In the wake of last week’s bruising off-year elections, the president has announced a bevy of policies that may ease the pressure on household budgets.
President Donald Trump insists Republicans have already won the affordability battle. His actions tell another story.
In the wake of last week’s bruising off-year elections that underscored just how vulnerable the GOP is heading into 2026, Trump has announced a bevy of policies that may ease the pressure on household budgets.
He’s announced a plan to send low- and middle-income Americans $2,000 checks funded by new tariff revenue, asked the Justice Department to investigate whether meatpacking companies are colluding to raise beef prices and, at an event flanked by pharmaceutical executives, announced a deal to lower the price of increasingly popular weight-loss drugs.
He’s also suggested sending money to Americans directly to help them purchase health insurance and floated a proposal pushed by Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte to establish 50-year mortgages, which could lower homeowners’ monthly payments.
Together, the moves demonstrate a White House more concerned with pocketbook issues than the president is publicly willing to admit.
“People see the higher price of beef and the higher price of eggs and the higher price of coffee and the higher price of health care and those kinds of things, and they think that their real income is declining,” said Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who has advised the president. “Well, it’s not. But they’re paying more attention to the rise in the prices rather than the rise in their wages … Perception is reality.”
The president, who last week accused Democrats of perpetrating a “con job” on Americans when pitching themselves as the party of affordability, has pointed to inflation rates, which plummeted from a high of 9.1 percent under former President Joe Biden to 3 percent last month, as well as falling gas prices as proof of his economic turnaround. But Americans just aren’t feeling it, with NBC News exit polls from Tuesday’s election showing the economy and cost of living were among the top issues concerning voters across the country.
White House aides rebuffed the notion that the new policies Trump has announced are a response to Tuesday’s election but instead are reflective of this longer-term affordability push and have been in the works for “weeks if not months.”
“It’s not something where we called a meeting Wednesday morning after the election and said, ‘We have to get stuff on the board now,’” said a White House official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal discussions. “At both a systemic level and more targeted micro examples, we have been consistently focused on addressing affordability.”
That ongoing work on affordability underlies the fact the political challenge facing the White House and Republicans is unlikely to fade. Affordability was the common theme across Democrats’ trio of wins last week in New York City, New Jersey and Virginia, where candidates zeroed in on the high costs of everyday life, including rent, utilities and groceries, and some Trump allies fear the White House isn’t taking the results of the election seriously enough.
“We shouldn’t have lost the way we lost and part of it is a revulsion against the economy which — rightly or wrongly — people now blame on Trump and which Republicans now own,” said one former senior Trump adviser granted anonymity to offer candid remarks.
Trump faces the same dilemma as many of his predecessors, including former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who both struggled to square the improving economic indicators with voter’s negative vibes.
“The truth of the matter is, when people are in an economic crisis like this, and this was certainly true when I was in the Biden White House, there is no good message to people that are waking up consumed by making ends meet that day,” said Jesse Lee, who served as a senior communications adviser to Biden’s National Economic Council. “But what Trump has been saying is basically the most catastrophic answer you can give — telling people that this is a con job and nobody is feeling the thing that people are overwhelmingly feeling.”
The White House blames the Biden administration’s policies for worsening the affordability crisis, and criticizes the press for failing to inform Americans about previous affordability initiatives, from efforts to reduce the cost of eggs to plummeting gas prices.
White House aides, including press secretary Karoline Leavitt, have blasted reports suggesting the president doesn’t want to talk about affordability, contending that it’s among Trump’s top priorities.
“Look, when POTUS talks about a ‘con job,’ I think he’s pushing back more on the Democrats and also you guys in the media about this idea that we’re not doing anything about affordability, or that’s taking a back seat to other issues,” the official added. “I don’t think we’re downplaying or dismissing the problem. We’re downplaying or dismissing Democrats attacking us on us relatively successfully cleaning up a problem that they made.”
The White House argues that some of Trump’s policies were designed not to kick in until next year — and will pay dividends closer to Election Day — like the tax cuts and extensions passed as part of the GOP’s megabill.
Others may take longer. A substantial part of Trump’s second-term economic agenda has focused on imposing tariffs to rebalance trading relationships and encourage manufacturers to reshore their operations, and he’s secured trillions of dollars in pledges from companies both domestic and foreign to invest in bolstering their U.S. presence. Even if those policies are successful in sparking a rebirth of American manufacturing, it will take years if not decades for them to create new jobs and economic activity.
“What the Trump administration has done is laudable in terms of trying to reshore jobs. The problem is that the switch doesn’t get flipped overnight,” said David Urban, a Republican strategist who advised Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“It’s the economy stupid. It always is. If you can’t pay your bills, if you can’t get your kid the GI Joe,” he continued, “or your family vacation, buy a new washer for your family, go on a trip, fix your car. All those things are really high on your list.”