How ‘Trump Take Egg’ captured the mood of an inflation-weary nation
Which came first: the up-for-grabs blame over inflation or the meme about it?
Either way, both have lately caused a stir on social media, where news about rising economic anxiety is now often yoked to three cheeky little words: Trump take egg.
One of the first major political memes to emerge on Bluesky in the Trump 2.0 era, “Trump take egg,” is a pithy, grammatically fraught way to assign ownership over a leading economic hardship. It can be found accompanying photos of empty store shelves, astronomically high prices, and signage about egg rationing—the kind of photos that haunted Biden’s entire inflation-ravaged presidency.
Egg-ception
The idea for the meme hatched with Daytime Emmy-winning editor for TV and film Michael Tae Sweeney, who made the first recorded “Trump take egg” post on February 4. Sweeney got the inspiration for it not online but out in the wild, where he witnessed firsthand the sweeping panic over rising egg prices. During a weekday morning trip to a Costco in Southeast San Diego, he noticed the vibes were off as soon as he walked through the door.
“Every single cart besides mine already had two cartons of 60 eggs in it, the most you were allowed to buy in one trip,” he recalls. “I bee-lined to the dairy section and was lucky to get some of the last eggs available that day. Other guys were pulling out their phones to take pictures of the empty egg case. It felt like it was all anyone wanted to talk about—the cashiers, the other grocery shoppers, my neighbors, the security guards at my kids’ daycare. That was weeks ago, and it’s only gotten worse since then.”
Indeed, egg prices have soared over the past few weeks, as farmers have had to kill more and more of their chickens in an effort to contain an ongoing outbreak of avian flu. The average wholesale price for a dozen large white eggs broke the $8 threshold on Thursday, a new record, up from $6.55 on January 24.
Although it may scan as goofy, “Trump take egg” is an organic, free-range rallying cry, holding the president’s feet to the fire for his lapsed pledge to bring down food prices on Day One—as he attempts to shift blame for it again and again. The message is starting to spread too. Not only has “Trump take egg” taken over Bluesky, where there’s a dedicated account reposting some of its usage, it’s migrated to X and has also begun to hit TikTok.
A meme takes flight
Though the bird flu outbreak may have preceded Trump’s term, some official acts on his watch—in particular, the Department of Government Efficiency accidentally firing the USDA workers tasked with curbing bird flu—likely did not help matters. Because the meme caught fire during a series of weeks in which egg prices soared, social media users now had a shared vocabulary to call out Trump for firing those workers in real time.
And though Sweeney has played ringleader to his own creation, posting it alongside egg news as often as possible, “Trump take egg” quickly took on a life of its own. Within days, random Bluesky users began tagging him in replies to their posts about eggs (and who took them). Some even started using the same cadence to assign blame for other consequences of Trump’s presidency, posting comments such as “Trump cause traffic” after the president sought to end New York City’s congestion pricing program earlier this week.
The message seems to be resonating because it applies a refreshing light touch to a serious issue. So far, a lot of political and financial news in 2025 has had a bleak aura for many Americans, and tends to hit social media with doomsday gravity. Slapping “Trump take egg” on an entire segment of current events, though, has the disarming effect of wearing Groucho glasses with a doctor’s smock. It also helps keep attention and ownership on a pressing issue during a chaotic time.
“Americans are angry and confused by the high price of eggs, understand it’s wrong, and understand that, on some level, Trump and the incompetent people running the country are responsible for it,” Sweeney says. “Being able to express all that real emotion in a tight three-word slogan just makes it easy for people, even if the slogan’s broken grammar is a little silly.”
Although for now, the message is mainly restricted to left-leaning Bluesky, the sentiment behind it seems to be taking hold all over. A new poll from the Washington Post and Ipsos released on Thursday shows 53% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, his worst economic numbers since 2017. Another poll released the same day, by CNN and SRSS, reveals 62% of respondents say the president has “not gone far enough” in trying to reduce prices.
Despite Trump’s efforts to deflect blame, it may now be harder than ever to wipe the egg off his face.
