President Trump is hitting the road this week to address Americans’ affordability concerns. But it is a journey in which his rhetoric and actions often appear at odds with each other.
On one front, Trump and his team continue to dismiss the prevailing sentiment among many Americans that everyday costs are getting harder to manage.
“I think the president is frustrated with the media coverage of what’s going on,” Treasury Secretary Scott Besant said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” arguing that inflation concerns are overblown.
Bessant also points to the results of a new CBS poll showing that only 36% of voters approve of the president’s handling of the economy and only 32% offer positive marks for his handling of inflation.
Trump and his team, on the other hand, have taken a series of actions in a clear admission that affordability is more important than media creation.
Recent weeks have seen the president reverse some of his tariffs on grocery items. He has floated ideas like $2,000 tariff rebate checks and even a 50-year mortgage to lower month-to-month costs.
This past weekend, the White House announced a new effort to address “risks from price fixing and anti-competitive behavior in the food supply chain.”
Competitive impulses are expected to be on display during the president’s stop Tuesday in northeastern Pennsylvania, where his team said he will highlight both his economic record and efforts to end inflation. He may also announce new initiatives to address affordability.
That event is expected to be followed by more trips in the coming weeks.
Read more: How to protect your savings against inflation
In recent weeks, the president has often suggested that he personally believes his affordability problem is a perception rather than a real pain point that he needs to do something new.
In the Oval Office last Wednesday, Trump said “the deal is the biggest job” by Democrats and his previous actions proved that he was indeed focused on the issue.
“You’re going to see those results very quickly,” Trump said.
In other contexts, the president has even dismissed polls that show Americans are worried. When pressed recently on Fox News about Americans’ concerns, the president fired back by dismissing those polls as “fake.”
It’s just one of a variety of messages, falsely claiming prices have been falling in the recent controversy that inflation is now in the “sweet spot” after spikes during the Biden years. The most recent inflation data available – the Consumer Price Index for September – shows inflation holding stubbornly at an annual rate of 3%.
