President Donald Trump rose to prominence in part because of voter perception of his business and economic acumen, and his populist appeals to a coalition of mostly white, working-class voters who’ve long felt locked out of economic mobility by Democratic policies perceived as elitist and out-of-touch. Nevermind that Trump was born to rich parents and is himself a billionaire. During the 2024 election, Trump and the GOP walloped the Biden administration for rising inflation and economic volatility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The president’s rhetorical approach to kitchen table issues like employment, wages, and energy prices helped to expand and diversify his winning electorate that year, making him the second person in U.S. history to be voted to two non-consecutive presidential terms.
More than one year into that second term, U.S. voters and politicians are now grappling in real time with a conundrum out of Washington: What happens when a president who doesn’t think affordability is a real problem tries to fix it?
“He thinks he has a political problem but not a policy problem,” Michael Negron, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who studies affordability, told TPM. “And so you can see that in the policy ideas, because either they’re often not attacking the central problem or they’re small or complicated and not really going to do much for people.”
A closer look at a number of affordability-related proposals from the Trump White House reveal that many of them have never actually come to pass. When they do — like through unilateral executive action on reducing tariffs, for instance — they come as a result of Trump trying to undo harm his own policies caused.
Consumer sentiment in February plummeted 13% compared to the previous year and was down 21% from January 2025, according to the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index. At 35%, Trump’s approval rating on the economy is the lowest it’s been during his second term, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll published last Wednesday.
In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Kush Desai defended the president’s record and said America’s economy under Trump “has been solid,” even amid the administration’s new war in the Middle East.
“Once we are past short term disruptions from Operation Epic Fury, America is poised to see even greater economic progress as the Administration’s trade deals, drug pricing deals, deregulatory efforts, and tax cuts continue taking effect,” Desai said.
The president’s marquee legislative priorities, from mass deportation to federal workforce reduction and sweeping tariffs, stack the deck against affordability. To address voter grumblings, the Trump administration, experts told TPM, is constructing a house of cards.
Tax Changes for the Working Class Ignore the Most Vulnerable
As tax season unfolds, the administration and its allies are highlighting provisions in Trump’s signature second term legislation, the tax cuts and Department of Homeland Security spending bill otherwise known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” or OBBBA. The president campaigned on no tax on tips and no tax on overtime and delivered, to an extent, on those populist promises in the OBBBA. Now filers are reaping the results, with several caveats.
The no tax on tips provision is largely that in name only, as it only applies on up to $25,000 of tipped income and means nothing for tipped workers who earn below the standard deduction and therefore don’t pay income tax. According to an analysis by the Yale Budget Lab, that’s more than one-third of all tipped workers. Forty percent of all U.S. households won’t pay federal income taxes, the Tax Foundation found.
Only overtime workers who are paid time and a half when netting more than 40 hours a week can earn the bill’s overtime tax benefit, and even then the federal income tax break only applies to the “half” portion of that pay. Workers who earned overtime and spoke to the New York Times described being disappointed with the tiny bump they got from the tax code change, but repeated a variation of a common refrain heard from people working to make ends meet: It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing.
The policies were touted as ways to offer financial relief to low-income and working Americans, said Elena Patel, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
“Almost by design it leaves out most of the households who thought they might have benefited from such a policy,” Patel told TPM.
In a press release published last Tuesday, the Treasury Department announced that 3.5 million tax returns claimed the reduced taxes on tips and 15.5 million claimed them for the changes to federal overtime taxation. Treasury also reported 9.2 million tax returns claimed an enhanced federal tax deduction for seniors, which an analysis from the right-leaning Tax Foundation found benefits lower- and middle-income filers most.
Ultimately, Patel said Trump’s tax schema pits people against each other (a totally novel outcome for the Trump administration, of course) and could sow resentment and dissatisfaction among filers — if they ever learn of the provisions and what some of their neighbors are getting.
“Once we start favoring certain kinds of income, we introduce inequities in the tax code that feel bad for people, and they are bad from a policy perspective,” Patel said.
She posed an example of two workers who make $65,000 annually. One is a tipped server, who under the OBBBA tax code changes can exempt up to $25,000 of their income. The other is a teacher, who doesn’t get to reap that benefit.
“And that’s, I think, a hard line in the sand to defend as to why that makes sense from a tax policy perspective.”
The 50-Year Mortgage Plan That Wasn’t
After Democrats won consequential elections nationwide and gained voter shares in red regions of the country in November’s elections, Trump infamously wrote affordability off as a hoax, a “new” word and concept employed by Democrats to drum up anti-GOP voter engagement.
In state and local elections, Democrats blew out races that were supposed to be close and Trump’s winning 2024 coalition showed significant signs of splitting, in part after low- and middle-income voters swung away from the GOP. Though Trump tried to brush it off, the White House immediately responded with the president’s signature flurry of policy proposals.
On Nov. 8, Trump floated the idea of a 50-year mortgage. A social media post showed Trump next to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat whose administration helped create the modern 30-year mortgage. The proposal was widely and almost instantaneously rejected as unserious. An Axios report showed a 50-year mortgage wouldn’t save homebuyers money, and the average buyer would be paying off their homes until they were 90 years old.
