Eggs are Expensive

It’s hard to be surprised anymore, but even the White House Easter Egg Hunt wasn’t safe.

It started slowly. First, the wooden souvenir eggs — which used to be simple, free keepsakes — were redesigned with Trump’s signature plastered across them, bigger than the actual word “Easter.” You could buy them for $15 each or get the “collector’s set” if you really wanted to remember the year innocence officially died.

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Then came the sponsors. Corporations lined up like kids at the egg roll — only they weren’t chasing candy. They were chasing influence. For $75,000 to $200,000 apiece, companies could plaster their logos across the South Lawn, hand out branded trinkets, and cozy up to the Trump family over brunch. The highest bidders even got their own 30'x30' branded "activation space," as if the South Lawn had turned into a strip mall.

Tickets were still free if you were fast. Or if you were willing to pay a scalper $300 for the privilege of standing on government property while a Trump posed for the cameras. Nobody seemed too concerned. In fact, it felt like the plan all along.

Perhaps it’s petty to bring this up. After all, the country had bigger problems than overpriced Easter eggs. But it wasn’t about the eggs. It was about the mindset. The idea that everything — even a simple public tradition meant for every family in America — could be privatized, cheapened, hollowed out, and sold back to you at a markup.

Under Trump, nothing was free. Not loyalty. Not decency. Not even a plastic egg with a Hershey’s Kiss inside.

Of course he monetized the Easter Egg Hunt.
It would’ve been news if he hadn’t.

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