Trump is starting to sound like Biden

On affordability, the president is doomed to repeat his predecessor's pattern

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Donald Trump is in the political hurt locker right now. His party got thrashed in elections earlier this month, Democrats managed to use the shutdown to box the GOP into a losing position on healthcare, and the Epstein saga is blowing up again.

But while these things get most of the headlines, there is an even more corrosive political crisis undermining Trump’s regime and GOP prospects into the future: Americans are still really pissed about high prices.

Inflation is a tricky problem for politicians because it’s something every single voter notices, and there’s also no solution to it. Sure, you might be able to stop more inflation from happening in the future, although the central bank has a much larger role in doing that than the president. But there’s basically no way to undo past inflation absent a massive recession, in which cases prices will fall because nobody is spending any money.

And that’s a big problem, because while voters of course don’t want more inflation in the future, it’s a relatively abstract problem for them. What they’re really pissed about is the fact prices feel high to them in the here and now, and that’s what they want politicians to do something about.

Unfortunately, the incentives involved in democratic politics mean that the difficulty of actually doing this is rarely communicated to voters. Nobody up for election wants to tell the electorate “sorry, yes high prices are bad, but also there’s nothing I can do about it”. Instead, everyone tries to win elections by promising that they’re going to lower prices.

That’s what Donald Trump did last year. If you strip away all of the overwrought commentary about how racial minorities and youngsters suddenly love the GOP, it’s pretty clear that Trump won last November because Americans were fed up with inflation and thought he could solve it. And Trump was hardly going to tell them otherwise.

A year later, he’s faced with the fact that prices have not gone down - they have in fact continued to go up. And the political backlash is intense.

So far, the Trump regime’s response to the affordability problem has been basically to do the same thing that the Biden administration did: to deny that the problem exists.

It’s working about as well as it did under Biden.

The reason that Trump officials feel able to make this point is that it is actually true that real wages have been rising over the last few years. Technically speaking, on the level of the economy, people’s pay has been rising faster than prices. So, just as Biden’s did, the Trump White House wants to tell everyone that according to the data, they’re actually better off than they were.

The problem with this narrative is that it’s clearly not what voters feel. One reason for that is that whatever might be true on the level of the economy is not necessarily true for each voter. Plenty of voters are not richer than they were before.

And even those who are doing okay are still reeling from sticker shock when they go to the grocery store. There’s a whole school of behavioral economics called prospect theory about how people feel the pain of losses more than they feel the pleasure of gains. High prices still feel unjust and disorienting, even if you can technically afford them.

So Trump’s messaging is falling flat, just as the same messaging did under Biden. But Trump being Trump, I feel like his anger at this is eventually going to translate into something darker.