The pivot to “you’ll pay more and you’ll like it”

The president who got elected because Burger Too Exponsive is governing on “I hope a bunch of arbitrary violence will help you forget about beef prices”:

THERE’S AN OLD JOKE ABOUT two elderly ladies kvetching about a meal. “Oy, the food at this place is really terrible,” one complains. The other responds, “And such small portions!”

The same could be said of President Trump’s affordability comments at last night’s State of the Union, which were both brief and abysmal.

Affordability is the issue for the 2026 midterms. In virtually every poll, with virtually every demographic, some version of “inflation/prices/cost of living/economic problems” tops the list of the most important challenges facing the country. It also tops the list of reasons Trump’s own voters are ditching him, according to polling from Morris Predictive Insights.

And yet, according to the time-keepers from NBC News, in Trump’s record-long 108-minute SOTU speech, he spoke about affordability for a measly 2.9 minutes.

[…]

This message does not seem to be resonating with voters, most of whom say Trump is making prices and inflation sound like they’re in better shape than they really are.2 And they’re right: Notwithstanding Trump’s claims, prices are not “plummeting downward.”3 Prices are very much still rising—and rising faster than the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. And there’s evidence that Trump’s tariff policies are contributing to that above-target inflation. For example, prices of appliances, furniture, and new cars, all products targeted by Trump tariffs, grew sharply from December to January.

Not to worry. Trump promised that his tariff revenue would be used to defray other American expenses—specifically, that it would “substantially replace” income taxes. This is a mathematical impossibility.

[…]

Trump also offered his standard talking point about the booming stock market, but as I’ve noted before, markets have actually grown a lot more in the rest of the world than they have here. Not to mention that paper stock market gains are cold comfort to people struggling to put food on the table.

Admittedly, he did toss out some slopulist bullshit as well, but when you’re governing people notice when stuff doesn’t work. My favorite part, though, is when he promised to make housing prices higher for owners and lower for buyers:

When I heard this, I drafted a skeet about it, then thought "naaah, there's no way his speechwriters would allow him to contradict himself within one sentence." But they really and truly did.

[image or embed]— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers.bsky.social) Feb 24, 2026 at 6:35 PM

I’m not sure the economics on that are going to work out.