Trump’s “affordability hoax” may doom him

Donald Trump has a difficult relationship with the truth. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that at a time when his approval ratings on the economy are slipping into the 20s, he would double down on his insistence that the economy is actually exploding — and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. On May 4 he made an appearance at The Villages, the community in central Florida restricted to people over 55, where he told his assembled fans, “You know, it’s amazing. I come into office and I say ‘Wow, look how high these prices are,’ and the Democrats start screaming ‘Affordability! Affordability!’ They’re the ones that caused the problem! I’ll tell you one thing: They got one good line of bulls**t. That’s one thing I’ll say about ‘em.”

Those comments marked an unusual step for him: He admitted there was a problem. Yes, there was that week when he was touting himself as “THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT.” But really, ever since he returned to the White House, Trump has been trying to persuade the public that what they say they’re feeling — rising prices, economic unease, anxiety about the future — is nothing more than a Democratic hoax. Now he’s just taken to throwing out nonsense about the American economy being “the hottest in the world,” his favorite line, and “roaring.” 

Few believe that. The latest Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll showed that only 23% believe the president is doing a good job on the cost of living, and his approval rating on inflation fell to 27%. These numbers make his overall number on the economy — 34% — look good.

If affordability is a hoax, a whole lot of people seem to have bought into it. Despite the administration’s tiresome habit of saying that everything is Joe Biden’s fault, people have good reason to blame Trump himself for what’s happening today. The president promised to fix the economy on day one. He’s now been in office for 16 months. 

When he was quizzed during the 2024 campaign about his plans to confront inflation and the cost of living, Trump always said that his tariffs would fix everything and that growth would be so strong that the federal government would be in a position to pay for everything from childcare to medical insurance for the whole country. It was absurd, of course, but a lot of people bought it. Taking him at his word that the economy over which he presided in his first term was “the greatest economy the world had ever known” — it was not — voters, then, turned against Joe Biden (and later, Kamala Harris) and Democrats in 2024 largely out of anger and frustration over inflation, which had spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Trump has only made it worse. 

Plenty of people who warned Trump and the GOP. Economists of all stripes said that tariffs would almost certainly raise inflation, and while nobody expected the president would start a war with Iran, everyone knows that shocks and disruptions in the oil markets cause prices to rise. Anyone would have assumed that Trump would move heaven and earth to avoid that in the middle of an already-precarious economic recovery, but hey — he marches to his own drummer. According to the March 2026 consumer price index, overall inflation currently stands at 3.3% — up from 2.4% in March 2025. The price of energy has increased by 12.5%, and gasoline prices are up by a staggering 18.9%. Economists have predicted a rise in the second quarter of 2026.

One would think it’s surprising that since Trump was an adult businessman during the 1970s, when we last experienced similar economic problems, he would have known this. But the president’s grasp of history, even a period he has lived through, is always tenuous at best. During this era, when he and his father were being sued for discriminating against prospective Black and Puerto Rican rental applicants, the country was suffering from stagflation, a condition caused by stagnant growth, high unemployment and soaring inflation, which started in 1973 and clocked in at 13.5% by 1980. The parallels to today, while not exact, are interesting; along with the Iran hostage crisis, stagflation ended up destroying Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

The problem was finally resolved after Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker threw the country into a brutal recession by raising interest rates to over 20% by mid-1981, causing nearly 11% unemployment. Three years later, when Ronald Reagan was running for reelection, the unemployment rate was still at 7.2%, but inflation had fallen to 4.3%. Even with those numbers, you might wonder why Reagan had the nerve to campaign on a message proclaiming it was “Morning in America.” The economy was objectively in much worse shape than it is today, and yet people were thrilled to give the president another term. He went on to win against former Vice President Walter Mondale in a landslide. 

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Setting aside the fact that many Americans just really liked Reagan, there are many theories about his win amid high unemployment and inflation, all of which probably have some merit. One is that people were used to inflation after years of dealing with it and had no expectation that prices were going to come down. In fact, there is a school of thought that it was a self-perpetuating cycle, with business and consumers alike assuming that inflation was going to continue to rise so they planned for it, which then actually made it happen. So when inflation actually did go down, they were relieved and happy. 

That was the last time the U.S. experienced any notable inflation until it shot up to just over 6% in 2022, which came as a shock to many consumers. Unlike Americans in the 1980s, they expected prices to come back down, but that will likely not happen. As the data analyst G. Elliott Morris recently wrote, it will take a long time before people have fully adjusted. Memories of the before-time are just too fresh. 

In an in-depth analysis of the issue, economist Robert Frank argued that inflation isn’t the villain. Instead, he wrote, “the real culprit was, and remains, something that neither Democrats nor Republicans have shown any willingness to tackle seriously: unprecedentedly high and growing levels of income and wealth inequality.” Frank believes that lavish spending by the wealthy is distorting both the economy and society-at-large, affecting everyone up and down the income ladder — and contributing to this ongoing sense of dissatisfaction and frustration. 

The problem is big and has been building for years; it won’t be solved by a return to 2% inflation or a rise in consumer confidence. And it certainly won’t change because Trump is pushing the bogus claim that America has entered a “golden age” and demanding that people believe him rather than their own lived experiences. 

Affordability is more than a political slogan. It’s a long-term global problem that’s getting worse every day, and Trump and Republicans look set to pay the price in November.