A radical idea for breaking the cycle of public anger

What if we actually focused on the cost of living?

Let’s make it easier to afford groceries. (Photo by Cool Picture)

“Just wait for the opposition to screw up enough” is not the world’s greatest political strategy, but it’s often a good enough political strategy.

Last week, Fox News released a poll showing Democrats are more trusted on the economy for the first time since 2010. I’m on the record as saying that Hakeem Jeffries’s skills as an opposition leader are widely underrated, but this is pretty clearly not because Democrats pulled off some incredible transformation of their public image.

What happened is that Donald Trump has made a hash of things.

He won office largely because of mass public outrage over high prices. He explicitly promised to make prices go down, setting himself up for trouble since this is not an achievable promise.

But he hasn’t even delivered on the pretty banal goal of “make the inflation rate go back down to the 2 percent target level.” Mortgage interest rates drifted downward very slightly across the course of 2025, but didn’t come close to returning to their pre-2022 level. Then they went back up again. And Trump has taken two easily avoidable high-profile actions that have a marked tendency to push prices up: tariffs and this war with Iran.

This is leaving Democrats in decent shape for 2026 and with high hopes for 2028. But it also, of course, raises the question of how they’ll respond to public anger about prices if they get a chance to govern.

So I want to propose an idea here that’s so radical nobody seems to be considering it. Something that if he’s smart, Trump will consider before it’s too late. Something the Biden administration never did. And if Trump doesn’t do it, then whichever Democrat wins in 2028 should.