What makes you think this is “evil and self-serving”? It affects a relatively small quantity of specific products from a specific supplier with specific use-by dates.
In any case, this is Argentinian beef, not Canadian or something. Isn’t the US administration pretty friendly with the right-wing populist Argentinian government?
Argentina's been paying Huawei for 5G gear and services with beef direct to China, who's been selling it via Huawei stores (see https://www.huaweimossel.com/).
Earlier in March a shipment of ~22 tons of beef was rejected by China for having antibiotics in it and was 'contaminated'.
This was back in 2024, when Argentina used to have severe restrictions on foreign exchange in an effort to (artificially) prop up the value of the Peso. This made it difficult for Argentine companies to purchase the foreign currency needed to import things like 5G equipment, hence this weird beef-for-telecoms equipment deal.
Argentina liberalised its Foreign exchange market in April 2025 so I'd imagine this sort of thing is no longer happening.
They are, leads me to wonder if something was found and the limited hangout is a paperwork snafu. Considering the administration is loudly trying to bring beef prices down via imports, it would look doubly bad if tainted beef came from Trump's bff.
Trump promoted the sale of the beef at a discount a week ago on Truth Social, and now the beef is recalled. Clearly it was bad beef, and he and his cronies made a mint fire-selling it, while American businesses take a loss. Pretty basic corruption.
Honestly more than half of this sort of mess is incompetence rather than malice. But... yeah, sigh. Our grandkids just aren't going to believe what it was like.
Usually I'm with you. In these instances, there's a ton of malice, however, with what DOGE did and the relentless drive from conservatism to shrink government and regulations (many of which aim to protect consumers).
If you look at the trajectory of things since the turn of the century, let alone prior, it's more likely that we'll be recounting stories of today as the 'good ole days.' We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning. No we didn't light it, and we tried to fight it.
Which interpretation of your comment do you think makes you look better: that you're pretending not to understand the point being made, or that you truly don't understand the point being made?
> Our grandkids just aren't going to believe what it was like
Is appropriate for recalling ~30 cows worth of beef? There is no secret point being made, it's just average things happening while certain people overreact.
Broadly though, the belief that "current X politician from Y party is the worst, most corrupt politician ever" is a childish belief. I've heard it said about every president and high-ranking politician in my lifetime and it is not remarkable. Frankly the Biden scandals where his son was cutting him into foreign payments seemed worse, and there's no reason to think this beef import had anything to do with corruption, and certainly not at the presidential level.
