President Donald Trump's Agriculture Secretary's advice to Americans on how to eat affordably is clueless and insulting, MS NOW's Ari Melber said on Thursday night's "The Beat" — even comparing it to the almost certainly apocryphal tale of French monarch Marie Antoinette suggesting to the starving peasantry, "let them eat cake" if they had no bread.
Secretary Brooke Rollins, who last year suggested people upset with high egg prices raise chickens in their backyard, sparked fresh outrage this week when she said on Fox Business that her department has done "1,000 simulations" and determined that Americans can easily make a $3 meal with "a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other thing."
"The queen made one of the greatest gaffes ever in politics, Marie-Antoinette showing she so misunderstood her own people's starvation crisis that she thought they could switch from bread to another carb. Well, they were out of all food," said Melber. "Critics see the same kind of problem for Trump, as his top food official has advice for you Americans about how to cut back and maybe get by on eating on $3 a day."
"Where to begin?" Melber continued. "It's a paltry plan for getting full or nutrition. Many people are speaking up on this one, including making their own videos. Consider this a kind of a citizen ad to push back. We're seeing the pushback online."
"Sometimes people tell on themselves," he said. "This out-of-touch, rich, right-wing MAGA elitist actually has the audacity to condescend to the public and tell them that's their eating plan. Trump ran on lowering prices. Now he wants people to just cut back on those little $3 appetizers, or get very distracted by a ton of other things. But when staple products are up this much, it's very hard to distract people from either their shrinking bank accounts to buy the stuff or their growling stomachs. As you can see, prices up over 10 percent. That's The New York Times report."
As this is going on, Melber added, Trump is "getting rich off his job with side hustles and corrupt moonlighting that, as a factual matter, legally, probably violates the Constitution and the law. You would need a Congress to investigate it and get all the facts. But that's what it looks like. We know that Trump's net worth has increased not by $100 million or $500 million, but by billions over crypto alone. Now think about the other things that they clearly feel free to do that might not have yet made the paper. He's also insisting on taking a luxury jet with him after office. That alone could be an impeachable offense if you had a Congress doing its job."