President Trump is hitting the road this week to address Americans’ accessibility concerns head-on. But it’s a journey that comes as his rhetoric and actions often appear at odds with each other.
On the one hand, Trump and his team continue to push back against the prevailing sentiment among many Americans that everyday costs are becoming increasingly unmanageable.
“I think the president is frustrated with the media coverage of what’s going on,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” when presented with those concerns, arguing that inflation worries are overblown.
Bessent also dismissed new CBS poll results showing that only 36 percent of voters approve of the president’s handling of the economy and only 32 percent give positive marks to his handling of inflation.
On the other hand, Trump and his team have taken a number of actions in an apparent recognition that accessibility is more than a media creation.
In recent weeks, the president has reversed some of his tariffs on grocery items. He also floated ideas like $2,000 rate-reduction checks and even 50-year mortgages to lower month-to-month costs.
Just this past weekend, the White House announced a new effort to address “price-fixing risks and anti-competitive behavior in the food supply chain.”
Competing impulses are expected to be on display during the president’s stop Tuesday in northeastern Pennsylvania, where his team said it will highlight both his economic record and his efforts to end inflation. He may also announce new initiatives to address accessibility.
This 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 one of perception rather than a real pain point that he needs to do something new about.
In the Oval Office last Wednesday, Trump said that “affordability is the biggest con” of Democrats and argued that his past actions prove that he is the one who is actually focused on the issue.
“You’re going to see those results very soon,” Trump said.
In other contexts, the president has even dismissed polls that show Americans are worried. When pressed recently about Americans’ anxiety on Fox News, the president responded by dismissing those polls as “bogus.”
It’s just one of a variety of messages, from falsely claiming that prices are falling to a recent claim that inflation is now in a “sweet spot” after rising during the Biden years. The most recent inflation data available — the Consumer Price Index for September — shows that inflation has held stubbornly at an annual rate of 3 percent.
