By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, November 11, 2025
Watching the president scramble to address the cost of
living after last
Tuesday’s election drubbing is like watching a lost
tourist try to get directions from the locals in their native tongue.
He might know a few words, possibly even enough to get
his point across. But most of the communication will happen through bold,
largely inscrutable gestures.
Take the following vignette from Politico describing a meeting last weekend between Donald Trump and Bill
Pulte, his henchman in charge of investigating political enemies for
mortgage fraud. If you had tasked me with writing a Never Trump satire of how
policy ideas gain traction in this administration, I promise that it would have
been subtler and more respectful of the president’s intelligence than this:
On Saturday evening, Pulte
arrived at President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach Golf Club with a roughly 3-by-5
posterboard in hand. A graphic of former President Franklin Roosevelt appeared
below “30-year mortgage” and one of Trump below “50-year mortgage.” The
headline was “Great American Presidents.”
Roughly 10 minutes later, Trump
posted the image to Truth Social,
according to one of the people familiar, who was with the president at the
time.
Trump was asked about the idea on Monday in a friendly
interview with Fox News, giving him a chance to play it off as a joke or spin
it as proof that he’s open to any suggestion to reduce housing costs, no matter
how silly. And a 50-year mortgage is silly. It would make home purchases
a de facto lifelong obligation, add hundreds of thousands of dollars in
interest payments over the term of the loan, and leave homeowners with far less equity when they sell than a 30-year borrower would have.
All that, just to reduce the average monthly mortgage
payment by a few hundred dollars. It’s preposterous—but not to Trump, who
proceeded to defend the scheme to Fox. “It's not even a big deal,” he told Laura Ingraham. “You go from 40 to 50 years. And what it means
is you pay something less. From 30, some people had a 40, and now they have a
50. All it means is you pay less per month, you pay it over a longer period of
time. It's not like a big factor."
If only we had a president with a background in real
estate.
Get used to idiotic proposals like this being kicked
around over the next year, though. In the week since the election, two things
have become clear: The White House is very nervous about its political
exposure on affordability and plainly hasn’t the foggiest idea of how to
address the subject in a serious way. Which means American voters are about to
spend the next 51 weeks being courted with one desperate, facile, unworkable
cost-of-living Trump gimmick after another.
The president is going to take a kitchen-sink approach to
kitchen-table issues. He has little choice.
Two populisms.
Broadly speaking, left-wing populism concerns itself
primarily with economics while right-wing populism concerns itself primarily
with culture.
Bernie Sanders can and will mouth the requisite “woke”
platitudes needed to keep him in the good graces of progressives, but his heart clearly
isn’t in it. He’s a class warrior, not a culture warrior. Redistribution is
what gets him out of bed in the morning.
Trump is the opposite. He’s enough of an economic
populist to oppose slashing entitlements, but his approach to taxes and spending is fairly standard country-club Republicanism. He’s a culture
warrior, not a class warrior. Rounding up illegal immigrants is what puts a
spring in his step.
No doubt to the president’s horror, it looks likely that
economics, not culture, will decide the 2026 midterms.
Granted, it was economics
more so than culture that decided the 2024
presidential election—and Trump did okay in that one. But the advantage he
enjoyed last November no longer obtains: Voters at the time compared the
painful inflation of the Biden era to the strong pre-pandemic 2019 economy and
decided to bring back the previous guy to hopefully work his magic again. A
year later, they’ve discovered that there is no magic. Inflation persists,
tariffs are a brake on growth, and—until last Tuesday—the president barely
seemed to care.
Now he has no choice but to care—and as a culture warrior
forced to play class warrior, he lacks a Bernie-esque off-the-shelf suite of
policy proposals designed to make life more affordable for lower- and
middle-class voters. Like the lost tourist, he’s a non-native speaker trying to
communicate with voters in an unfamiliar tongue, so he’s doomed to a series of
bold yet largely inscrutable gestures in hopes of signaling intelligibly that
he feels their pain.
Those gestures have already begun.
Bold gestures.
