The Trump-Vance administration says it got the message loud and clear from its drubbing last Tuesday: it needs to do better on alleviating the country’s cost-of-living crisis.
“We had an interesting evening, and we learned a lot, and we’re going to talk about that,” Donald Trump said after the results came in — perhaps closer to an indication of self-reflection than we will ever hear from the president.
“Why did Zohran Mamdani do so well last night? He relentlessly focused on affordability,” top White House advisor James Blair told Politico. He’s one of a number of White House officials who say they’re desperate to pivot to the issue of affordability.
“We’re going to keep on working to make a decent life affordable in this country, and that’s the metric by which we’ll ultimately be judged in 2026 and beyond,” Vice President J. D. Vance tweeted.
Even some Republicans outside the White House seem eager to take it up. “Our side needs to focus on affordability,” near-billionaire and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said in a video. “Make the American dream affordable. Bring down costs, electric costs, grocery costs, health care costs, and housing costs.”
The only problem is, almost nothing that Trump, Vance, and the rest of the GOP have done since suggests they’re planning to actually do anything to meet people’s affordability concerns.
Take the deal they just struck to end the current government shutdown. The fundamental sticking point in those negotiations was the refusal of Trump’s GOP to agree to extend health insurance subsidies for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), whose expiry will make people’s premiums more than double on average, sometimes even more than quadruple. You don’t need to know that health care is already most Americans’ number-one financial stressor to realize that having to go from paying $888 to paying $1,904 annually for health insurance premiums is going to make your life less…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
