Trump embraces affordability slop

Politicians should try something that actually works.

In January of 2022, then-President Joe Biden, wracked by public anger over inflation and desperate to show progress on the cost of living, announced a crackdown on consolidation in the meatpacking industry, which he hoped would bring down consumer prices or at least create the impression of decisive action.

Four years later, President Donald Trump, losing support on his signature issue of immigration and having failed to conquer Greenland, announced the exact same thing, also hoping to either make progress on consumer prices or at least create the impression of masterful action.

This is part of a broad suite of initiatives the administration has rolled out in 2026, all of which seem designed to harness economic populist energy. Trump signed an executive order purporting to make it harder for large investors to buy single-family homes, and he said banks had a January 20 deadline to reduce credit-card interest rates to 10 percent. When that didn’t happen, he said Congress should pass a law capping credit-card interest rates for one year. His administration also said it would let people tap into their 401(k) savings to make a down payment on a new house, but then the president said he actually doesn’t support this.

I think this kind of flailing slopulism probably works a bit better for a Republican than a Democrat, because it plays against type.

But Trump is going to find that he has the same basic problem as Biden: If you want to address public concern about inflation, you need to both alter people’s lived experience of inflation and also alter the news coverage of inflation.

If you claim that antitrust enforcement against meatpackers will make beef cheaper, that probably sounds like a great idea to most people. But is beef actually going to be cheaper? I don’t think it will. And whatever Trump is doing with single-family homes definitely won’t make them cheaper. Credit-card interest rates have not actually been capped, and if they were capped this would have downstream consequences that people would find very annoying.

Last but not least, all of these affordability gimmicks suffer from the egg problem.