The first gesture after Election Day came last Friday
when Trump demagogued the meat-packing industry for inflation at the
supermarket by accusing
it of price gouging. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the Biden
administration did
the same thing when the cost of living began to bite
Democrats politically in the fall of 2021. Americans need someone to blame for
why things are expensive, it seems, and intangible market forces like supply
and demand ain’t gonna cut it. Our last two presidents have offered up greedy
corporations as a scapegoat to appease voters in hopes that they won’t be
scapegoated themselves.
Trump’s next gesture on affordability came the following
day when he addressed the key
issue in the shutdown saga, the cost of health care. What if, he said in a Truth
Social post, we took the billions in Obamacare subsidies that the federal
government currently pays
to insurance companies and gave that money to
Obamacare customers instead, to buy their own health care plans? Wouldn’t it be
better if consumers suddenly had thousands of dollars in their pockets?
“Consumer choice” is a fine conservative principle, but
there are a lot of moving parts in that reform. For instance, would
recipients be required to spend the money on health insurance or would they be
free to spend it how they like? If the latter, some are destined to remain
uninsured and end up suffering expensive medical emergencies that bankrupt
them. Even if we do require them to buy cheap, catastrophic insurance (the
return of the mandate!), would those low-premium plans provide insurers with
enough revenue to offset the cost of covering Americans’ preexisting conditions,
as the law currently obliges them to do?
Or are Republicans planning to repeal that very
popular aspect of Obamacare?
Sunday then brought two more splashy gestures on the cost
of living: first, the cockamamie 50-year mortgage scheme, followed by a
proposal to pay every American below an unspecified income threshold a $2,000
“dividend” out of tariff revenue collected by the
administration. That’s stupid for all sorts of reasons—the Supreme Court might
soon hand most
of that money back to importers; even if it doesn’t, the government hasn’t raised
nearly enough from tariffs to cover the cost of the
“dividend”; even if it had, you can imagine what sort of inflationary effect a
stimulus of hundreds of billions of dollars might have. (Actually, you
don’t have to imagine.)
It’s an ideological mess, too. If Trump wants to collect
money from American businesses and redistribute it back to the average joe, he
might as well go full Bernie by hiking the corporate income tax and using the
proceeds to fund new welfare programs. Be the
socialist that you are, buddy.
Amid all of these bold gestures over the last week, the
president has resorted more than once to a talking point that’s tone-deaf at
best and politically suicidal at worst, insisting that the supposed
affordability crisis is … mostly a figment of voters’ imaginations. That’s
another echo of the Biden era, when many Democrats parried complaints about
inflation by arguing that the
economy’s fundamentals were strong. But Trump has taken the “your lying
eyes” approach a step further by simply denying that the cost of living keeps
rising.
“I don't want to hear about the affordability,” he told reporters
last Thursday, alleging that, “Our energy costs are way down. Our groceries are
way down. Everything is way down.” On Monday, Fox’s Ingraham asked him if there
was a “perception” problem with the economy or if Republicans should be doing
more to address voters’ frustrations. “More than anything else, it’s a con job
by the Democrats,” the president glibly replied, accusing
the media of trying to poison public opinion against him.
This is what it looks like when culture warriors are
forced to play class warriors, and what it’s going to look like all the way
until Election Day 2026.
The tool kit.
Populists are destined to be bad at policy for the same
reason they’re destined to be authoritarians, I think. They believe that social
problems result from failures of will, not failures of imagination. If America
is bedeviled by some ill, it’s not because the incentive structure created by
policymakers to remediate it is flawed. It’s because policymakers lack the
nerve to deter the villains behind the problem by inflicting enough pain on
them to make them stop.
Through a populist lens, every complex problem is simple.
According to progressives, for instance, the wealth we need to make America
equitable and prosperous for all already exists. It’s just being hoarded by the
rich. Muster the will to seize it, and our problems will supposedly be solved.
The right’s cultural populism is even simpler: Whatever
the problem might be, the solution is to get rough. Deter drug dealing
by blowing
up boats in the Caribbean. Deter illegal immigration by letting
ICE go rogue. Deter resistance to the administration by
threatening critics or indicting
them. Win wars by letting American soldiers commit
war crimes. With enough ruthlessness, any impediment to asserting one’s
will can be overcome with ease. It’s not a coincidence that Trump won the 2016
Republican nomination running on a message as elementary as “build the wall.”
