About a month ago, in the immediate aftermath of the Democrats’ dominant performance in the 2025 elections, Donald Trump declared that he sees concerns about the cost of living as “dead.” A day later, the president went further, adding, “I don’t want to hear about the affordability.”
After a weird speech in mid-November in which the Republican falsely claimed, “Prices are coming down, and all of that stuff,” The New York Times reported, “As President Trump seeks to reframe his message on affordability, he is increasingly denying there is a problem at all.”
Maybe the president doesn’t have any ideas about what to do about the cost of living; maybe he’s convinced himself that his absurdities are true. Whatever the motivation, Trump spent parts of his latest White House Cabinet meeting insisting that Americans shouldn’t believe their lying eyes — or wallets.
“You know, there’s this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about, ‘affordability,’” he said as the gathering got underway. “They just say the word, it doesn’t mean anything to anybody, they just say it, ‘affordability.’”
He added soon after, “The word ‘affordability’ is a con job by the Democrats. … The word ‘affordability’ is a Democrat [sic] scam.”
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that White House aides “have urged the president to focus on affordability,” given its obvious importance to the American public. As it turns out, he is emphasizing the issue, but only as part of a larger effort to pretend the issue doesn’t exist.
To bolster his case, Trump argued that he “inherited the worst inflation in history,” which wasn’t even close to being true. He also said he’d successfully slashed the cost of prescription medications by 800%, which is mathematically impossible. (The Republican administration did recently announce reduced prices on 15 common or costly medications, but those price drops were made possible by a Biden administration breakthrough.)
As part of the same pitch, the president added that gas prices are “$1.99 in some places of the country,” which sounds impressive, right up until reality gets in the way.
In other words, Trump not only wants the public to see affordability concerns as a “scam,” he also apparently wants to supplement his case with a variety of lazy lies.
The New York Times noted after the Cabinet meeting, “The comments marked something of a turnabout for Mr. Trump, who just last weekend appeared to acknowledge the salience of the issue, calling himself the ‘affordability president’ and promoting his efforts to bring down prices.” This week, he reverted to norm. If the president had asked for Americans’ patience, that would have made sense. If he had presented some kind of plan to address the affordability crisis, that would have been even better. But Trump appears convinced that the best way to address the issue is simply to push the same nonsense over and over again, demanding the public take his word over their own life experiences. The more the Republican plays make-believe, the more he appears hopelessly out of touch. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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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