now have new ammunition to push back.
