Outrage as Trump official refuses to name source of U.S. beef: 'Why not?'
A Trump Cabinet secretary's inability to say from which country the U.S. will import beef is spurring online outrage.
On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins was asked which countries have been in talks with the U.S. about stepping up beef imports. The question came amid Trump's plan to allow up to 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef to enter the U.S. without higher tariffs, which has been met with backlash within the GOP.
Rollins told reporters, "I am not privy to talk about" where the U.S. will be getting its beef, which stirred disbelief and anger about the secrecy.
"Why not?" reacted Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) in a post on X.
"How is the Secretary of Agriculture not willing to talk about where Americans are getting their beef from?" asked journalist Aaron Parnas.
"Why does the Republican Party want to hide from Americans where their meat comes from?" demanded Ron Filipkowski, the editor-in-chief of the political news network MeidasTouch.
"Why is this a damn secret?" wondered former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill. "If we are promoting foreign beef and importing it, don't we have a right to know where it is coming from?"
"The Trump administration refusing to tell us where beef is coming from should convince everyone not to buy it or eat it," cautioned activist and Karoline Leavitt foe Jamie Bonkiewicz.
"It's literally her job to be 'privy' to this information," Missouri congressional candidate Fred Wellman wrote in reaction to Rollins' response.
"The Trump administration is going to flood our markets with foreign beef and they're not going to tell you where it's coming from," warned progressive political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen.
"Sounds an awful lot [like] BULLS— to me from an administration that has lied more than 30,000 times during just the first Trump admin," blasted author Don Winslow.
"We're definitely eating horse meat," lamented Jack Cocchiarella, evoking another story where the Trump administration sent wild horses off to the slaughter in countries that eat horse meat.