Americans are fed up with food prices, and plenty of expect President-elect Donald Trump to lower their grocery bills.

During the campaign, Trump often complained about significant price increases for bacon, cereal, crackers and other products.

“We’ll take them down,” he told shoppers during a September visit to a Pennsylvania grocery store.

But the food price inflation that caught the United States – and other parts of the world – by surprise in 2021 and 2022 had complicated causes which can be difficult to eliminate, from the pandemic to the war in Ukraine to bird flu. Many economists imagine that Trump’s plans, which include imposing tariffs on imported food and deporting undocumented employees, could actually cause food prices to rise.

Prices for food eaten at home within the U.S. rose 28% in comparison with 2019, in response to government data released Wednesday. However, growth peaked in 2022; between October 2023 and October 2024, food prices increased by 2%, which is lower than the final inflation rate.

Nevertheless, supermarket sticker shock weighed on the American electorate. About 7 in 10 voters, including 70% of girls and 63% of men, said they were very concerned about the price of food and groceries, in response to an AP VoteCast survey of greater than 120,000 voters. Only 1 in 10 said they weren’t very concerned or not concerned in any respect.

Trump won decisively amongst voters who said they were “very” concerned. About 6 in 10 voters in that group supported him, and 4 in 10 supported Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival. Harris won the overwhelming majority of voters who were somewhat concerned, not very concerned or not concerned in any respect.

Asked how he would lower grocery prices during a September town hall in Michigan, Trump said the tariffs would help American farmers. Trump has called for a 60% tariff on products made in China and a “universal” tariff of 10-20% on all other foreign goods entering the United States. In some speeches he mentioned even higher percentages.

Trump said American farmers are being “decimated” since the United States is allowing so many agricultural products into the country. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, as of 2021, the United States imported 60% of fresh fruit, 38% of fresh vegetables – excluding potatoes and mushrooms – and 10% of beef.

“We will have to behave a bit like other countries,” he said. “We won’t let that much come. We will put our farmers back to work.”

But David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University, said food producers depend on imported goods corresponding to fertilizer, equipment and packaging materials. Ortega said in the event that they are forced to pay more for these products, they’ll raise prices.

He added that American farmers might also have trouble selling their goods abroad because other countries will likely respond with retaliatory tariffs. According to the USDA, roughly 20% of U.S. agricultural production is exported every year.

The American Farm Bureau didn’t reply to a request for comment from the Associated Press. The Consumer Brands Association, which represents large food firms corresponding to Coca-Cola and Nestle in addition to personal care firms corresponding to Procter & Gamble, says lots of its members need ingredients grown outside the U.S. corresponding to coffee, bananas and chocolate.

“There is a fundamental disconnect between the stated goal of lowering grocery prices and tariff policies that can only increase those costs,” said Tom Madrecki, the association’s vp of campaigns and special projects.

Ortega said Trump’s plans to deport people within the U.S. illegally could also drive up grocery prices. He said there are greater than 2 million undocumented employees working across the U.S. food chain, including about 1 million on farms, 750,000 in restaurants and 200,000 in food production.

At a town hall in Michigan, Trump said that lowering energy costs by increasing oil and gas drilling would also lower food prices.

“If you make donuts, should you make cars, whatever you do, energy is essential and we will get it. My ambition is to scale back my energy bills by 50% inside 12 months,” he said.

Energy constitutes a comparatively small a part of the prices of manufacturing and selling food. According to the USDA, for each dollar spent on food in 2022, just below 4 cents went to energy costs. Agricultural production cost 8 cents and food processing cost 14 cents.

Joseph Glauber, a senior research fellow on the International Food Policy Research Institute, said energy prices are necessary but have already fallen significantly over the past yr.

“I think it would be difficult for the Trump administration to have a big impact on energy prices in the short term,” Glauber said.

Asked whether Trump has plans beyond energy and tariffs to lower grocery costs, a spokesman for his transition team didn’t provide further details.

“Americans re-elected President Trump with an awesome majority, giving him a mandate to implement the guarantees he made through the campaign. He will keep his word,” said Karoline Leavitt.

Maria Kalaitzandonakes, an assistant professor of agricultural and consumer economics on the University of Illinois, said her research shows that most voters imagine politicians can lower grocery prices.

Jordan Voigt, 34, a single mother of two young children, said she now lives along with her parents near Asheville, North Carolina, because gas and grocery costs have change into so high.

Voigt said she voted for Trump partially because she believes he’s a businessman who can lower prices.

“He doesn’t just say, ‘Oh, that is what it costs, Americans have to just accept it.’ I appreciate it,” Voigt said during an election night meeting. “He stands up and says, ‘No, Americans won’t pay this.’ And he said, “You’re going to have to find a way to do it cheaper.”

But Ortega and other economists say there’s little the president can do, especially within the short term, to lower grocery prices. Persistent price declines often only occur in cases of sharp and long-lasting recessions.

