(DCNF)—Republican strategist Scott Jennings told Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky that she was “lying” about the price of eggs Tuesday during a discussion about inflation.
In the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term, Democrats criticized him over high prices, especially the price of eggs, which doubled in price from November 2023 to March 2025, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, a price hike fueled by the culling of tens of millions of chickens in response to a bird flu outbreak. Jennings pointed out that since Trump took office in January 2025, the price of eggs has dropped significantly.
“It’s not panic when we were promised on August 15th of last year that the price of eggs, that the price of bacon, the price of apple —” Roginsky said, before Jennings cut in with, “Price of eggs is down 69%. They’re down.”
“Actually, eggs year over year or — sorry, year over year over year,” Roginsky claimed, with Jennings asking her, “Last year?”
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by 2.7% year-over-year in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, roughly in line with expectations.
“Yeah, are up 27%,” Roginsky claimed, with Jennings reminding her, “They’re down.”
Jennings and Roginsky continued to argue in a back-and-forth.
“Since he took office, they’re down,” Jennings said, before Roginsky doubled down, saying, “But year over year. Year over year.”
“He promised, when he took office, they would go down,” Jennings reiterated.
According to a White House fact sheet released on March 17, the price of eggs was $6.55 per dozen on Jan. 21, 2025, but had dropped to $3.45 a dozen by the release of the fact sheet. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins unveiled a plan in a February 26 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal to address the high-egg prices. The average price of eggs was $3.77 in June, down from a high of $6.22 in March 2025, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
“Hold on. Let’s not — let’s not fight about statistics here. She’s right,” “CNN NewsNight” host Abby Phillip claimed. “Year over year, they are up significantly. Month over month, they’ve gone down, but that’s from their high, which occurred partly due to bird flu and other things.”
“So let’s be very clear. He promised three things: the price of eggs, the price of bacon and the price of apples. We’re going to go down. I can quote him. It was on August 15th of last year,” Roginsky claimed. “He said, ‘They’re going to go down almost immediately when I become president.’ All of them are up. They’re up year over year. And that’s a fact. And these — you know, you think it’s hysteria or whatever you called it. People are suffering. You know how I know this? Because I heard all about that from you last year when I would debate you, and you kept talking about how the price of eggs is really high. Well, guess what? It’s much higher now than it was when you and I were debating.”
The CPI hit a four-decade high of 9% in June 2022, after then-President Joe Biden signed multiple spending initiatives into law, including the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, despite warnings that it could cause inflation to go up. While Biden was in office, prices shot up by over 20%.
“It is not. You are literally lying about the eggs,” Jennings told Roginsky, who shot back, “Excuse me, they are up.”
“The eggs are down,” Jennings responded, before Phillip intervened on Roginsky’s behalf again.
CBS and CNN both accused Trump of lying about egg prices declining during his term in April, but the St Louis Federal Reserve noted the price for a dozen eggs dropped $1.10 from March 2025 to April 2025. Other media outlets expressed doubt the Trump would be able to lower egg prices, with a USA Today columnist claiming Trump “ruined Easter” due to the prices.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.