Where's The Beef? - August 21, 2026

**Cenk Uygur** (0:00)
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**John Iadarola** (5:18)
I got news for you. Later on, I'm going to put marijuana in my body, and it doesn't matter.

**Cenk Uygur** (7:09)
All right, welcome to The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, John Iorla with you guys, huge show ahead. Israel's a new list of demands for us. We'll get to that later in the program. Ten different things that we must do. Otherwise, of course, we're all anti-Semites. We've got Donald Trump falling apart at the seams. We have the first lady of the Pentagon, or is it the first lady of war now?
And that incredibly strange relationship.
Israeli officials say they need to kill more people in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. Ukraine and Russia continue to hit each other in their capitals. The world is falling apart at the seams. But good news, you're here with us and everything's gonna be okay. Also further good news, not in the rundown today, but it should be noted, Aisha Wahab has won Eric Swalwell's old seat. So down goes AIPAC, down goes AIPAC. That's another vote to defund Israel, another vote against AIPAC. Collect them in your AIPAC tears mug, and that's at shoptyt.com, okay? So we got this thing, our cup runneth over now with all these AIPAC tears. So now AIPAC went from invisible to can't win an election. So it is an amazing turn of events here in America, to which we'll partly say you're welcome. Okay, so having said all that, let's get started with the first story.
Here we go again, more Maga Civil War. This time Marjorie Taylor Greene taking on Donald Trump, not on Israel, the war, but on tariffs and betraying American, not just manufacturers, but farmers and ranchers. And it's not just Marjorie Taylor Greene. There's also other right wingers you wouldn't expect going against Donald Trump on this issue. So John has the whole story for us.

**John Iadarola** (9:06)
You might say MAGA's got beef with each other.
But you probably shouldn't, that's not good enough. But anyway, let's jump in to what's actually going on. So this morning Trump bleated out on Truth Social. Today I concluded a deal that substantially lowered the price of ground beef for working American families. As everyone knows, under President Biden, beef prices soared at their fastest rate, and the American beef herd fell to its smallest size in modern history. As we work to rebuild this herd and help our ranchers for the next 90 days, the US will now have up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out-of-quota tariff. We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25% below current market prices. This deal will reduce prices for Americans while giving space for a great American beef herd to grow again. Thank you for the interest in the matter. Okay, so there's some claims there. Some of that might be true. Some of it is objectively not true. For instance, the American beef herd has reached a sore close under, right now, it's Trump. He's the president right now, Biden's not the president. I know that there's this quantum state thing going on where if something's good in the rare cases, Trump gets credit. But if it's bad, Biden was president a minute and a half ago, it's not true. It's the worst it is right now. The prices of food are bad right now, inflation is bad right now. That's the situation he finds himself in.
And so he's gonna try to bring in some foreign beef or whatever to get the price down because the price is objectively pretty high. He says he has a commitment that the beef will be sold at 25% below current market prices.
Sounds like communist price fixing to me, but he doesn't have a problem with it for some reason. In any event, the US started this year with the smallest herd since the 1950s, about 86.2 million cattle and calves.
We can talk if we have time about why the herd has been trending down for 70 years. I don't think the right wants to talk about that, but we can. In any event, the cattle shortage has driven consumer beef prices to record highs with ground beef selling for 6.89 a pound on average in July. That is up 10% from a year ago when Biden wasn't president, I'll remind you.
So what is the issue with this? Well, we're gonna get into all the criticism. It's coming from a variety of different sources. So you have Republican senators like Tim Shee, who claims that Trump's maneuver is going to benefit the meat packers rather than the cattle ranchers. And that shouldn't really be disputable. Trump should be focusing on the fact that theoretically this benefits consumers. Why this would in particular benefit the herders makes no sense. It's a total lie. But Tim Shee is right that it will almost certainly benefit the meat packers right now. He says, I've advised President Trump against this course of action for a year because American ranchers have been struggling against the packer monopoly for decades and this will further harm them, most of whom are MAGA Republicans. The president's heart is in the right place on wanting lower prices for the American people and beef prices have been impacted by the Mexican screwworm. But the reality is this action will make it more difficult for American ranchers to rebuild our herd and bring prices down for the American people. And most importantly, this will harm our ranching families who feed the nation. So that's on the Senate side. On the House side, former representative Thomas Massey said, what a slap in the face to American cattlemen and consumers, worse than socialism. Dumping foreign beef in US markets can temporarily lower prices, but it won't incentivize American farmers to raise more beef.