What do Donald Trump and Joe Lombardo have in common?

If you said they both gave speeches within one week of each other in which neither of them mentioned the price of eggs, you’re right.

But while both men demonstrate they have higher priorities than your grocery bill, they’re not entirely two (overpriced) peas in a pod.

“I was saved by God to make America great again,” Trump explained in his speech.

The only non-corporeal source of salvation Lombardo invoked was an imaginarily benevolent “Nevada Way.”

And that’s not the only difference between the president and the governor.

In his speech, Lombardo boasted of presenting “a budget that’s centered and balanced,” but followed that up by firing his budget director because the budget Lombardo had sent to state lawmakers was unconstitutionally unbalanced. And then Lombardo tried to let his chief of staff take all the blame. Classy!

Trump, by contrast, has been following up on his speech by carpet-bombing the nation with what he calls “executive orders,” even though a good deal of them aren’t so much specific orders as nebulous executive thoughtlets of things Trump thinks it would be nice for somebody to do someday if someone in the government Trump’s underlings are in the process of depopulating can figure out how to do them.

Trump’s executive “order” on lowering prices to consumers falls into that category.

Trump & eggs

“President Donald J. Trump Delivers Emergency Price Relief For American Families to Defeat the Cost-of-Living Crisis” reads the title of one of Trump’s “Presidential Actions” issued Monday.

Emergency price relief? 

Cool.

How’s he going to do it? 

Glad you asked.

“I hereby order the heads of all executive departments and agencies to deliver emergency price relief, consistent with applicable law, to the American people,” the order reads.

Okay, how are the department heads going to do it?

By “pursuing appropriate actions” to lower the costs of housing, health care, and appliances, and eliminating “harmful, coercive ‘climate’ policies that increase the costs of food and fuel,” the “order” reads.

The aforementioned heads are supposed to report their progress in 30 days. And then again 30 days after that. And then every 30 days until …consumer morale improves?

Two days later Trump issued another executive “order,” with the exact same title. It reiterates all the original’s vague nothings but has additional whining about Biden that somebody probably forgot to put in the first time.

Unless you want to count the iffy-at-best proposition that petroleum companies (or more to the point, their shareholders) want to heavily invest in new oil & gas production, the “emergency price relief” orders have no details for how to actually relieve prices. And even if you share Trump’s faith that there’s nothing drill baby drill can’t do, the “emergency” order is devoid of any measures that could be described as “emergency” actions.

Lombardo & eggs

Lombardo’s strategy for addressing consumer costs likewise flirts with nonexistence. 

“We all know working families need to catch a break,” Lombardo said at one point in his address. In the same vein, a few sentences later he declared “prices are higher because of the compounding effects of inflation,” demonstrating what a great sleuth he must have been back when the former lawman was on the force.

The governor presented some housing and health care initiatives of questionable efficacy as if they might someday translate into savings for households. But that’s a stretch, to put it charitably. 

The “break” that he can bestow on consumers, Lombardo added, is “the promise of not raising taxes on hard-working Nevada families.”

That’s the least he can do.

No, seriously, not raising taxes is literally the very least the governor, and the Democrats in the Legislature, can do, because doing that would be doing nothing at all, when in fact something should be done.

Nevada’s tax system is upside down — the less money you make, the larger percentage of it you pay in taxes. Turning the tax system right side up — and actually lowering the costs of many consumer goods in the process by cutting the sales tax rate — is not rocket science. 

It’s politically hard though. So Nevada elected officials in both parties rarely even indicate an awareness of Nevada’s inflation-compounding tax system, let alone talk about it.

Crypto & eggs

After Trump proclaimed that he is God’s holy vessel on Earth, he (Trump, not God) signed an executive order directing the Department of Interior to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Later that day while heralding Trump as civilization’s savior, Elon Musk gave what he (Musk, not God) insists was absolutely positively not a Nazi salute. 

What does all of that (and so much more) have in common with the policy agenda in Nevada? 

If you said none of it will bring down the price of eggs, you’re right.

But while the executive branches in Washington and Carson City are both AWOL on consumer prices, there are of course many differences between the nation’s capital and the Reno exurb.

For instance, Nevada politics and policy in the next several months promise to fail to bring down the price of eggs while being rather dreary.

National politics and policy, by contrast, promises to fail to bring down the price of eggs by providing a plurality (though not a majority) of the U.S. electorate something it perhaps craves even more than lower prices: A freak show.

In an interview with Time magazine after the election Trump confessed that he might not be able to bring down prices because that’s hard, even though on the campaign trail he suggested it would be easy peasy because he’s TRUMP! 

But for Nevada families who, as Lombardo put it, “need to catch a break,” maybe there is a silver lining.

A couple days before his inauguration Trump rolled out a crypto meme coin, along with artwork depicting an image of Trump that is uncannily realistic if Trump was only 40 years younger and had Ryan Gosling’s body. The meme coin’s website warns it is not an investment opportunity “of any type,” but that’s just a thing Trump’s lawyers put on there so if you lose all your money it’s not Trump’s fault, which seems silly because nothing has been or ever can be Trump’s fault (there’s probably an executive order that says that, but if not there’s a definitely a Supreme Court ruling that does).

So perhaps this is really Trump’s plan, as well as the break Lombardo says Nevadans need to catch: Working families will get rich trading Trump’s crypto coins and never have to worry about the price of eggs again.