Trump Administration has begun rolling out new policies and recasting its economic messaging

Alan Rappeport

A shopper at a grocery store in Manhattan, New York, on November 5. Only 30% of voters believe US President Donald Trump has lived up to their expectations for tackling inflation and the cost of living, according to a recent NBC News poll - his lowest mark for any issue respondents were asked about. Photo / Hiroko Masuike, The New York Times

Lower prices for coffee and fruit. A 50-year mortgage to reduce monthly home payments. Direct cheques of US$2000 to many Americans. And a new willingness to welcome skilled foreign labour 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.

This month’s elections made it 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% of voters believe US President Donald 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 meagre 27% of voters in a CNN poll in late October said 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 it is 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 Administration said last week that it would lift tariffs on foreign products, including beef, tomatoes, bananas and coffee.

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 this past week.

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”.

US President Donald Trump is under pressure to deal with the high cost of living. Photo / Doug Mills, The New York Times

The new urgency over affordability comes before looming Midterm elections that could alter the course of 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 past week, Trump said he “doesn’t want to hear about affordability” because the US economy is so strong.

But in an acknowledgment that Americans were frustrated with high food prices, he said in an interview with Fox News that he expected to lower tariffs on coffee and fruit, the move the Administration made on Saturday.

Critics of the Trump Administration noted that Trump appeared to be solving a problem that his policies had created.

“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 Trump’s policies on tariffs and immigration restrictions.

“If they reverse some of that, maybe costs will come down.”

Wage increases have been outpacing inflation in the US this year, but not significantly enough for people to feel like they are better off.

And a protracted US Government shutdown sowed panic among lower-income Americans whose food stamps became a political pawn in the standoff.

Food banks across the US reported a surge in customers, with local and national media outlets showing long lines of people waiting for groceries to feed their families.

In emphasising affordability, the White House is grappling with the fact that its policies cannot please everyone.

Last month, Trump suggested that the US would begin importing more beef from Argentina in an attempt to bring down prices. That led to a backlash from American cattle ranchers who said that such a move would hurt their profits.

Some Republicans expressed disappointment after Trump told Laura Ingraham in the Fox News interview that he would support allowing more skilled foreign labour into the US 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.

A shopper looks at produce at a grocery in the Bushwick neighbourhood of Brooklyn. Photo / Hiroko Masuike, The New York Times

The Trump Administration is promoting affordability on several other fronts.

In a speech in New York this past week, Treasury Secretary Scott 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,” Bessent said.

“The work we do here directly impacts affordability and quality of life out there.”

Trump and Bessent have also been pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to support the housing market. The Treasury Secretary said this month 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, Trump and his aides have been contemplating more creative ideas to lower monthly home expenses.

The President this past 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 criticised because it would saddle consumers with more debt and interest costs.

William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said this past 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.

Trump has pitched offering US$2000 ($3520) cheques to Americans that would be funded by tariff revenue — if Congress approved such a plan — and Bessent predicted 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 Trump’s team is considering would require co-operation from Congress or a broad reversal of his trade agenda.

Analysts are sceptical 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 Joe Biden.

“Cleaning up Joe Biden’s inflation and economic disaster has been a top focus for President Trump since day one, when he signed an array of executive orders to unleash American energy and slash costly regulations,” said Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson.

“The Trump Administration will continue to implement and emphasise these and other economic policies that are cutting costs, raising real wages, and securing trillions in investments to make and hire in America.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Alan Rappeport

Photographs by: Hiroko Masuike, Doug Mills