National Democrats are salivating over the chance to attack President Donald Trump on the economy, arguing that the White House’s latest gaffe highlights how “out of touch” Trump is over how the Iran war is impacting affordability.
On Wednesday, Trump hosted guests for a private Easter luncheon at the White House, where, for more than an hour, he repeatedly suggested that the federal government could not afford to launch new programs lowering the rising costs of child and daycare, which are frequently cited as a top economic concern heading into the 2026 midterm elections.
The event itself was behind closed doors, and Trump’s comments would have skirted under the radar had the White House not accidentally published his remarks to its public YouTube page before deleting the post shortly after.
In the deleted video, Trump can be heard telling attendees that he’d instructed Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought not to “send any more for daycare” to the states.
“The United States can’t take care of daycare,” he said. “That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You’ve got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump added later in his remarks. “You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
Trump and Republicans have grappled with addressing affordability concerns since the fall, when Democrats swept the off-year elections buoyed by economic uncertainty, but the president’s own polling remained relatively constant until the launch of Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28.
And now, Democratic lawmakers and strategists tell the Washington Examiner that by simply comparing what Trump is willing to spend money on, specifically the war in Iran, with his comments over the past year regarding kitchen table financial issues allows them a new avenue to sharpen attacks on the president’s economic messaging and possibly move voters out of the MAGA camp who’ve stuck with the president over the past year.
The Democratic National Committee made Trump’s Easter address the core focus of a call with reporters Thursday morning, and even repackaged the president’s speech into a new digital ad. Party operatives claimed that the Democrats’ clips of Trump’s speech had earned more than 10 million views in a little over 12 hours, as of Thursday morning.
“It’s extraordinary to me that Republican policies have found money to enact massive tax breaks for GOP billionaire donors, provide a $75 billion slush fund so that ICE agents can unleash brutality and in some cases, kill American citizens, and at the same time, spend billions of dollars to drop bombs in the Middle East in a reckless war of choice,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told the Washington Examiner on the call. “But Donald Trump believes that there is no funding for critical things like nutritional assistance, assistance as it relates to healthcare and providing for the health and well-being of everyday Americans. It speaks for itself. Republican policies have been cruel, extreme, and they have failed to make life better for working-class Americans, middle-class Americans, and everyday Americans.”
Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) added that the ballooning cost of the Iran war, including a $200 billion supplemental funding request the White House reportedly plans to submit to Congress in the coming days, could have fully funded the expired Affordable Care Act subsidies that Democrats pressed Republicans to extend in 2025 for an additional seven years.
“I just hope it really hits home to the American people, just how out of touch and dangerous Trump’s actions are, his willingness to be able to push billions of dollars towards things that the American people clearly don’t want,” Kim told the Washington Examiner.
The White House sought to downplay the president’s comments from Wednesday. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement that “Democrats and the left-wing media” took the president’s words “out of context.”
“President Trump was talking about the importance of stopping the scams and rooting out the billions of dollars in fraud in these vital programs that elected Democrat officials have allowed to happen,” she said. “The Trump economic agenda will continue to lower costs and make everyday life more affordable for hardworking American families.”
Still, Republicans have privately voiced concerns to the Washington Examiner that Trump isn’t doing enough to address the affordability issue, and when he is, he often misses the mark.
For example, on Thursday, Trump, in an interview with the Washington Examiner, suggested that he no longer prioritized signing into law the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan bill which he openly lobbied for last month before its passage through the Senate.
“I’m looking at other things very strongly,” Trump said. “Housing to me is all about interest rates, and we’re driving the interest rates down. Other than we have a very, very dumb head of the Federal Reserve, we’re driving the interest rates down.”
Trump seemed to indicate that he believed mortgage rates would precipitously drop after he formally concludes the fighting in Iran. Just hours later, Freddie Mac announced that average 30-year fixed-rate mortgages had risen for the fifth consecutive week, virtually wiping out all the relief prospective homebuyers have seen since the start of Trump’s term.
TRUMP SAYS IRAN WAR TO CONTINUE FOR UP TO THREE WEEKS: ‘BRING THEM BACK TO THE STONE AGES’
“I mean, honestly, their biggest problem is Donald Trump’s own attitudes,” one veteran Democrat strategist, an alumnus of the Biden White House, told the Washington Examiner when asked about Trump’s recent comments on affordability. “There have been enough of these kinds of quote, unquote gaffes where it’s now clear that he just doesn’t care about the people who are struggling.”
“Remember, ahead of the holidays, when he was making fun of people who thought the tariffs would make it hard to buy toys for their kids for Christmas?” that person said. “Or these reported comments from Punchbowl about how he told speaker Johnson, quote, ‘Nobody gives a s**t about housing’ when that is objectively false. So you have a lot of persuadable voters who are extremely frustrated and saying, ‘I’m getting the opposite of what I was promised. What the hell is going on?’ And his conduct keeps making that worse, not better.”
