President asks the Justice Department to investigate the meatpackers for charging too much for beef.

The post went up in the late morning. The President had asked the Justice Department to “immediately begin an investigation into the Meat Packing Companies” for, in his words, “Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation.” The capital letters were his.

There are four major beef packers in the United States. The concentration is real. Cattlemen have been complaining about it for two decades. The Obama administration looked at it. The first Trump administration looked at it. The Biden administration looked at it. The structure is, as a matter of antitrust economics, a textbook oligopoly with the textbook results: thinner margins for ranchers, fatter margins for processors, and steady prices at the meat counter regardless of what is happening at the cow auction.

None of this is new. None of it is what the Truth Social post said it was. The post used the language of crime. There is no public evidence of a criminal conspiracy. There is the long, dull, well-known structural fact of a concentrated industry, and there is the President’s separate, recent, and unrelated wish for beef to be cheaper at the grocery store before Thanksgiving.

The administration’s prior solution to the price of beef was to import Argentine beef. The plan was announced in October. It produced almost no movement at retail, because the volume of imported Argentine beef in question was a rounding error against domestic supply. The plan was, in narrative terms, a public failure.

The new plan is to ask the Justice Department to find that the price the President does not like is the result of a crime. This is a category error. The problem is structural, not criminal. Asking DOJ to fix it is asking the wrong department to do the wrong thing about the wrong problem. It is, however, the kind of thing one announces when one needs the headline to read “The President Took Action” before Thanksgiving.

By Wednesday, the same President was telling reporters that grocery prices were already coming down “substantially” and the press was simply not reporting it. The two statements coexist, on the same feed, four days apart.

Calmly documenting the decline.