Photo: Yuri Gripas/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Donald Trump’s superpower, if he has one, is to assert wildly counterfactual things over and over and somehow convince people his version of reality is gospel, or at least plausible. His 2024 presidential campaign was a master class in shameless fabrication: He invented a violent crime wave even as crime statistics were falling nearly everywhere; he invented a nationwide crisis of voting by noncitizens despite almost no evidence it was happening at all; he accused his opponents of consciously betraying the country by deliberately herding violent felons across open borders and directing them to rape, kill, and plunder a helpless population of law-abiding Americans, a narrative supported by little more than anecdotes; and he asserted that all his many legal problems, capping a career marked by vast legal problems, were in fact perversions of justice orchestrated by his enemies. Ultimately, his many lies and exaggerations combined to paint a portrait of a nation that had been on the brink of never-before-imagined glory just a few years earlier but was now on its knees and near to total destruction.
This cartoonish version of current affairs was immensely gratifying to his MAGA base of true believers, and didn’t unduly trouble swing voters who were inclined to believe all politicians make stuff up and who mostly just wanted a change of administration. But now that Trump is totally in charge of the federal government and exhibiting every single day his domination of national affairs, he wants the public to acknowledge the astonishingly bright prospects he has given them, and forget all the troubles that led them to vote for him in the first place. That’s the only sensible interpretation of his fury towards the subject of affordability**.**
Anyone who can read polls or follow off-year election returns is aware that concerns over the steadily rising cost of living, which contributed powerfully to Trump’s 2024 victory, have not at all gone away. There is, in fact, a growing sense of dismay, within and beyond the MAGA ranks, about Trump’s campaign promises that he wouldn’t simply slow down inflation but would actually reduce prices for the most important goods and services. Many voters give him low marks on that front, which is why addressing affordability has emerged already as the Democratic Party’s key message for the 2026 midterms. It was very successfully introduced in this year’s offyear elections, which were a fiasco for Trump and his party.
For a moment, Trump seemed to understand and accept the assignment to look less interested in ending or beginning overseas wars and more interested in “affordability.” He even got chummy with New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in claiming a shared focus on the issue during their congenial Oval Office visit on November 23. But as this November 29 Truth Social post indicated, Trump treats the “affordability” crisis as a marketing problem rather than anything he really needs to address in a substantive manner:
Because I have invoked FAVORED NATIONS STATUS FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, DRUG PRICES ARE FALLING AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, 500%, 600%, 700%, and more. No other President has been able to do this, BUT I HAVE! This is also the answer to much less expensive, and far better, HEALTHCARE! Republicans, remember, this was done by us, and nobody else. This is a revolution in medicine, the biggest and most important event, EVER. If this story is properly told, we should win the Midterm Elections in RECORD NUMBERS. I AM THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT. TALK LOUDLY AND PROUDLY! President DJT
Americans didn’t need Obamacare subsidies or Medicaid benefits or lower tariffs or regulations on AI to thrive; they just needed to realize how lucky they were to be alive at this time of restored American Greatness, the “story” that needed to be “properly told” to them. As with his fable-making in 2024, Trump wanted to impose his own version of the facts on everyone his voice could reach. But in this case he isn’t talking about overseas threats or large impersonal forces shaping events or elite conspiracies, but the lived experiences of people who won’t easily be convinced their troubles are a figment of their imaginations.
Politically attuned people in Trump’s inner circle must have cringed inwardly during Tuesday’s televised Cabinet meeting when the president denounced affordability concerns as a hoax, as the New York Times reported:
President Trump on Tuesday downplayed the cost-of-living pains being felt by Americans, declaring that affordability “doesn’t mean anything to anybody” as his political edge on the economy continues to dissipate….
After ticking off what he claimed were trillions of dollars of investments and other economic accomplishments, Mr. Trump called the issue of affordability a “fake narrative” and “con job” created by Democrats to dupe the public….
Mr. Trump has tried to claim he has brought down inflation, glossing over the fact that it ticked up slightly in recent months and some of his policies were contributing to high costs, like his tariffs.
“There is still more to do,” Mr. Trump acknowledged on Tuesday. “There’s always more to do, but we have it down to a very good level. It’s going to go down a little bit further. You want to have a little tiny bit of inflation. Otherwise, that’s not good either. Then you have a thing called deflation, and deflation can be worse than inflation.”
Trump appears to be making the same mistake his predecessor Joe Biden made: talking trends and macroeconomics to people who just want prices to go back to where they were before the pandemic — conditions for which Trump himself took so much credit. Worse yet, he’s talking down to Americans, accusing them of being dupes by feeling what they’re feeling and seeing what they’re seeing. It’s not a good look for a billionaire president to become visibly impatient with his subjects and their concerns.
Perhaps his advisers will prevail on him to get on the right side of the affordability issue before the midterms. But it’s possible that after years of telling tall tales about conditions in the country, Trump is beginning to believe his own hype, and is spinning himself as well as the media and the country. If that happens, he’ll soon join Sleepy Joe Biden in the ranks of old men who didn’t just lose a step, but lost their way and doomed their party.
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