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Hey everyone. I’m back! Newsletter number one was so much fun I’ve decided to do it again. For this edition, I’m going to tackle a fundamental question: How does a president lose an election on affordability? Easy peasy: 1) Deny the problem exists. 2) Once you begrudgingly acknowledge it, propose some useless “solutions.” And then, 3) enact policies that make the problem worse.
Democrats learned some of this the hard way in 2024. But Republicans have picked up the Democratic playbook in recent months. Donald Trump is struggling to message and (more importantly) act on what is likely to be the biggest issue going into 2026, and we appear to be stuck in an endless doom loop of voters ousting incumbents because they’re lusting over lower prices.
Have a better idea for how politicians can talk about these issues—or, even more to the point, fix them? Drop me a note in the comments. And in the meantime if you’re not yet a Bulwark+ member, please do consider becoming one. You can do it right here:
–Catherine
Trump Is Falling Into the Same Trap That Ensnared Biden
Republicans learned nothing from how badly Dems bungled inflation.
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THE PARTY IN POWER just lost an election because the party out of power hammered them hard for not cutting prices. If that sounds familiar, it’s because pretty much the same thing happened last year, except the antagonists have swapped places.
Turns out it’s easy to win while running as an outsider promising “affordability.” It’s much harder to actually do anything about it.
It’s doubly hard if you insist the problem doesn’t exist in the first place and suggest voters should just shut up about it. Triply hard if your economic policy agenda (cough-cough, tariffs) cuts in the opposite direction, making life more expensive.
In short, President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have learned nothing from how badly Joe Biden and the Democrats bungled inflation. Instead they’re repeating some of the same mistakes and adopting the same useless gimmicks. Only this time, they’re also pursuing policies that make the problem worse.
Affordability crisis? What crisis?
USUALLY TRUMP AND HIS ALLIES are great at creating their own alternative reality, and getting their voters to buy into it. Tax cuts pay for themselves? Sure. Horse dewormer cures your ills? Swell. Immigrants are eating your pets? You betcha.
This strategy is a bit more challenging when it comes to the cost of living, because voters presumably notice whether their grocery and electricity bills have gone up or down. Not that that has stopped the White House from trying.
In the past week, Trump has called complaints about affordability a “con job” orchestrated by the Democrats. Asked about voters’ anxiety on the economy—as documented in numerous polls—Trump told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham: “I think polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”
Not only that, he has stressed, but maybe prices are already falling!
As he explained to reporters last week, “The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under ‘Sleepy Joe Biden,’ and the prices are way down.” Republicans, he has said, can win on the issue if only they resolve to “talk about the fact that prices are down.” (To be clear, prices are not down. They’re still rising, up about 3 percent in September from a year earlier.)
In some ways this is a more strident version of what Biden and the Democrats did during the first year of his term.
For most of 2021—until, coincidentally, the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving—Democrats and allied commentators often downplayed or dismissed public concerns about inflation. The significance of rising inflation had been, well, inflated by media exaggeration, right-wing “propaganda,” and Republican lies, they stressed. Surrogates and pundits said stuff like this even as inflation seemed increasingly un-transitory, and continued shooting upward; in November 2021, the headline consumer price index was 6.9 percent higher than it was a year earlier.
CPI cooled significantly toward the end of Biden’s term but not enough to spare Democrats in 2024. Under Trump, it’s begun to tick back up. But luckily for him, his administration can at least temporarily dodge the damning data. The prolonged government shutdown has left the country in a statistical blackout, since the federal agencies that usually release measures on prices, jobs, GDP etc. have been shuttered. And even though the government has now reopened, it may take some time before those data releases resume.
Trump has decided to fill this void with rosier numbers, including by repeatedly citing a Walmart press release advertising a cheaper Thanksgiving meal bundle this year. Alas, that Walmart bundle includes less food and fewer name brands than it did a year prior, so is not exactly an apples-to-apples (squash-to-squash?) comparison.
Trump has also delivered up some other more appetizing data. On Monday, the White House blasted out