“People want grocery prices to drop to pre-pandemic levels, but that’s just not going to happen,” he said. “Deflation is not something we want.”

Kalaitzandonakes agrees that the White House has little power to bring down food prices quickly.

But she said presidents can encourage policies that may help tame grocery price inflation in the long term, corresponding to increasing competition and investing in infrastructure, agricultural technology and crops which can be proof against pests and extreme weather.

“Cutting food prices is not a good idea,” Kalaitzandonakes said. “Instead, we want to consider whether your income is keeping pace with your bills and whether your grocery bill is falling.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s collection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, as the following Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was met with mixed reactions from lawmakers on each side of the political aisle,

When Trump made his selection on November 14, lawmakers, each Republicans and Democrats, openly expressed their willingness to hearken to him. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) mentioned plenty of issues he agrees with Kennedy on, including “tobacco and organic farming.” Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis celebrated X’s election, expressing hope that Kennedy would “focus on personal vaccine choice, not bans” and “fight big pharma and the corporate agricultural oligopoly to improve our health.”

Senator Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) prolonged the praise, stating that Kennedy could probably do more to “improve America’s health than anyone in history.” “If President Trump wants it, I believe he could (be confirmed to the Cabinet). Why not?”

Other GOP lawmakers, Sens. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Rand Paul of Kentucky echoed similar sentiments. Tuberville thinks it’s “great” that Kennedy is involved and can be open to moving forward once Kennedy’s nomination is confirmed. Paul called the offspring of one in all America’s most famous Democratic families “an important voice… to reassess the crony capitalism in which large corporations, especially Big Pharma, have undue influence over the regulation and approval of their drugs.”

loyal Trump ally and conservative Georgia congresswoman, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, warned GOP lawmakers about what would occur in the event that they don’t confirm Trump’s cabinet picks. “Well, then they’re going to have to deal with Donald Trump and they’re going to have to deal with Elon Musk and his great new PAC and the American people,” she said.

“This is a mandate.”

Trump’s collection of Kennedy was not a shock to many Americans because he endorsed the Republican president-elect after withdrawing as an independent presidential candidate. In an announcement, Trump said he believed Kennedy would “restore these agencies’ Gold Standard research traditions and beacons of transparency to end the chronic disease epidemic and make America great and healthy again!”

However, not everyone is simply too captivated with the choice, given Kennedy’s extreme comments up to now in regards to the Covid-19 pandemic, during which he claimed that the disease was “targeting Caucasians and Black people.” “The most resistant people are the Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese,” he once said.

Public health and health workers have issued warnings about Kennedy’s ideas as dangerous, highlighting specific concerns about his claim that vaccines cause autism. Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) loyalists are silent on celebrating Kennedy’s election, predicting a war between pharmaceutical and food firms and their allies on Capitol Hill.

Make America Healthy Again PAC spokesman and former national field director for the Kennedy presidential campaign, Jeff Hutt, said that for the policy to be successfully enacted under recent potential leadership, “established Republicans will need to be as bold as they can be.” “

Honolulu City Council has decided not to pursue a $1.5 million wrongful death lawsuit settlement over the 2021 police killing of a former South African rugby star, after strong opposition from law enforcement and city officials . The civil case will now go to court.

The settlement was approved by town attorney and the council’s legal committee after three years of mediation and negotiations with lawyers representing the widow of Lindani Myeni, an unarmed black man who was shot 4 times during a temporary and violent encounter with Honolulu police responding to a call. a 911 call regarding an alleged burglary attempt.

However, town council unexpectedly delayed a vote to approve the settlement last month after greater than 40 armed and uniformed officers, led by the police chief, showed up in council chambers in protest while Myeni’s widow, Lindsay Myeni, other residents and city leaders expressed emotional testimony for and against the settlement.

City Council President Tommy Waters then canceled last week’s scheduled full council vote on the settlement, saying the matter ought to be decided in court, Hawaii News Now reported.

Waters said discussion of the case at the October board meeting “devolved into what resembled a heated civil trial, with speakers presenting impassioned arguments and facts from both sides. It is clear that the legal framework and procedural safeguards of the judicial system are best placed to deal with this case.”

Honolulu prosecutor Steve Alm, who previously declined to charge the officers and told council members last month that police acted in self-defense once they shot Myeni, in an announcement expressed satisfaction that the plea vote was rejected.

“The resolution of this case would also mean that the officers involved were motivated by racial prejudice,” he said. “There was no evidence of this.”

Bridget Morgan-Bickerton, a lawyer representing the Myeni family, called the overwhelming police presence at the October city council meeting a “bullying and intimidation” tactic intended to influence the council to change its decision on the settlement. Civilbeat reported.

