Trump Turns to Affordability Message Amid Economic Frustration

Lower prices for coffee and fruit. A 50-year mortgage to reduce monthly home payments. Direct checks of $2,000 to many Americans. And a new willingness to welcome skilled foreign labor into the United States.

The Trump administration has begun floating a series of ideas over the past several weeks as it confronts the cold reality that its economic policies are not helping many Americans who continue to struggle with elevated prices and a sense of economic pessimism.

Last week’s elections made clear that affordability was top of mind for many Americans. Voters in New York propelled Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist with an ambitious agenda to lower the cost of living, to victory in the mayoral race. Democratic wins in New Jersey and Virginia were built on promises to address the high cost of living in those states.

Only 30 percent of voters believe President Trump has lived up to their expectations for tackling inflation and the cost of living, according to a recent NBC News poll. That was his lowest mark for any issue respondents were asked about. And a meager 27 percent of voters in a CNN poll in late October said Mr. Trump’s policies had improved the country’s economic conditions — less than half of those who thought he had made matters worse.

In the wake of those results, the administration has begun rolling out new policies and recasting its economic messaging to try to show they are serious about combating the nation’s affordability crisis.

That includes a watering-down of some policies, such as tariffs, that the Trump administration insisted for months were not causing prices to rise for American consumers. The president is also planning to travel around the country to try to explain more clearly how his policies are helping Americans.

“We understand that people understand, as people look at their pocketbooks to go to the grocery store, that there’s still work to do,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, said outside the White House on Thursday. He said that providing consumers with more purchasing power is “something that we’re going to fix, and we’re going to fix it right away.”

The new urgency over affordability comes ahead of looming midterm elections that could alter the course of Mr. Trump’s presidency if Democrats retake control of one or both chambers of Congress.

The Trump administration contends that its policies have curbed inflation and boosted wages. However, the sticker shock from tariffs combined with high mortgage rates that have made homes more expensive have made consumers generally skittish. A survey of consumer sentiment published by the University of Michigan last month showed growing gloominess about personal finances and business conditions.

This week, Mr. Trump said that he “doesn’t want to hear about affordability” because the U.S. economy is so strong.

But in an acknowledgment that Americans are frustrated with high food prices, he said in an interview with Fox News that aired this week that he expected to lower tariffs on coffee and fruit. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed on Wednesday that relief would be coming in the form of “substantial announcements” that would lower prices for food that the United States does not widely produce.

Critics of the Trump administration noted that Mr. Trump appeared to be solving a problem that he had created through his policies.

“They have pursued an anti-affordability agenda for their time in office,” said Bharat Ramamurti, a deputy director of the National Economic Council in the Biden administration, who pointed to Mr. Trump’s policies on tariffs and immigration restrictions. “If they reverse some of that, maybe costs will come down.”

In emphasizing affordability, the White House is grappling with the fact that its policies cannot please everyone. Last month, Mr. Trump suggested that the United States would begin importing more beef from Argentina in an attempt to bring down prices. That led to swift backlash from American cattle ranchers who said that such a move would undercut their profits.

Some Republicans expressed disappointment this week after Mr. Trump told Laura Ingraham of Fox News that he would support allowing more skilled foreign labor into the United States to train Americans to make high-tech products at new factories.

White House officials have also struggled to explain how they can claim that tariffs are not imposing additional costs on consumers but that removing or lowering them will lower costs.

The Trump administration is preparing to issue broad exemptions to certain tariffs to ease food prices, according to people briefed on the plans. The exemptions are expected to apply to the global tariffs Mr. Trump announced in April, including on products coming from countries that have not yet struck trade deals with the United States.

The Trump administration is promoting affordability on several other fronts. In a speech in New York this week, Mr. Bessent argued that curtailing federal spending was helping to keep borrowing costs lower for bank loans and home mortgages.

“Maintaining a robust Treasury market — and strengthening it even further — is essential to making America affordable again,” Mr. Bessent said. “The work we do here directly impacts affordability and quality of life out there.”

Mr. Trump and Mr. Bessent have also been pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to support the housing market. The Treasury secretary said last week that some sectors of the economy were already in a recession as he called on the central bank to cut rates more quickly.

With the housing market weighing heavily on the economy, Mr. Trump and his aides have been contemplating more creative ideas to lower monthly home expenses.

The president this week suggested that he was considering an expansion of the traditional 30-year mortgage to allow borrowers to take out home loans that could be repaid over 50 years. However, the idea was criticized because it would saddle consumers with more debt and interest costs.

William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said this week that his agency was “actively evaluating portable mortgages,” which would allow mortgage holders to purchase new homes at their existing interest rates. Although loans of shorter durations in other countries are portable, such a policy could be complicated in the United States because of the way home loans are bundled and sold as investments.

The White House is also focusing on ways to make Americans feel wealthier. Mr. Trump has pitched offering $2,000 checks to Americans that would be funded by tariff revenue — if Congress approved such a plan — and Mr. Bessent predicted this week that taxpayers would start to see benefits early next year from the tax cuts that Republicans passed over the summer.

But most of the policies that Mr. Trump’s team is considering would require cooperation from Congress or a broad reversal of his trade agenda. Analysts are skeptical that minor adjustments to his economic plan will have a meaningful impact on affordability.

“The Trump administration’s plans to lower tariffs on some high-profile consumer goods are important symbolic steps to address the affordability issue that voters are frustrated by,” said Owen Tedford, an analyst at Beacon Policy Advisers. “Still, it is uncertain how much they will actually affect voters’ pocketbooks and satisfy their desire for the president to do more about high prices.”

In the meantime, the Trump administration appears poised to continue its strategy of blaming the problems in the economy on the policies of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“Cleaning up Joe Biden’s inflation and economic disaster has been a top focus for President Trump since Day 1, when he signed an array of executive orders to unleash American energy and slash costly regulations,” said Kush Desai, a White House spokesman. “The Trump administration will continue to implement and emphasize these and other economic policies that are cutting costs, raising real wages, and securing trillions in investments to make and hire in America.”