J. D. Vance Stopped Talking About Eggs

We used to hear a lot about eggs from J. D. Vance. On the campaign trail, he talked about them constantly: how his kids were nuts for them, and how, thanks to the failed policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, omelets were ruined for everyone.

“My kids eat a lotta eggs!” he said in Traverse City, Michigan. And in Monroeville, Pennsylvania: “A lotta eggs in my family!” Although other elements of the speech changed here and there, eggs—and their rising price—were always front and center. “The 7-year-old, he’s got his mama’s personality, very practical, worried about whether we have enough eggs,” Vance told a crowd in Charlotte, North Carolina. “And right now all across our country, we’ve got a lot of families that are cutting back because of Kamala Harris’s war on affordability in this country.”

For Republicans in 2024, eggs were a convenient shorthand for the squeeze of inflation, and nobody was more committed to this commiseration—or more devoted to the egg as a breakfast concept—than Donald Trump’s running mate. You had to respect Vance’s dedication to the project. Here was a man who seemed to have a genuine, Gaston-level passion for eggs. But now, as egg prices rise again—to historic highs—that shell has cracked.

For a man who so loved the egg, and so reviled any egg-related cost hurdle, Vance has been conspicuously silent as egg prices have continued to increase under President Trump. Last week, I reached out to Vance’s office to ask why he wasn’t talking about it. Had the Vance family found a new, more affordable source of complete protein? Had the kids developed a taste for Frosted Flakes? “The Trump Administration is working tirelessly to respond to the Avian flu outbreak that has decimated our egg supply,” Taylor Van Kirk,the vice president’s press secretary, told me in an emailed statement.

[Read: What Democrats don’t understand about J. D. Vance]

But Vance certainly talks less about them. “Today for breakfast, I made my kids (aged 6, 4, and 2): 6 pieces of toast and 7 fried eggs,” the then-senator from Ohio posted on X in May. “I now understand the dads buying two 36 packs of eggs at Costco.” In September, the VP candidate filmed himself walking through the aisles of a Pennsylvania grocery store with his two young sons, pausing in front of the eggs to look aghast at the cost. Vance was, as people on the internet quickly pointed out, exactly wrong about the price of those particular eggs, but what drew more headlines was his children’s seemingly insatiable hunger for them. “Let’s talk about eggs. Because these guys actually eat about 14 eggs every single morning,” Vance said to the crowd of nearby shoppers, who seemed not nearly shocked enough at the idea that two little boys were regularly eating seven eggs apiece.

All the egg talk has died down since January. That month, Vance did predict in an interview with CBS’s Margaret Brennan that eventually “prices are going to come down” on gas and grocery items. And Van Kirk, his spokesperson, assured me that, “despite the damage caused by the last administration, President Trump is going to bring down prices and unleash American prosperity the likes of which the Fake News losers at the Atlantic have never seen.” But, as all egg lovers know, that hasn’t actually happened yet. Instead, the retail price of a dozen is now, on average, $4.95, more than 10 cents above the peak during the Biden administration, in January 2023. Because grocery stores typically use eggs as a loss leader, the wholesale price is much higher, and some restaurants have added an egg surcharge to their menu. These numbers could jump by as much as 41 percent over the next year, according to a new report from the Department of Agriculture.

[Read: It’s weird that eggs were ever cheap]

Perhaps Vance has gone silent on eggs because his boss, like Biden before him, can’t actually do a whole heck of a lot about inflation. Trump once promised that prices would go down on “day one,” but the new administration is encountering the same problem on eggs that the old one did: namely, a nasty bird-flu outbreak that has caused the destruction of more than 40 million egg-laying chickens in 2024.

The Trump administration says it’s trying. Last week, Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced a new $1 billion plan to address the bird flu, including enhanced biosecurity efforts and bird-vaccine development. Still, Rollins acknowledged that there is “no silver bullet” to solving the crisis. Confounding matters, of course, is that Trump’s friend and American meme-ster in chief, Elon Musk, has overseen the mass firing of thousands of federal workers, including several USDA employees who were working on the federal response to the bird-flu outbreak. Trump and Musk seem to have adopted the mantra that you have to break some eggs to make an omelet. But, of course, in a more basic sense, you’ve got to have eggs to begin with.

Now it’s the Democrats’ turn to stand up for egg lovers. Each time the Trump administration embarks upon an objectionable move, such as a new slapdash effort to dismantle some government agency, Democrats return to a common refrain: “What’s this got to do with the price of eggs?” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has been particularly outspoken. Voters “expected that [Trump] was going to be a change maker, not for chaos, not for corruption, but they wanted him to do something on their costs,” she told The New York Times last week. “But that’s not what he’s doing.”

Eggs have once again become a compelling symbol of political dysfunction. But Vance seems to have lost his appetite for them.