(DCNF)—President Donald Trump told supporters Tuesday at a Pennsylvania rally that data and price trends show the economy is improving.
Trump delivered remarks about the U.S. economy as he argued the country is making progress despite voters’ concerns about the cost of living. Speaking at the event, Trump said consumers see relief across core household expenses, including health care, groceries, gasoline and rent.
“Under Obamacare, trillions of dollars were given directly to health insurance companies. Their stocks are up 1,700% in a very short period of time. Would you say that’s good? Obamacare’s primary purpose was to pay off insurance companies. You know, the insurance companies back the Democrats very heavily,” Trump said. “I want to give billions of dollars directly to the people. I want to take all of the billions and billions and actually trillions, but over a period of time. And I want to give all of that money we give to the big, fat, rich insurance companies. I don’t want to give them nothing.”
Trump said individuals should purchase their own coverage and not rely on government-directed plans.
“Now you see the numbers because your premiums are going up on Obamacare, and everything is forcing everything on. But we want the money to go directly to the people. We want you to go out and buy your own health insurance, and you’ll get much better health insurance at a much lower [cost]. Everybody knows this is the best way to go. But the Democrats, they’re bought and owned by the insurance companies,” Trump said. “So let’s see how many of them have the guts to vote for this. You know, we’re putting in bills where all of that money, hundreds of billions of dollars, goes to the people to go out and buy your own health care.”
Trump then discussed food prices and said egg prices have dropped.
“They said, ‘Sir, we’re going to buy plastic eggs this year. Plastic eggs. We don’t have enough eggs to go around.’ I said, ‘You’re going to buy regular eggs. And by the time Easter comes, we’re going to have so many eggs you’re not going to know what to do,” Trump said. “You’re not buying plastic.’ And we didn’t. Brooke Rollins, our Secretary of Agriculture, did an incredible job, and eggs dropped like a rock. We ended up buying a lot of eggs, but the price of eggs is down now, 80% since March.”
Trump compared egg prices under his leadership to those under former President Joe Biden.
“We have two price charts. You remember the last time I pointed to a chart? My all-time favorite chart was the one I had in Butler [Penn.]. I don’t care how good that chart looks — I like the Butler chart. That one showed how strong employment was and more. But look at this: Biden price increases versus Trump price changes,” Trump added. “Under Biden, prices jumped 37%, 24%, 22%, 21%, 30.7%, 30.7% again, 10.4% and 49%. Under Trump, prices went down 5.1%, 4.2%, 0.5%, down 4%, 2 points and 2.9%. Look at that. Our prices are coming down. Their prices aren’t. It’s a hoax.”
In May, new government data showed grocery prices fell more in April than at any time since 2020, driven largely by a decline in egg prices. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the average price of a dozen Grade A eggs dropped more than 12% for the month — the biggest monthly fall since 1984 — as overall grocery prices posted their steepest drop since September 2020.
On energy, Trump said domestic oil production reached record levels, pushing gas prices lower nationwide. He told the crowd that at least four states recently reported gasoline prices as low as $1.99 per gallon, calling it proof that expanded drilling works.
The national average price for regular gasoline dropped below $3 last week for the first time in four years, falling to $2.99, as analysts pointed to weaker demand, cheaper winter-blend fuel and crude prices hovering near $60 a barrel.
Trump added that housing and food costs are easing. He said rent prices have fallen and dairy prices are dropping quickly.
“So rent prices are down. Dairy prices are coming down very strongly. The cost of Thanksgiving turkeys was down by 33% compared to the Biden era. You know what you did during the Biden era for Thanksgiving?” Trump asked. “You said, ‘Oh my God, this is terrible.’ It was a rotten Thanksgiving. And Walmart, I thank them. You know, they came out with a big, like sort of a numbers thing, a chart, and they had 25% less. So that’s pretty good. A Thanksgiving meal with all of the trimmings is 25% less under Trump than it was a year ago, under Biden. That’s a good start. We’re bringing it down.”
It was reported last month that several staple Thanksgiving dinner items were set to cost slightly less than last year, extending a three-year streak of declining prices, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. The group’s annual survey estimated a classic Thanksgiving meal for 10 people will cost $55.18 — about $5.52 per person — reflecting a roughly 5% drop from 2024.
The American Farm Bureau Federation previously reported that the average cost of a Thanksgiving meal hit a record $64.05 in 2022, when Biden was in office. Meanwhile, GasBuddy projected the national average gas price as about $3.02 per gallon on Thanksgiving Day, among the cheapest holiday levels since 2021, as analysts expect Americans to spend hundreds of billions on holiday shopping and travel this season.
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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.
