After the president announced tariffs would go into effect—sparking a trade war that sent the S&P 500 plummeting 1.8% on Monday—a new meme has begun taking hold on Bluesky: Trump Take Nest Egg.
It’s being delivered in context-free drops, in response to tariff-centric news clips, and accompanied by screenshots of the stock market declining in real time. While the loaded phrase may leave some observers scratching their heads, it should be instantly recognizable to many folks who have spent too much time online lately–particularly on Bluesky, where the simple line, “Trump take egg,” has become the go-to meme for commenting on the president’s chaotic second term.
The Tarzan-esque catchphrase began as a way to highlight Trump’s ownership of the recent egg shortage and subsequent price surge. Joe Biden’s critics spent much of the former president’s lone term blaming him for grocery store sticker-shock; now, the shoe is firmly on the other foot. (Especially after the Trump administration made moves like accidentally firing the team responsible for curbing bird flu, which may have directly affected egg prices.)
Trump Take Nest Egg, the latest iteration of what may be 2025’s most infectious phrase, isn’t the first time it has evolved. Though originally used as a caption to go along with photos of depleted store shelves, and still frequently deployed that way, the cadence of the phrase quickly spread to other Trump-related topics. When the president sought to end New York City’s congestion pricing program recently, Blueskiers wrote “Trump cause traffic”.
As the Department of Government Efficiency seemingly fed whole segments of the federal government into the wood chipper, others posted “Trump take job.” Some have used the phrase to comment on Trump’s broken promises around IVF treatment, which was highlighted in a viral Washington Post profile recently. And of course, many have used the phrase to comment on the abundance of plane crashes and near-misses in 2025.
Over the past month, “Trump take egg” has become a Swiss Army Knife of a meme that has reverberated widely online and off. It’s as if social media is putting all their Trump-related memes in one basket.
“It’s been amazing to see the egg meme organically evolve like it has,” says Michael Tae Sweeney, the Daytime Emmy-winning TV and film editor who created it and has egged it on every step of the way. “Not just the many variations like ‘Trump take nest egg’ but also seeing examples of it out in the real world–people holding ‘Trump take egg’ signs at protests, or even slapping ‘Trump take egg’ stickers on empty supermarket egg cases.”
The “nest egg” iteration, however, might be the purest and potentially most resonant distillation of the idea since it initially hatched. While Trump and Elon Musk have both previously admitted there could be temporary “pain” from the retaliatory tariffs, many of their already-pressed constituents are ill-equipped to weather it. Sweeney’s hope, though, is that those consumers will soon have more proactive defenders, armed with better messaging around Trump’s actions.
“With a few notable exceptions like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and JB Pritzker, Democratic politicians have so far been unable or unwilling to lend their supporters effective language to express the pain and frustration we’re feeling with Trump’s incompetent and destructive economic policies,” he says. “That it’s fallen to random idiots like me to step in isn’t great.”
Of course, no amount of posting on social media will make the president reconsider his least popular economic initiatives. But it’s not yet clear if Trump Take Nest Egg signifies the beginning of a bigger offline movement. Scrappy grassroots catchphrases have certainly morphed into nationwide rallying cries before. (“Let’s go, Brandon”, for instance, made its way to Congress.) As variations on “Trump take egg” burrow into national consciousness, and the anger behind them becomes more visible, it could wind up translating into more public protests. And that might be what it takes for Trump’s love of tariffs to crack.
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