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Trump tried to make burgers cheaper. It backfired spectacularly.

The GOP’s farm-state problem just got worse.

On most fronts, President Donald Trump has shown little concern for reducing Americans’ cost of living ahead of November’s midterms.

Trump has refused to accept Iran’s ceasefire proposals, even as the conflict pushes fuel costs to new heights. And he’s declined to abandon his trade wars — with US adversaries and allies alike — even as tariffs nudge up Americans’ expenses.

Yet there is one area where Trump has recently tried to lower consumer prices in an economically coherent way, and it’s been a political disaster.

• Trump relaxed tariffs on foreign beef, in hopes of lowering meat prices.• But the policy is too narrow to make much difference for consumers, shaving just a couple cents off the price of ground beef, in the best-case scenario.• Meanwhile, it antagonized cattle ranchers already hurting as a result of Trump’s trade conflicts and war with Iran.• The controversy appears to be dragging down Republicans in farm states.

In late August, the president lowered tariffs on up to 661 million pounds of imported lean beef trimmings, a key ingredient in hamburger meat.

This policy directly addressed a genuine problem facing US consumers: Ground beef prices were roughly 8 percent higher last month than they had been one year earlier. And unlike many of the White House’s other ideas for increasing affordability, the meat imports proposal comported with conventional economic logic: If you reduce input costs for meat processors, they’ll be able to sell beef at lower prices.

By endorsing this reasoning, the Trump administration was implicitly rebuking its own theory of trade economics (which holds that tariffs increase costs for foreign companies, not American consumers). In doing so, Trump also put voters’ material interests — and economists’ conventional wisdom — above his ideological hangups.

And he’s paying dearly for it.

Instead of appeasing cash-strapped shoppers, the beef imports policy has mostly just aggravated (already aggrieved) agricultural firms. All across the farm belt, cattle ranchers are incensed by Trump aiding their foreign competition — after the president had already depressed their sales through tariffs and increased their costs via his Iran war and immigration policies.

Cowpokes aren’t alone in resenting the White House’s affronts to agricultural interests. In dark red states like Kansas and Iowa, Democratic candidates have become highly competitive, while Republicans are racing to distance themselves from the president, in part by going after his beef plan directly.

Which raises the question: How and why did Trump’s plan for cheaper hamburgers go so wrong?

The answer partly concerns that measure’s particular flaws. But it also reflects broader problems with the administration’s governance, which now threaten to cost Republicans badly: A persistent failure to account for its policies’ economic consequences, a reliance on symbolic, last-minute fixes instead of far-sighted planning, and inattention to the material concerns of voters — even those as deeply conservative as cattle ranchers.

The 2026 economy could have been great — if not for Trump

Trump’s cheap beef policy is small potatoes

As a political matter, the fundamental flaw with Trump’s beef import policy is simple: Its benefits to individual........

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