That’s an irresponsible accusation coming from one of the politicians whose own agenda helped make housing so unaffordable in the first place.

If Warren genuinely cared about lowering housing costs, she’d spend less time attacking Trump and more time acknowledging how years of Democratic policies helped drive prices higher.

Democrats’ reckless immigration agenda tells this story well.

The Biden administration presided over the largest surge of illegal immigration in modern American history. Millions of additional people needed places to live at precisely the moment America was already struggling with a severe housing shortage. Warren defended the administration’s actions for the entire four years of Biden’s term.

Now we have fresh evidence of the consequences.

A recent Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas working paper found that the surge in unauthorized immigration significantly increased housing demand without meaningfully increasing housing supply. The researchers estimated that a 1% increase in unauthorized immigrant worker flows raised local home prices by roughly 2.2% and rents by 1.4%. They further concluded that unauthorized immigration accounted for a substantial share of home-price and rent growth during the 2021-2024 period.

That also helps explain why Trump’s priorities aren’t nearly as irrational as Warren suggests. Before Congress turns to broader housing legislation, it makes sense first to address one of the underlying policies that contributed to today’s affordability crisis.

The SAVE America Act is designed to strengthen confidence in the integrity of federal elections after years in which illegal immigration dominated the national conversation. Given that the same immigration surge also placed additional pressures on America’s housing market, it’s hardly unreasonable for Trump to insist Congress address that issue before moving on to longer-term housing reforms.

Immigration cheerleading is not the only way Warren helped contribute to America’s affordable housing woes.

Warren spent years supporting the spending agenda that fueled the worst inflation in decades. As inflation climbed, the Fed responded by raising interest rates, sending mortgage rates soaring. Overnight, families that could once afford a home found themselves priced out of the market. Builders likewise faced higher financing costs, making it even harder to increase housing supply.

Those weren’t acts of nature. They were the predictable consequences of economic policies that Warren supported with enthusiasm.

Instead of acknowledging any of this, Warren chose a different villain — not the government but the private sector (naturally).

Warren has repeatedly argued that the corporate greed of landlords, who have begun using property management software that gives them rough pricing suggestions, is a major reason rents have increased. She has demanded investigations into companies that develop these applications. Warren implies that Kelley Blue Book-styled pricing technology that tracks supply and demand trends — and not years of misguided public policy — caused America’s housing affordability crisis.

It’s a convenient political narrative. If “greedy landlords” are to blame, then politicians don’t have to answer for inflationary spending, failed border policies, burdensome regulations, or the supply constraints those policies helped create.

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Americans know better.

If Warren wants to know why so many Americans struggle to buy a home today, she shouldn’t blame Trump or the private sector. She should instead look in the mirror.

Michael J. Pappas is a former Republican member of Congress from New Jersey.