The proposal was laughable, said Antonio White, former director of the Office of Congressional Affairs and Communications at the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
“What I think it was is this administration looking for its FDR moment,” White told TPM. “I believe it was shot down because we are facing rising interest rates. There are increased costs on construction materials for homes. People have lower wages, people are losing jobs, and so they just simply don’t have enough money to even put down a down payment.”
The idea has since been dumped, with FHFA Director Bill Pulte saying the administration had “other priorities.”
The same day, Trump said on social media he was urging Senate Republicans to send Americans stimulus checks intended to help Americans bypass the Affordable Care Act insurance marketplace and purchase private health care.
Trump Tries to Lessen the Sting From his Signature Tariffs
On Nov. 9, Trump posted to Truth Social promising a “dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone” from tariff revenue, a $450 billion commitment that would be about double total 2026 tariff revenue, according to the Yale Budget Lab. Not that it matters, since the Supreme Court overturned most of Trump’s tariffs in a February decision.
In mid-November, facing an annualized inflation rate of 3% according to the September Consumer Price Index and a rise in food prices, the president removed tariffs on certain food products that’d seen price spikes including beef, coffee, and tropical fruits. Products selected for tariff reduction had seen some of the sharpest price increases. Beef and veal were up 13.9% between August 2024 and August 2025, coffee prices spiked by 21.7% in the same period while banana prices rose 6.6%. Still, administration officials denied the tariff rollbacks had to do with food price inflation.
A Proposed Cap on Credit Card Interest Went Nowhere
Trump in early January demanded a 10% cap on credit card interest effective January 20. With the word “AFFORDABILITY!” written in all caps in the middle of the post, the president’s intentions were overt. Such a proposal had previously been owned by progressives in Congress, and was met with swift rebuke from Wall Street and economists. An interest cap, they said, would ice out some customers because companies would be less likely to take risk on customers with lower credit scores. Trump’s social media post was obviously non-binding and there hasn’t been much legislative movement on the populist proposal since, other than momentary confusion from banks and credit card companies.
A Muddled Message on 401(k) Withdrawals
Given the characteristic machine-gun rapidity of Trump administration policy proposals, the president himself hasn’t supported some of the ideas coming out of his own White House.
In mid-January, for example, Kevin Hassett, Trump’s lead economist, said the president would announce an initiative to allow Americans to make penalty-free withdrawals from their 401(k) retirement accounts explicitly to pay for housing down payments. Trump quickly backtracked from the initiative; he failed to highlight it in a speech at the Davos World Economic Forum and then told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was “not a huge fan” of the proposal.
Meanwhile, Republican legislator Rep. John McGuire (R-VA) introduced the Home Savings Act that month to try to codify the 401(k) withdrawals.
Experts said these half-hearted efforts present a picture of sloppy, careless policy making designed to make headlines, not to make a dent in Americans’ precarious household finances.
“I don’t like the affordability proposals that are coming out of this White House just because I think they’re misguided,” Patel said. “I don’t really think that they’re gonna affect household budgets, which is what people talk about when they say the economy is unaffordable.”
Trump’s Parallel Anti-Affordability Policy Agenda Makes His White House Unique
Republicans don’t own the tendency to make pie-in-the-sky policy promises in exchange for political points. Patel pointed out the parallels between Trump’s haphazard approach today and the myriad policies coming out of the Biden White House as the Democrat’s administration sought to combat pandemic-fueled financial unrest.
But Trump’s White House stands out for a couple reasons, experts told TPM.
First, Trump’s most obvious priorities either contribute to inflation, depress wages and employment, or both. There’s the aggressive anti-immigration enforcement actions which have seen tens of thousands of people — and workers — removed from the U.S. Economists predicted that Trump’s tariffs would drive up prices, though most of those price hikes have been eaten by companies who’ve yet to pass the full cost of imports to consumers.
And now, in addition to its heinous toll on human life, the war in Iran has obliterated one of Trump’s most prominent campaign promises: to lower energy prices and “drill, baby, drill.” Since Iran has restricted oil tankers passage through the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil travels, Trump has tried to temper the markets by asserting the U.S. mission in Iran would be over soon, an assertion he also continues to contradict and of which markets seem skeptical.
After gas prices at the end of last year dipped below $3 a gallon for the first time since May 2021, prices have jumped more than 50 cents a gallon on average in the two weeks since Trump and Israel launched their war on Iran.
Negron said Trump’s spaghetti-at-the-wall approach to domestic economic policy reveals the president himself still doesn’t think affordability is a real concern.
“They’re saying things, but they’re not really things that will help,” said Negron. “And in fact, their affirmative policy agenda is making it worse.”
Rather than empathize with voters whose trust polls reveal he’s losing, Trump waved off energy price concerns as “short-term” and a “very small price to pay” in a Truth Social post.
Volatile crude oil prices spiked above $100 per barrel last week.
