Why Trump is Doomed to Lose the Affordability Fight

Trump is in a huge hole and can't stop digging

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump kicked off his much-anticipated and quite belated pivot to affordability with a rambling rally in Pennsylvania. The speech was a political and rhetorical disaster — truly a crime against political strategy and the English language.

Here’s how Politico Playbook summarized the “speech”:

• Trump veered off message, twice calling affordability a “hoax” — before admitting he’s no longer “allowed” to use the phrase.

• Trump revived his ill-advised line that it’s fine if parents can’t afford so many toys and pencils for their kids now that prices are higher due to tariffs. “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter,” he told the crowd. “Two or three is nice.”

• More broadly, Trump made clear his lack of conviction in the whole premise — mocking the word “affordability,” mocking his own price charts, mocking his pre-prepared speech — and admitting he was only on tour at the urging of chief of staff Susie Wiles.

• And Trump strayed way off topic, revealing his team had asked him not to discuss the border — before doing exactly that.

• In one of several long passages on immigration, Trump launched his most vitriolic attack yet on America’s Somalian community, describing their homeland as “filthy, dirty, disgusting” and wondering why the U.S. couldn’t take migrants from Scandinavia instead. (The clip’s going viral, and he’s being heavily criticized for this language today.)

• In the same breath, Trump confirmed 2018 reports — denied at the time — that he’d described certain African and Asian nations as “shithole countries.”

For most of his ten months in office, Trump has been at the White House working on his interior (and exterior) design projects or traveling the world. It’s been a while since we have seen Trump doing the so-called “weave” at a rally.

Trump was so incoherent that it should worry everyone that this addled, hateful, sunsetting man is in charge of the ship of state. But it should also give Democrats confidence as we head into the midterms. On Tuesday, Trump showed why his effort to solve his affordability problems is doomed to fail.

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1. Reality Bites

During Trump’s first stint in office, he absurdly bragged that the economy was the greatest in American history. While I don’t think voters agreed with his assessment per se, they did rate the economy — and his handling of it — quite well. Back then, Trump’s economic approval rating consistently exceeded his job approval and personal favorability ratings. This means that there was a swath of people who didn’t like Trump and would go on to vote for Joe Biden in 2020, who still thought he did a pretty good job on the economy.

There was a school of pundits who adopted a vibes-based view of economic politics. These folks argued that if you talked up the economy, voters would feel better about the economy, and your poll numbers would improve.

To put it bluntly, this idea is political idiocy, born of playing fantasy politics on Twitter rather than listening to voters.

Back in the dark days of the financial crisis, I repeatedly watched focus group participants nearly flip over the table whenever they heard a politician offer an overly sunny assessment of their grim economic reality.

Voters know all too well how much prices have gone up. They are the ones trying to make ends meet and suffering the sticker shock at the grocery store or with the monthly electricity and gas bills. Trump can say prices are down all he wants, but it’s not going to work.

When political rhetoric runs headlong into reality, reality wins every time.

2. People Blame Trump

During the speech, Trump tried to blame Joe Biden for high prices. This has been a central talking point by Republicans for months. In theory, this could work. Inflation was a problem that started before Trump took office. Historically, voters give newly elected presidents a long leash to deal with the problems they were elected to solve. Voters still blamed George W. Bush for the state of the economy well into Barack Obama’s election campaign.

That’s not the case here.

A Politico poll found that 46% of voters — including 15% of 2024 Trump voters — say Trump is fully or primarily responsible for the state of the economy. Only 29% blame Biden.

For Trump to get this much blame so early in his presidency is a historical anomaly, and it’s entirely his fault.

3. Tariffs Define Trump

In the minds of most voters, Trump’s economic policy can be summed up in one word: tariffs.

Trump was elected to lower prices, and one of his first and most high-profile acts was to explicitly raise prices on nearly everything. Americans know about the tariffs, and they don’t buy Trump’s absurd and largely incomprehensible arguments about why he enacted them.

Voters draw a straight line from Trump’s tariffs to higher prices. A Navigator Research poll of battleground House districts found that 69% believe that tariffs have increased costs.

A majority say their grocery prices are up because of Trump’s tariffs.

5. Trump’s Biggest Problem Is Trump

Ultimately, Donald Trump’s effort to solve his political problem is doomed to fail because he’s Donald Trump. To solve the problem of high prices, Trump has to acknowledge it. And to acknowledge the problem of high prices would be to admit a measure of failure.

In his eight decades on this planet, there is no evidence that Trump has the capacity to admit fault.

Trump is making the same mistake Biden did. He takes dissatisfaction with the economy personally and then reacts defensively by offering a message that is nothing more than a thumb in the eye of voters.

To give you a sense of Trump’s mentality, he recently awarded himself an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” for his economic stewardship.

Pretty sure, most Americans would not give him that grade

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Tuesday’s rally was supposed to kick off an aggressive campaign to make the economic case before the midterms. Trump’s chief of staff has said that Trump will campaign like it’s 2024:

“Typically, in the midterms, it’s not about who’s sitting at the White House; you localize the election. And you keep the federal officials out of it. We’re actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot.”

Democrats could only be so lucky.