I've been writing about Trump's "eat shit and die" attitude toward food safety since he first paved the way to sell pork containing "feces, sex organs, toenails, bladders and unwanted hair" in 2020.
Trump kicked off his second term with more policy changes sought by his biggest meat and poultry industry donors, despite warnings that the "escalating, bloody exploitation" of workers on high-speed lines was returning us to the days of "The Jungle."
By April 2025, as Food & Power reported, Trump's USDA had already "granted waivers to dozens of the largest meat processing plants, allowing them to operate at faster line speeds," while proposing a new rule to "finally raise line speed limits for all poultry and pork plants."
Trump's new plan, wrote Food & Power, would place new demands on "short-staffed meat inspectors" who already had "little time to identify carcasses contaminated with feces or disease."
A year of eating dangerously
In May 2025 (as a salmonella outbreak linked to Florida-grown cucumbers spread to 15 states), I warned that Trump was letting "America's food safety standards collapse completely."
"You might soon be longing for the days when all Trump made you do was eat a little shit with your pork," I added.
Sixteen months later it's clear that, along with accelerated line speeds, Trump's reckless dismantling of our food safety apparatus — marked by massive staff cuts, rollbacks of new salmonella-prevention rules, and the elimination of key scientific panels — has made food poisoning in America both a feature and a bug of daily life.
The Trump 2.0 era has been marked by so many food recalls and food-related public health disasters that, in a recent skit to help people comprehend the size of the ballooning US debt, Jimmy Fallon joked that "40 trillion" was the number of foods that gave us diarrhea this summer.
As Rebecca Schneid writes for TIME:
This summer, it’s been hard for consumers to know what to put in their grocery cart. Recalls have affected hundreds of products, including lettuce, which was linked to a Cyclospora outbreak; eggs and jalapenos that were connected with salmonella; and blueberries that were potentially contaminated with E. coli.
"What stands out in 2026," writes Schneid, "is the severity of some of the outbreaks caused by contaminated food this year."
More than 37 million pounds of food were recalled during the first half of 2026, a new 10-year high
According to TIME, epidemiologists believe this year's Cyclospora outbreak is among the largest documented foodborne illness events in U.S. history.
In July, as the rapid increase in cases of "explosive diarrhea" dominated the news, Trump told Fox News's Peter Doocy he hadn't given the crisis any thought.
"Are you eating lettuce recently?" Trump asked Doocy.
"I should always have more lettuce," replied the reporter, as laughter rippled through the room.
"Because if you are, get the hell out of here, Peter," said Trump with a smile.
When the president treats food safety as a joke, American families become the punchline
There's always a human price to be paid when food safety protections are abandoned.
Without sufficient oversight, food contamination goes undetected, outbreaks are not tracked, officials don't get the information needed to contain those outbreaks — and consumers cannot avoid the debilitating and sometimes deadly results.
"Couldn't we just use new technologies and make the government more efficient?" you ask
Experts confirm to TIME that we can't rely on "advanced tracking and surveillance technology" to save us. These systems simply cannot counter "the loss of knowledgeable human engagement amid these outbreaks."
And Trump's tariffs aren't helping either.
Under Trump, we're paying more for imported food while the government is inspecting it less
As CNBC reports, affordability remains the "defining challenge" for Americans in 2026, "with food costs leading the way."
Trump's pledge to reduce the cost of groceries is long forgotten.
In May, he famously said he no longer thinks about Americans' financial problems.
Tariffs have driven up the cost of many imported foods.
Based on the latest data (July 2026), annual inflation is running at more than 10% for items like coffee, apples, and tomatoes. Fresh fish and seafood are up 7.8%. Fresh vegetables overall are up 6.3%.
But despite the higher costs on imported foods, we're spending far less on inspecting food originating outside America.
Inspections of foreign food, which collapsed during the Covid pandemic that began during Trump's first term, were mostly restored under Biden.
When Trump returned to office, they collapsed again, plunging 17% in 2025.
Foreign foods have been responsible for the majority of the major recalls in recent months, most notably the Mexican lettuce that caused the multi-state Cyclospora outbreak.
From 1 May to 30 August, the CDC now reports nearly 20,000 laboratory-confirmed cases related to the microscopic parasite (a greater than 16X increase vs the same period in 2025), with more than 1,000 hospitalizations and 2 deaths. (State totals show a much higher total of cases — more than 33,500.)
Other significant recalls of imported foods have have included Mexican jalapeños, Indian moringa, Indonesian shrimp, and Italian pork.
Then, just when you thought it was safe to put lettuce on your burger again, Trump replaced American beef with cut-price imported "mystery meat."
Even American ranchers now have beef with Trump
In a reminder that, in his second term, Trump is being as brazen about corruption as he is cavalier about food safety, Trump recently blindsided American ranchers by announcing that he would import 660 million pounds of dubiously sourced, imported beef.
With the midterms looming and surging beef prices taking a central role in the affordability debate, Trump tried to sell the scheme to the American people as bold idea to lower prices for consumers. The move was denounced immediately by ranchers, elected Republicans, and the entire U.S. beef industry.
And the deal to import the mystery meat failed an all-important smell test when the Wall Street Journal revealed the plan had been hatched just one day before it was announced at a meeting between Trump and Joesley Batista, the Brazilian billionaire who owns JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker.
JBS just happens to own Pilgrim's Pride, the poultry processor that donated $5 million to the Trump 2025 inauguration and immediately benefitted from several major policy decisions such as accelerated line speeds and the rollback of Biden's plan to make chicken safe from salmonella.
At first, Trump refused to say where the mystery meat that would soon be flooding the country would be coming from. But in the Oval Office on 4 September, he confirmed that the meat was coming from Argentina and Brazil, as well as "a couple of other places."
Responding to concerns that U.S. inspectors would soon be overwhelmed by this new influx of lower quality beef, former steak salesman Trump promised that the meat would be "very clean" and "very good."
Coming from Trump, words like that are hardly reassuring. Even less so when you realize that Joesley Batista of JBS had previously admitted to bribing inspectors in Brazil in a massive food safety scandal in which, writes Eric Schlosser in the New York Times, "rotten meat treated with ascorbic acid and other chemicals to mask the contamination had been sold to hospitals and schools in Brazil and also exported."
Should you worry that Trump's allowing cheap meat from foreign sources into the country?
Maybe so.
In March 2026, China rejected 48,500 pounds of Argentine beef that was tainted with the banned antibiotic chloramphenicol.
According to the FDA, there is no safe level of human exposure to chloramphenicol, which can cause fatal bone marrow failure and other forms of bone marrow toxicity.
The World Health Organization also expresses concerns about "the genotoxicity of chloramphenicol and its metabolites, its embryo- and fetotoxicity, and its carcinogenic potential in humans."
Based on China's experience, it would be extremely risky to allow Argentine beef into America without testing it
In May 2026, 30,000 pounds of Argentine beef snuck across the U.S. border into Florida and Texas without a single federal inspection.
The mistake was only discovered by accident months later.
What was left of that beef wasn't recalled until 7 August.
There's no indication that the beef that entered the U.S. was contaminated.
But if it had been the same kind of tainted shipment that went to China, you could have eaten it in a restaurant — or your child could have been fed it at school — long before Trump's broken food safety system even realized there was a problem.
Americans shouldn't have to fear our food.
But that's the reality in a country where the president takes money from dubious donors — and laughs when the food they sell us makes us sick.
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