In public, Donald Trump and his team boast with pride about their success in tackling inflation, reducing the cost of living and addressing consumers’ concerns about affordability — despite the fact that none of these things has actually happened.
In private, however, the Republican White House seems to realize it has a problem. The Wall Street Journal reported:
President Trump and his advisers are rushing to try to lower prices for U.S. consumers after voters sent a warning shot to Republicans this month over the high cost of living. Following the recent election, Trump’s aides have urged the president to focus on affordability, and they are drawing up plans to attempt to address voters’ frustrations, according to administration officials.
With this in mind, the president on Friday signed an order exempting a variety of products from his reciprocal tariff policies, including coffee, beef and bananas.
Asked about the policy shift, Trump told reporters on Friday night that the move was intended to “bring down some of the foods” whose prices have become “a little bit high.”
Democratic Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement the Republican administration is “finally admitting publicly what we’ve all known from the start: Trump’s Trade War is hiking costs on people.”
Neal added that the president and his team are putting “out a fire they started and claiming it as progress.” That’s true, and it’s an important detail. For the past year, the White House’s line has been relatively consistent: Tariffs do not and will not hurt American consumers. The costs will either be paid by foreign countries or companies will forgo some profits, but American consumers won’t feel the pinch. In recent days, however, Trump and his team quietly acknowledged what has long been true: their tariffs made a bad problem worse. Indeed, Friday’s reversal was, for all intents and purposes, a confession that his policy isn’t working and needed to be undone, at least in part. The White House’s new “affordability” agenda, in other words, involves abandoning a failing policy that was making it harder for Americans to afford things, despite months of Trump’s assurances to the contrary.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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