You can understand, then, why the affordability crisis
would leave him feeling at sea and sounding like a lost tourist. Unlike the
type of cultural fracas in which he typically involves himself, it’s not a
problem that lends itself to a dopey “get rough” solution. High grocery prices,
expensive homes, and sky-high health insurance premiums are three complicated
and distinct challenges, and Republicans don’t have the ideological luxury that
Democrats do of shouting “tax the rich!” or “Medicare for all!” to address
them.
I doubt the president ever imagined having to be
proactive about such issues in a second term, in fact. My guess is that he
believed devoutly in his own hype about having an economic Midas touch, in
which merely putting him back in charge of America would unleash optimism,
ignite job growth, and lower prices. He ran on securing the border and
“retribution”; the economy and the rising cost of living were things that would
either take care of themselves or be healed
through the divine power of tariffs.
Now here he is, forced to grapple with serious economic
discontent and without the slightest idea of what to do about it—especially
health care, a notoriously byzantine system that the GOP has yet to formulate a plan for reforming despite having had 15 years to do so. Is it any surprise that
he’s fallen back on the same ol’ demagogic populist tool kit that’s served him
well in other political disputes?
One tool is blame shifting. This isn’t just part of his
kit, of course, but more like his defining personality trait. It’s also the
approach he’s taken with meat-packing companies to explain the high cost of
beef, not coincidentally.
Another tool is bribery. A Trump specialty, the president
understands
better than most the primal satisfaction of having a
fat envelope slipped into your hand. “No tax on tips” was a sneak preview
during last year’s campaign of the sort of fiscally goofy gimmickry aimed at
buying votes that we’re now seeing with his plan for $2,000 tariff refunds and
subsidy payouts to Obamacare consumers.
A third is denial. It’s hard to fault Trump for thinking
he might persuade Americans that they’re imagining their economic hardship
after he spent the last 10 years successfully persuading right-wingers to
abandon every conviction they ever had. He convinced enough voters that his
coup attempt in 2021 was no big deal that they returned him to office last
November, didn’t he? Go figure that he believes he can talk his way out of the
basic day-to-day reality of what things cost, too.
The fourth tool is ruthlessness. We haven’t yet reached
the point where Trump seeks to lower prices by executive order, but it’s a
cinch that we will. The populist imperative to “get rough” with problems will
eventually lead him to market-distorting authoritarian interventions like price
controls to show voters that he’s pulling out all the stops to try to make life
easier for them. And no, of course it won’t matter that he blasted
Kamala Harris as a “communist” during the campaign for
proposing something similar. He’s already warmed up to
Harris-style “communism” in other respects.
Hucksterism.
Beyond all of that, insofar as there are serious
solutions to affordability problems available to the White House—like
incentivizing states to make it easier to build housing—those reforms would
take years to pay political dividends even if implemented today. For a
civic-minded president, that would be fine; for Trump, it’s a nonstarter
because it doesn’t solve the electoral problem that’s looming for him in
November of next year.
Never has America had a leader who cares
less about what happens after he’s gone and his
personal reputation no longer depends on the country’s success. A long-term
plan to boost the supply of housing can’t be his main proposal on the cost of
living because it fails to answer the question that guides all of his actions.
What’s in it for him, electorally or otherwise?
When you elect a huckster, you’ll get policy “solutions”
that appeal to a huckster. The president’s instant attraction to 50-year
mortgages is almost a parody of that: It’s a quick, simple fix to reduce
monthly housing payments, never mind its many deleterious consequences, and
quick, simple fixes are just what a salesman would offer when he’s desperate to
make a sale to voters by next November. The fact that Bill Pulte’s inane idea
allegedly went from posterboard mock-up to presidential statement in 10 minutes
perfectly captures the “here’s something I just thought of” unseriousness with
which Trump will approach the cost of living over the next year.
He’s going to throw every half-baked huckster-ish idea he
hears about how to make life cheaper at the proverbial wall and force Democrats
to explain to voters why it can’t or shouldn’t be enacted. In the past, the
right always struggled to “outbid” the left in promising free stuff to
Americans, restrained by conservative principles and a basic tether to fiscal
reality. Trump is restrained by neither. He’ll say anything to sell Americans a monorail.
And this electorate might buy it. He’s president for a reason, you know.
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