Democrats have no idea what to do about this.

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Before the presidential election, eggs were all you ever heard about—specifically how they were too expensive because of Joe Biden’s inflationary nightmare economy. Eggs, eggs, eggs, all day!

To wit, this man in a New York Times voter focus group in August 2023, talking about how it was time to get Donald Trump back in office to do something about the eggs:

I hope that people can get over their own feelings about tweets and things he says and look at the bigger picture with where our economy is now. We could all have great feelings and nice tweets. But when milk is $6 or $7 a gallon and when eggs are $6 for a dozen, how many feelings do you really need to have?

And this woman in a New York Times voter focus group in May 2024, complaining about what Joe Biden did to the eggs:

I was taking a look at my bank account and how expenses in groceries—I have three kids—went from $200 to $400. Explain to me how a 12 count of eggs can be $2 and then the next month it’s $6. Why? What’s going on? It’s a little bit sad.

After the election, Trump supporters (see: Fox News and this Republican Latino organizer quoted in the Guardian) and Harris supporters alike (see: MSNBC’s Chris Hayes) agreed that eggs contributed to the Republican’s victory. It was a defensible claim: Eggs were about three times as expensive on Election Day as they had been in 2020, which is the kind of thing that shoppers tend to notice.

The catch, though, is that the price of eggs appears to have risen since 2020 largely because of A) the war between Russia and Ukraine, which are both leading producers of the kinds of grain used to feed chickens, and B) avian flu, which has broken out recently in the U.S. and kills chickens. (Fewer chickens that are more expensive to feed = more expensive eggs.) Those aren’t problems that a president can necessarily address with fiscal policy. Egg prices remain high under the new president and are expected to stay that way indefinitely.

Trump doesn’t seem too interested in reducing the cost of living, anyway. His initial flurry of activity in office has been about rolling back diversity programs, preventing immigrants’ children from becoming U.S. citizens, freeing Jan. 6 rioters, threatening to impose heavy tariffs on whichever country he’s looking at on a map at that given moment, and carrying out symbolically humiliating deportations of undocumented migrants. The latter two projects, should he follow through with them at scale, would even be expected to raise the cost of groceries; vendors would pay more for goods produced abroad because of the tariffs, and more for goods produced domestically because of deportation-related labor shortages.

Some Democrats see an opportunity here, like newly sworn-in Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, who sent the president an open letter about his inattention to the egg issue last week. “In your campaign, you often mentioned plans to bring down prices on staple items such as food, and eggs must be a central part of those actions moving forward,” Gallego wrote, adding that “high egg prices affect not only the wallets of my constituents, but their nutritional wellbeing.”

On Sunday night, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and 19 co-signatories got in on the act with their own letter, telling Trump, “During your campaign, you repeatedly promised you would lower food prices ‘immediately’ if elected president. But during your first week of office you have instead focused on mass deportations and pardoning January 6 attackers.”

This helpfully puts a button on Dems’ central dilemma: How to respond to the president’s aggressive and potentially illegal behavior at a time when even their own voters are suffering from outrage fatigue (and they don’t control either house of Congress).

Your mileage may vary as to whether Egg Whataboutism is a feckless approach. On one hand, sending a strongly worded letter about groceries to a regime that is releasing violent paramilitary leaders from prison … it is, admittedly, indicative of a certain powerlessness. A common criticism of Democrats is that by talking exclusively about the so-called kitchen-table issues that voters in focus groups say they care about, they fail to to inspire the deeper animal spirits that really determine their votes. And there is nothing more kitchen-table or less inspiring than a damn egg.

On the other hand, the word “egg” is funny, and Warren’s way of framing the issue does highlight the absurd gap between what Trump is doing and what the swing voters who elected him thought they were getting. If voters themselves start to ask questions about voting for the cheaper-egg candidate and receiving the permanent termination of cancer research in the United States instead, it’ll be reflected in polling, which will change swing-district Republicans’ calculations about what to support, which would give elected Democrats, at least, some leverage.

And given that no one knows what the resistance to Trump will look like this time, or where it will be most useful, or even what communication channels it will be conducted on … maybe the Egg Message is worth a try? Everyone’s gotta eat.

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