“And it is clear that it did,” Myeni’s attorney Jim Bickerton told Atlanta Black Star, noting that in September the council’s legal committee voted 8-1 to approve the settlement “after a detailed presentation of the facts by their own attorneys in a confidential meeting.” No latest facts have emerged. The only latest thing was the police showing up and making it clear how outraged they were that they couldn’t freely kill an unarmed black man.”

The wrongful death lawsuit alleged that the officers engaged in rash, unreasonable use of deadly force and that their actions were motivated by racial animosity toward Myeni, who’s Black.

Before the meeting, Myeni entered a multifamily Airbnb property and was told to leave by two residents of one of the properties. Myeni can have confused the property with a similar-looking temple round the corner or one other historic constructing, Bickerton said, noting that Myeni had a penchant for visiting historic sites in Hawaii.

The doorbell video shows Myeni casually taking off her shoes before entering the constructing while wearing a conventional Zulu headdress. Conversations between people inside are muffled. After leaving, Myeni said, “Sorry,” and quickly placed on his shoes.

In any event, Myeni left peacefully when asked to achieve this, the suit claims.

Dash camera and body-worn video of the incident show officers arriving as Myeni stood within the driveway and a lady who was a guest at the property shouted: “It’s him! It’s him!”

The lawsuit states that since it was a dark, moonless night and the property was poorly lit, and the officers counting on the element of surprise didn’t use sirens or announce themselves as police officers, they then aimed blindingly vibrant Maglites at his face and ordered him to come down, Myeni probably mistook them for robbers.

“Who are you? Who are you?” Myeni’s words might be heard at the start of the meeting within the bodycam footage.

His subsequent actions – lunging, grappling and punching officers, who burned and shot him – were self-defense, his attorneys argued, noting that between the primary time he punched Myeni and the officer who shot him the primary time.

“That’s an impossibly short time for any officer to assess that Lindani posed a significant risk of serious bodily injury,” Bickerton said, adding that Myeni was unarmed and standing about eight feet from Cpl. Garrick Orosco when Orosco shot Myeni within the stomach.

“And from that point on, as you know, we have maintained that because this was an unlawful use of force against an unarmed person, Lindani was justified in using deadly force in defense. You don’t shoot someone just because he knocked out two officers. You can attack him. You can beat him. You can use pepper spray. You can put three guys on him, but you don’t shoot him. So yes, after this Lindani is now fighting for her life. He realizes, “These guys are going to kill me.” I’m going to die tonight. He had every right to fight as hard as he could.

In court documents, Officer Brent Sylvester said he fired the ultimate three-shot salvo that killed Myeni because he feared for Orosco’s life, who Myeni was lying on top of at the time and punched him within the face. Orosco suffered serious facial fractures and still has not returned to work.

Bickerton said police and the district attorney “created a false narrative” about conditions at the scene and the sequence of events that led Myeni to attack the officers.

“The bottom line is, until he got shot, he didn’t punch anyone in the face or break anyone’s bones,” Bickerton said. “So he got into an argument, in his opinion, with people he couldn’t identify because his lights blinded him and they didn’t tell him who he was.”

Bickerton claims the officers’ “aggressive and disrespectful” behavior towards Myeni was based on racial animosity. “It was very contrary to the way our officers usually conduct themselves with the word ‘Aloha.’ Knowing the culture as well as I do, if it had been a Japanese, Hawaiian, or Caucasian man, Officer Orosco would not have addressed him that way. There was no “Sir, this is the police, show your hands.” It was, “Get on the ground!” And “F-you,” after which just saying, “Shoot him.”

Giving evidence at the City Council hearing, prosecutor Alm disputed the plaintiffs’ claims that Myeni didn’t know his attackers were police officers.

“I don’t see the police doing anything wrong,” he said. “I was told they were being criticized for not saying, ‘Police, police.’ They are wearing uniforms that everyone can see,” he said.

Bickerton, frustrated that the district attorney was “meddling in a civil matter,” responded last week: by publishing video from a police body camera showing Cpl. Orosco repeatedly said within the moments after the fatal shooting that he “didn’t see” the suspect.

If police officers cannot see well, which means Myeni cannot either, Bickerton said, adding that police have a legal obligation to report on themselves and their goal in such unclear circumstances.

The lawsuit seeks damages and compensation for Lindsay Myeni and her two children, who’re currently 3 and 5 years old. Her lawyers initially asked for $5 million at the beginning of the settlement process, then agreed to accept $1.5 million after lengthy negotiations with town, managed by a former judge and mediator.

Now that the settlement has been invalidated, Bickerton said: “It is for the jurisdiction to decide whether to award damages and, if so, how much. However, in proposing this award, I am certainly guided by the many large awards I have seen across the country. Because this is the only way to reduce the risk to everyone’s safety from a police force that feels irresponsible and can simply wield weapons willy-nilly. An award of significant damages would discourage this type of conduct, so we will certainly ask for it.”

There will probably be a hearing Thursday to set a trial date, which is able to likely happen inside a number of weeks within the second half of next 12 months, Bickerton said.