President Donald Trump will tell you that affordability is a “dead” issue, but the slate of economic proposals he has put forward in recent days begs to differ.
Democrats, including New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, parlayed a campaign focus on rising prices into big-time wins in last week’s elections. The messaging ran directly contrary to the president’s own claims that his policies are engineering a new “golden age” of American economic dominance.
Trump, however, chalked up the Republican losses to the fact that he himself was not on the ballot and repeatedly grew frustrated with reporters last week for pressing him on economic issues.
“It was a con job, affordability,” he declared Friday in the White House’s Cabinet Room. “They call — it was a con job by the Democrats. The Democrats are good at a few things, cheating on elections and conning people with facts that aren’t true. We are much better than [former President Joe] Biden and all of them now, just so you understand. Do you remember that the Biden administration had the highest inflation in 48 years? The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under sleepy Joe Biden.”
Still, that same day, Trump began pushing proposals that seem to be pulled straight from the Democrats’ playbook.
First, he directed the Justice Department to open a price-fixing investigation into meatpacking companies. On Saturday, Bill Pulte, the president’s Federal Housing Finance Agency director, confirmed that the administration is “working on” a 50-year mortgage option for homebuyers. On Sunday, Trump touted on Truth Social how his tariffs were making the United States “the Richest, Most Respected Country In the World” and his plans to use tariff revenue to send taxpayers a $2,000 stimulus check, “not including high-income people.” And finally, on Monday, Trump suggested that he would authorize $10,000 bonuses for any air traffic controllers who did not take time off during the government shutdown.
Kevin Hassett, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, pumped the brakes a little on some of those proposals while speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, but he did confirm that Trump is serious about sending people a $2,000 dividend pulled from his tariff revenue, even if it would require legislation to do so.
“I think that when we studied the matter in the summer, we thought that deficit reduction might be the best use of those monies, but we’ve had a big surge in tax revenues,” he said. “We’ve seen a big surplus in the latest monthly Treasury report. And because of the surge in tax revenues, I think that’s a position that Congress and the president will be considering.”
However, Hassett sounded much less sure while discussing Trump’s 50-year mortgage plan, offering that the idea still requires “a lot of legal analysis,” but reassured reporters that housing is “something that we take very seriously as a policy challenge.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made headlines in September when he predicted to the Washington Examiner that Trump would declare a national housing emergency this fall. When asked about the timeline for that declaration on Monday, Hassett told the Washington Examiner that he “can’t talk about that right now.”
White House and Treasury Department officials declined to give any additional specifics Monday about Trump’s recent suite of suggestions.
“President Trump’s tariffs are resetting global commerce, securing manufacturing investments, and safeguarding our national and economic security – and they’re also raising billions in revenue for the federal government,” one senior White House official said in a statement. “The Administration is committed to putting this money to good use for the American people.”
A second White House official added, “President Trump is always exploring new ways to improve housing affordability for everyday Americans. Any official policy changes will be announced by the White House.”
Trump’s aforementioned proposals, as opposed to his public comments, fall more in step with comments White House deputy chief of staff James Blair made following last week’s elections.
Blair told Politico in an interview that the president is “very keyed into what’s going on, and he recognizes, like anybody, that it takes time to do an economic turnaround.”
“Why did Zohran Mamdani do so well [Tuesday] night? He relentlessly focused on affordability,” he added. “People talk about communists; they can say all these things, but the fact is, he was talking about the cost of living.”
Heading into the 2026 election cycle, Trump runs the risk of falling into the same trap that virtually sank Democrats’ hopes of holding on to their congressional majorities in the 2022 midterm elections, not to mention former President Joe Biden’s legislative efficacy during his final two years in office.
Similar to Trump, Biden championed a long-term-focused economic agenda that, despite transformative promises, did not ease the financial concerns of voters. That messaging disconnect, at least partially, led to major electoral losses for his party.
Andrew Bates, a former Biden White House spokesman, denied to the Washington Examiner that Trump’s situation mirrors Biden’s but said that the president “chained himself between a rock and a hard place” by promising on the campaign trail to lower prices “immediately” upon entering office.
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“He looked voters in the eye, he looked cameras in the eye, and he kept saying, ‘I will fix this fast. You will not believe how fast prices fall,'” Bates said. “But instead, his agenda is making them go up. I think the common thread here is he keeps treating people like they are stupid, and I think what really happened was the victory went to his head. He did not process that a lot of swing voters chose him because he promised he would bring their costs down, not because they subscribe to every single one of his beliefs or they’re hardcore MAGA people.
“If you get goodwill from a promise that was crucial to hiring you, and then when it counts, you do the opposite, you are going to reap many, many times over that much badwill. People aren’t stupid, and they’re watching.”
