Affordability

The White House thinks it needs to talk about it. They don't know how.

“We’re focusing relentlessly on affordability,” Stephen Miller said Tuesday, as a guest of Larry Kudlow on Fox Business. Miller went on about it at some length, in fact; the administration’s laser-like intensity on bringing down costs for, well, pretty much everything. Policies to accomplish this were light.

Over on MSNBC that same day, you could catch Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent opining on the same topic. “We inherited an affordability crisis,” Bessent said. He claimed that the Trump policies have slowed the rate of price increases, which will combine with a coming rise in real wages to “address the affordability issue.” Again, not real clear how.

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This came on the heels of a Fox News interview with Trump himself, conducted by Laura Ingraham. There, Trump denied there is a problem at all, declaring affordability a “con job by the Democrats.” Cost of living, he said, is way down on his watch.

Trump had initially been an early adopter of the affordability mantra, mentioning it repeatedly the day after last Tuesday’s elections. That was the magic message coming out of those Democratic victories. Fox News itself, according to one analysis, used the word “affordability” some 50 times a day after those elections, compared with around 15 times a day two weeks earlier.

Indeed, Trump had come right out acknowledging that the elections had gone badly for Republicans, while most GOP leaders on Capitol Hill—notably Speaker Mike Johnson—were prattling talking points that it hadn’t happened at all. It was all a bit silly; everybody knew what had happened, and had seen more or less the same analysis of why. Trump, unusually, was the only one telling the truth.

However, Trump seemed to quickly realize that the emphasis on too-high cost of living reflected badly upon the current President. He suddenly reversed course, saying that he was sick of people using the term he had been using himself a day earlier. Soon he was making his typical false boasts, as he did with Ingraham, claiming to have solved the problem.

The Ingraham interview went over poorly with a surprising number of MAGA influencers. Not, to be sure, the full-fledged sycophants. But more than I’m used to seeing. Trump’s clumsy denying of an affordability problem was a big part of the displeasure—exacerbated by his sudden plan for 50-year mortgages, which reportedly took Bill Pulte 10 minutes to talk him into at the golf club.. But there was more. Trump’s once again defended the approval of 600,000 Chinese student visas, and reiterated his relatively newfound backing of the need for H-1B workers.

Those are most definitely not policies that MAGA folks voted for. And this is on top of ongoing frustrations about the slow pace of prosecuting the many, many fiends behind RussiaGate and other outrages. Trump gave blanket pardons to dozens of people involved in the 2020 “Stop the Steal” attempt to overturn that election, but that didn’t seem to impress many—none of them were facing federal charges, and he conspicuously left off their hero Tina Peters.

So, there seems to be discontent among the faithful. But the affordability issue threatens much more mainstream problems for the Trump and GOP brands. Denying the problem is unlikely to work. Claiming to be hyper-focused on the issue sounds almost farcical coming from Miller and others who have barely mentioned the topic for the past ten months. And Trump sounds brutally out of touch every time he engages on the subject.

Trump has now offered two new proposals to win back goodwill on affordability, One is a $2000 distribution from tariff revenue for all but high-income households. (That too is not being received well by MAGA types who want the debt paid down.) We’ll see if that happens, The other is his hot healthcare proposal to send money to households instead of to insurance companies as ACA subsidies. Senator Rick Scott says he plans to have a bill ready next month. I am very skeptical that anybody will be seeing those checks.

So, any other ideas?