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Welcome to this week’s edition of Receipts. We’re sending this a day earlier than usual so I can weigh in on Trump’s State of the Union before we all move on to another crisis. My TL;DR: Any GOP pols waiting for Trump to pivot to affordability ahead of the midterms will have to keep waiting. In total, Trump dedicated less than 3 minutes of his interminably long speech to the topic. And when he did discuss it, he either downplayed cost-of-living concerns as a serious issue or rehashed the same ideas about how to address it—ideas that at best aren’t working to combat inflation, or are actually making it worse.
But hey, Trump’s missed opportunity is the opposition’s gain. Or it could be, anyway, if Democrats figure out how to offer a more compelling alternative to voters. In future newsletters, I’ll delve into what that could involve—and what silly ideas Dems should resist.
To follow our reporting and analysis on the issues that matter most in the midterms, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to Bulwark+ if you don’t already do so. Upgrade your subscription here and see what you think:
The Trump ‘Affordability’ Pivot That Never Came
In his record-breakingly-long SOTU, the president spent more time talking about Venezuela than prices.
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THERE’S AN OLD JOKE ABOUT two elderly ladies kvetching about a meal. “Oy, the food at this place is really terrible,” one complains. The other responds, “And such small portions!”
The same could be said of President Trump’s affordability comments at last night’s State of the Union, which were both brief and abysmal.
Affordability is the issue for the 2026 midterms. In virtually every poll, with virtually every demographic, some version of “inflation/prices/cost of living/economic problems” tops the list of the most important challenges facing the country. It also tops the list of reasons Trump’s own voters are ditching him, according to polling from Morris Predictive Insights.
And yet, according to the time-keepers from NBC News, in Trump’s record-long 108-minute SOTU speech, he spoke about affordability for a measly 2.9 minutes.
For context, that’s just a few seconds longer than the time he spent celebrating the country’s Olympic achievements (2.2 minutes), and about half the time he spent talking about Venezuela (4.8 minutes). Even if you add in time he spent on the broader economy and taxes, this total (7.1 minutes) is still less than the amount of time he spent talking about national security (8.5 minutes).¹
If Republican lawmakers were hoping Trump would spend his ample time on the things their voters care about, they must have been disappointed.
When he did touch on affordability, Trump questioned the very notion that it was a legitimate issue at all. He claimed that “affordability” problems were either created or imagined by Democrats, and naturally, that they have all been solved since he took office: