At Papi Steak in Miami Beach, Florida, guests don’t just come for the over-the-top, high-priced menu items; they come for the spectacle. Dishes include a $95 gold-encrusted baked potato, a $320 seafood medley served on a multitiered stand packed with ice and the restaurant’s main attraction: the $1,000 wagyu tomahawk steak. Weighing in at a whopping 55 ounces, the raw slab of meat arrives at diners’ tables in a diamond-encrusted briefcase, with waitstaff standing at the ready to brand it with the restaurant’s logo and then whisk it off to the kitchen to be grilled to perfection.

According to co-owner David “Papi” Einhorn, the restaurant, which has an outpost in Las Vegas as well as a new mail-order service, has no problems finding patrons. Miami draws lots of corporate-card-wielding conventiongoers, plus the city is not lacking for its own big spenders. “I just had Ivanka and Jared,” Einhorn says, referring to President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law-slash-diplomat-on-call, noting that the couple are regulars and often bring the family.

“The kids are driving them crazy, like insanity. They must go, they must have their birthday there.”In Trump’s America, a steak has become more than just an expensive cut of meat. It’s a symbol of health and wealth, with notes of pure masculine virility. The rib-eye (of which the tomahawk is a particularly large version) has pride of place near the top of the updated the administration released in January. Shortly after the new upside-down food pyramid was unveiled, the Health and Human Services Department posted a photo of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ready to blow out the candles on his birthday steak.

And though the fervor for a steak-based diet may have started with RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement, other cabinet members have become converts to Kennedy’s steak-and-sauerkraut routine, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Vice President JD Vance, as the reported in June.

Beef has taken on another association, though, one that’s awkward for the administration: It’s one of those everyday items that many Americans can no longer regularly afford. Since Trump was first sworn into office in January 2017, prices for steak and ground beef have soared 81% and 95%, respectively, according to government data, compared with 41% for food overall. Runaway beef inflation has spurred a series of announcements from the Trump administration, including the resumption of shipments of live Mexican cattle to the US and a scheme to import 300,000 metric tons of low-tariff “product for ground beef.” (Details on the latter are notably scant, leading to feverish speculation about the origins of the so-called mystery meat.)

In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Trump “is delivering on his promise to consumers by reducing beef prices while allowing our American beef herd to grow.”Americans’ appetite for beef was strong enough to keep up with rising prices for years, but consumers seemed to have finally reached their limit this summer.

Data from Circana, a market-research company, showed retail sales by volume stalling out right at the peak of grilling season in July, though they’ve since resumed growing at modest rates.

What we’re seeing is the forces of supply and demand at work, and not the failure of any one administration. Simply put, people still want to eat beef, and there’s less of it to go around. The size of the US herd is at a historic low. And though the most recent report from the US Department of Agriculture shows a very small rebound compared with the previous year’s stock, experts agree that any sustained increase is going to be long and slow.

Two factors that would normally spur ranchers to increase their herds were present in recent years: Feed prices were low, and beef prices were high. But another factor neither Trump nor the markets have any control over has held them back — rain. Or, more precisely, the lack thereof.

“Drought is not a problem that’s going away,” says James Mitchell, an associate professor of agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas, and that will keep prices high. Ranchers need rain for the feed they provide their cattle, from the grass they pasture on in the summer to the hay they eat in the winter. As of early October, about 52% of the country’s cattle herd was in an area already in a moderate or more intense drought. And conditions are almost certain to get worse over the long term, as climate scientists have been warning for years now (sometimes in conjunction with a plea for people to take steps to reduce their carbon footprint by, you guessed it, eating less beef).

“We’ll get more droughts, we’ll get more severe droughts, and we’ll get longer droughts,” says Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan. We’ll get “short periods of relief,” he says. But the droughts will return, and the periodic snowfall and rainfall won’t be enough to undo their harm.

Herd rebuilding takes three to four years to play out. Ranchers have to wait for a heifer to reach breeding age, then for her to gestate a calf, which they raise and send to a feedlot, before it finally goes to slaughter, so the effects of a long dry stretch can take years to show up in the supermarket meat case. Right now shoppers are paying for ranchers’ decision to shrink their herds during the 2020-23 drought, says David Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State University.

Weather forecasting technology has come a long way since the days of the . Today drought reports the government produces can tell a rancher the present state of conditions, and some tools can predict a season, or even a year out. But cattle operations need to be able to see even further into the future to make educated decisions on whether to expand their herd.

Overpeck, working with a team of scientists convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, has approached the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about developing a drought assessment model that would rely on data from more recent climate-change-related droughts instead of historic ones. Its uses could go far beyond cattle ranching. Although Overpeck says NOAA is taking the proposal seriously, it will require government funding, something that, like rain, has been in short supply of late. He couldn’t put a dollar figure on it but says the project needs only “a very small investment.”

It’s an investment that could pay dividends not only to farmers and ranchers but to shoppers too. Keith Good, an agricultural policy analyst and former statistician at the USDA, says the recent modest increase in “replacement heifers,” the industry term for cattle that will be used to bear calves, in the department’s report from July was a sign that cattle owners were making a “cautious bet.”If drought conditions improve, their businesses will do well. If they don’t, ranchers could always send those heifers to the slaughterhouse. (In his analysis of the USDA report, Brett Stuart of the market intelligence company Global AgriTrends noted that the increase in replacement heifers was only 2.7%, compared with the 23% rate in the last expansion, in 2011-16.)

But that bet has gotten riskier in just the past couple of months, with feed prices rising and with Trump touting the mystery meat plan that sent cattle futures tumbling in August. (They’ve since recovered.)

That 300,000 metric tons in imports would amount to only 2.2% of annual US beef consumption, says Glynn Tonsor, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University, some of which was already coming. The intervention may push prices down, he argues, but the announcement also had the unintended consequence of adding uncertainty into the market.

“I think the bigger impact on producers is a losing of faith,” he says; ranchers can’t predict what Washington may do next. “And if the future business environment is more uncertain from a policy front, you’re less willing to make an investment. And that’s what herd expansion is, an investment for the next 5 to 15 years.”

Meanwhile, growth in retail beef purchases has resumed. As long as unemployment doesn’t jump, says Chris DuBois, leader of Circana’s protein practice, sales will continue to grow modestly; even many of those watching their spending are still buying it sometimes, reluctant to give it up entirely. Jenn Lueke, a budget-minded food influencer and cookbook author, says ground beef isn’t off the menu — it just makes fewer appearances now that it’s gotten so expensive.

“If we’re going to include ground beef in a recipe, every now and then,” she says, “it’s considering what the other meals are for the week.”The allegiance to beef is strong in restaurants too, with more than 90% featuring it on their menus, according to food and beverage industry market researcher Datassential. It’s a premium option that “operators are leaning into rather than steering away from,” says Claire Conaghan, an analyst at the company. And it’s not just fancy restaurants. The roast beef sandwich chain Arby’s added “steak nuggets” to its menu for a limited time in 2025 and found the campaign so successful it brought them back for another cameo in August.

The US is coming off of the warmest summer on record with below-average precipitation; 41 states were in a drought the week ended Oct. 6. But even in places where rainfall is scarce, high demand is enough to persuade some ranchers to take the bet.

In Missouri, where 55% of the state’s cattle herd is in areas afflicted by drought, Vance Keaton is already looking to expand his stock of the replacement heifers he’ll sell to other ranchers looking to grow. Keaton acknowledges that he’s worried about the cost of diesel and feed and concerned about how the Trump administration’s unpredictable announcements may negatively affect cattle prices. But, he says, “we’re going to have to have cows.”