Donald Trump made his money through fraud. So it makes sense, then, that he thinks the quickest way out of the affordability crisis is to rely on the same carnival barker tactics he used for decades to trick banks and investors into giving him money.
The billionaire president was born into wealth and has coasted on his family’s name. But there can be no doubt of his talent as a con artist. As New York Attorney General Letitia James demonstrated in a civil trial, Trump’s company ran for decades on scams. (For instance, he claimed his 10,000-square foot apartment was actually 30,000-square feet.) Despite being so good at talking people out of their money, he still managed to go bankrupt multiple times. The scheme that saved his empire was a different flavor of fraud: Being falsely portrayed as a successful businessman on a reality show, NBC’s “The Apprentice.” This fakery netted him nearly a half-billion dollars, but because Trump is as bad at finances as he is at everything else but lying, he lost all that money too.
He craves a quick fix to this whole economic dilemma — the same disaster he created through chaotic policies that have raised costs on everything from housing to health care to groceries…
Still, Trump’s skill at bamboozling people helped him win not just in 2016, but again in 2024, when he managed to convince swing voters he could somehow lower costs after a few years of pandemic-driven inflation. Instead, he has done the opposite, and now he is clearly annoyed at aides and reporters who insist that the cost of living is a real issue that voters care about. Trump is notoriously lazy, even on issues he cares about, so caring about the concerns of people who weren’t born rich taxes his extremely limited patience. He craves a quick fix to this whole economic dilemma — the same disaster he created through chaotic policies that have raised costs on everything from housing to health care to groceries, often for no other reason than a narcissistic insistence that he knows economics better than economists.
There are the tariffs, which Trump levies chaotically, as an expression of his ego, even as his propagandists pretend there’s some grand economic theory behind his impulsive and constantly changing orders. Then there’s his deportation agenda, which is dramatically driving up costs in housing construction and agriculture labor markets. Trump also signed legislation to end subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, which has sent insurance premiums skyrocketing, all because he is obsessed with erasing former President Barack Obama‘s legacy.
As Thomas Edsall of the New York Times demonstrated this week, the self-inflicted inflationary pressure is hurting ordinary people. By combining all these factors, he calculated “an estimated net loss of $2,250 in 2025 spending power” for the median American household — and that’s before the health care premium rise that’s coming.
The result is that Trump’s approval ratings are falling, especially on the economy, as voters start to realize he has no intention of even trying to relieve their economic woes. In response, the president has fallen back on the instinct that has gotten him this far in life: Instead of doing anything of substance, he hits his marks with a hurricane of lies and hopes his audience doesn’t notice they’re being cheated until it’s too late.
As with the COVID-19 pandemic or the Epstein files scandal, Trump’s first move was to simply deny that it’s happening by flinging the word “hoax” around. Last week, he declared that affordability concerns are not just a “hoax” but a “con job” and a “scam.” (One of his go-to hustler tactics is to accuse everyone else of his own sins.)
But that’s not working, so Trump moved on to his reality TV tactic of using tricks and empty gambits to create the illusion of doing something, while actually doing nothing. He tried co-opting the message by giving himself a nickname, declaring on Truth Social that he’s “THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT” and whining that people won’t just take his word for it. During an interview with Politico Monday, he returned to the “fake it and and hope they buy it” strategy he used to sell himself on “The Apprentice.”
“Prices are coming down substantially,” he lied. “Prices are all coming down,” he lied again. “Now everything is coming down,” he said again, clearly hoping repetition will erase people’s direct experience with their own checking accounts. He also continued to whine that “Democrats love to say affordability,” spitting out the word as if his political opponents had just made it up.
He floated the idea of sending Americans a $2,000 “tariff check,” which would actually be paid by borrowing money, as the tariffs haven’t brought in even a fraction of the funds he promised they would. He announced a $12 billion bailout for farmers, once again falsely claiming it’s paid for by tariffs, when it’s actually coming from normal tax revenue. (This will only cover about a third of farmers’ losses and is also dwarfed by the $40 billion Trump gave to Argentina, mostly because he likes the country’s far-right president.)
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The president is now hoping he can drown out the bad economic news with a torrent of lies and distractions. On Tuesday, he held a rally in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, to sell his administration’s supposed policies on affordability. But he couldn’t conceal his aggravation at having to talk about money with the proletariat, even a red-hatted audience that loves him.
Sure enough, Trump immediately declared that people’s economic concerns are “a hoax,” falsely asserting that “prices are coming down.” But he also lashed out, Ebenezer Scrooge-style, at working Americans who want to spoil their kids a little for the holidays. “Under the China policy, every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two,” he said. “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice.”
For those unwilling to pretend that the economy is doing well, Trump is turning to another favorite gambit: scapegoating. Of course, he constantly blames the Democrats, even though the party doesn’t control either the White House or Congress. But he’s also looking for foreigners to accuse. The White House ordered an “investigation” into whether foreign businesses are engaged in price-fixing, which will undoubtably amount to nothing besides giving his propagandists a talking point. Trump has also been yelling at Mexico over a water dispute, while his Cabinet goons go on Fox News and pretend that immigrants are the reason for high housing costs and soaring grocery prices. It’s all lies, but Trump’s faith that people will swallow anything he says, no matter how preposterous, is unyielding.
The polls show that none of this is working. If anything, it’s backfiring. While he was out of office, it was much easier for Trump to sell glittery lies about how rich he could make everyone — if only he had power. Now that he has returned to the White House, people are expecting him to take action. Instead, they are seeing their bills rising, an economic sign that is hard to ignore, no matter how much the president is shouting about the Mexicans and Somalis.
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According to other troubling indicators, the economy is about to get much worse. Trump keeps finding excuses to delay federal economics reports, and it’s no wonder. The October jobs report, which was finally released on Tuesday, showed mostly stagnation, with signs that finding a job for the unemployed is getting harder than ever. The Bureau of Labor Statistics isn’t even going to release the wholesale inflation report from October, befitting Trump’s longstanding belief that burying bad numbers means the underlying problem goes away. And in a telling move, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent divested his shares of a soybean farm last week after 11 months of refusing to do so as required. Soybean farmers are getting especially destroyed by Trump’s tariffs, since China won’t buy from them anymore. Because Bessent has the ultimate insider information about the likelihood of Trump backing off tariffs, his action suggests he’s not too confident about the future of American soybeans.
The secretary’s apparent suspicion was confirmed early Tuesday morning when Trump — who frequently falls asleep during daytime meetings — went on a Truth Social tirade about tariffs. “The biggest threat in history to United States National Security would be a negative decision on Tariffs by the U.S. Supreme Court,” he posted at 2:37 a.m. “Only dark and sinister forces” would end tariffs, he wrote at 2:45 a.m. Such late night rants appear to indicate truly mad king behavior from a president who seems to have doctors ordering frequent check-ups to detect cognitive impairment.
If the Supreme Court ended his tariffs — which they might, as he’s not really following the law as written — they would only be saving Trump from himself. But, of course, he’s blinkered by the same narcissism that led him to bankrupt his businesses over and over, all while pretending he’s the greatest businessman of all time. But now, at 79, that ego is being made worse due to what seems to be declining reserves of brain power and being flattered all day. Instead of admitting he was wrong on tariffs, Trump would apparently rather sacrifice the GOP in the midterms — and have everyone else pay the price.
