The Affordability Hoax

Oh, how the proverbial worm turns. A few days ago, at the end of a Cabinet meeting, Donald Trump said, “The word affordability is a Democrat scam. They say it and then they go into the next subject and everyone thinks, ‘Oh, they had lower prices.’ No, they had the worst inflation in the history of our country.” He also dismissed concerns about affordability as “a con job” and “a fake narrative.”

A sitting president rejecting criticisms of his economic policies is hardly distinct to Trumplandia. Whoever happens to be in the Oval Office tends to blame the other party for painting the economy in bleak terms to undermine the administration. Nor is it unusual for a president to exaggerate or outright distort economic numbers. In September 2022, Biden claimed that the unemployment rate was at a 50-year low of 3.7% when it was in fact at a 2.5-year low. It is also true that over the past few decades public opinion about “the economy” has divided sharply along partisan lines: The party in power usually thinks things are good and getting better, while the party out of power thinks things are bad and getting worse.

From 2008 to 2016, when Obama was president, Democrats routinely saw the economy as recovering decently from the 2008-09 crisis, while Republicans strongly dissented, declaring the recovery mediocre at best. From 2017 to 2021, the perspective flipped, with Democrats criticizing the economy’s performance under Trump. The pandemic, its resulting disruptions and the massive government spending that ensued somewhat blurred those trends, but by 2023, the contrary perspectives and narratives were again being shaped by partisan and party affiliation.

The economic data over the past four years has been largely positive. Inflation has come down steadily since a 2022 pandemic peak, even though it has increased over the course of 2025 (from a low near 2% to about 3% today). Unemployment rates remain historically low, albeit higher than when Biden made his claim in 2022. Wages overall are growing modestly, though with healthcare and housing costs rising too, gains aren’t experienced as, well, gains by actual people. As a result, discontent with Trump’s handling of the economy has increased sharply. Only 36% of Gallup respondents say they approve of economic policy, but the partisan divide among those respondents is extreme: 81% of Republicans approve, but only 4% of Democrats do. That’s about as extreme as it was in October 2024, when 66% of Democrats thought the economy was getting better but only 8% of Republicans agreed.

No surprise, then, that Trump is just doing what most modern presidents have done: sweeping aside criticisms as politically motivated and statistically suspect. And over the past 15 years — since the crisis of 2008-09, in fact — much of the economic data that we use to assess “the economy” has been historically positive, with inflation and interest rates coming down and employment going up along with a modest rise in overall wages. Still, in a country of nearly 340 million people, the regional and class and education variations in who has benefitted and who has not remain immense, with the result that any one narrative of “the economy” is largely wrong.

That confounds a political class that wants one simple binary narrative. It also confounds the many citizens who want clarity about “the economy.” It’s evident that at least a plurality if not a majority of Americans are not satisfied with an economic system that seems to create too many uncontrollable costs, especially healthcare. Meanwhile, interest rate variability makes calculating home purchases tricky, and very low mortgage rates pre-pandemic set unrealistic expectations for the cost of financing. Then, as interest rates went up in the past three years, the cost of homes rose with them, creating one major condition for the pervading sense of an affordability crisis: It does in fact cost more to buy and then own a mortgaged home than it did five years ago, and that reality is not fully captured by inflation statistics.

Many of these trends extend well back to the end of the 20^th century and manifest as well in other developed nations such as Australia, Great Britain and Canada. Economic discontent and insecurity are also endemic to the global middle class — not just Americans. But the domestic variant is virulent and intensified by a particular American conviction that things used to be better and that government policy is central to how the economy performs (though even that is evident in other countries).

Trump is now being hoisted on his own petard, as it were. He railed against the “Biden economy” and rode that critique to the White House. Now that his administration has owned the economy for 2025, many people — not just Democrats but also most Independents and slowly increasing numbers of Republicans — are finding that things are about the same as they were a year ago. They weren’t happy about it then, and they are not happy about it now.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

For Trumplandia, this is the bitter pill of contemporary politics. DEI, wokeness, immigration … those things may matter, but not nearly as much as how people experience the cost of living compared to how much money they have now or think they will have in the future. And they can’t be lectured into feeling differently. No party and no leader has figured out how to speak effectively to a countryful of people experiencing the economy from their own vantage point. Trump may be exceptional in many ways, but not here.