President Donald Trump is adjusting his messaging strategy to appeal to voters worried about the cost of living, with plans to highlight new tax breaks and show progress in fighting inflation.
The messages center around affordability, and the push comes after inflation emerged as a key vulnerability for Trump and Republicans in Tuesday’s election, in which most voters said the economy was their top concern.
Democrats have used concerns about affordability to run by huge margins in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, turning what had been a Trump strength into 2024. presidential elections, to vulnerability in next year’s midterm elections.
White House officials and others familiar with their thinking requested anonymity to speak for this article so as not to preempt the president’s actions. They stressed that affordability has always been a priority for Trump, but the president plans to talk more about it, as he did Thursday when he announced that Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk would lower the price of their obesity drugs.
“We’ve done a great job on affordability, the Democrats haven’t,” Trump said at an Oval Office event announcing the deal. “We just lost the election, they said, on affordability. It’s a Democrat scam.”
The White House has been touting Thanksgiving dinner prices and deals at retailers like Walmart, Lidl, Aldi and Target on social media.
“I don’t want to hear about affordability, because right now we’re a lot less,” Trump told reporters Thursday, arguing that Americans are much better off under his party.
“The only problem is that Republicans aren’t talking about it,” he said.
The outlook for inflation is uncertain
Currently, the outlook for inflation has worsened under Trump. Consumer prices rose 3% in September, up from 2.3% in April, when the president first began raising tariffs, which suddenly weighed on the economy. An AP poll of voters showed the economy was the top issue in Tuesday’s elections in New Jersey, Virginia, New York and California.
Food prices continue to rise and recently electricity bills have become a new concern. At the same time, the pace of job growth slowed to a 23% year-over-year pace.
The White House is running a talking list on the economy, noting that the stock market has hit multiple record highs and that the president is attracting foreign investment. Trump has emphasized that gas prices are falling, claiming that gas costs an average of $2 a gallon, but AAA reported Thursday that the national average was $3.08, about two cents lower than a year ago.
“Americans are paying less for essentials like gas and eggs, and today the administration signed another deal on drug prices to deliver unprecedented health care savings to everyday Americans,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai.
Trump receives at least weekly briefings on the economy from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other officials, and tariffs are often a daily discussion, a senior White House official said, noting that Trump should travel more domestically next year to make sure he is fixing affordability.
But critics say it will be difficult for Trump to change public attitudes about affordability.
“He’s in real trouble, and I think it’s more than just the cost of living,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the liberal economic advocacy group Groundwork Collaborative.
Owens noted that Trump has “lost his steam” as voters increasingly question Trump’s economic leadership compared to Democrats, adding that the president has no time to change public opinion about him as he continues to impose sweeping tariffs.
New hype about income tax cuts ahead of April
A new affordability policy will be introduced, a person familiar with White House thinking said, declining to comment on what that would be. Trump said on Thursday that there will be more deals on drug prices. Two other White House officials said the messaging would change, but not the policy.
A big part of the administration’s response to affordability will be educating people before tax season about the role of Trump’s income tax cuts when they file their returns in April, a person familiar with the planning said. The cuts were part of a massive bill Republicans pushed through Congress in July.
This person emphasized that the main challenge is to reduce prices while raising wages so that people can feel and see any progress.
There are also bets that the economy will be healthier six months from now. With Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s term ending in May, the White House hopes to begin a steady stream of cuts to the Fed’s benchmark interest rate. They expect the inflation rate to cool down and the reduced federal budget deficit to boost sentiment in financial markets.
But the U.S. economy rarely cooperates with a president’s intentions, as Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden recently learned, whose popularity has plummeted since his 2022 presidential bid. inflation reached its highest level in four decades in June.
The Trump administration says it is simply dealing with the inflation challenge it inherited from Biden, but new economic research suggests Trump has created his own inflation challenge through tariffs.
Since April, Harvard University economist Alberto Cavallo and his colleagues Paola Llama of Northwestern University and Franco Vazquez of the University of San Andres have tracked the impact of import taxes on consumer prices.
October In a paper released last week, economists found that the inflation rate would have been drastically lower at 2.2% if not for Trump’s tariffs.
The administration says the tariffs have not contributed to inflation. They plan to prove that import taxes help the economy and dismiss criticism of import taxes as contributing to inflation as a talking point for Democrats.
The fate of Trump’s country-by-country tariffs is currently being decided by the Supreme Court, where the justices appeared skeptical at Wednesday’s hearing of the administration’s claims that the tariffs are essentially regulations and can be levied by the president without congressional approval. Trump has at times argued that foreign countries, not US citizens, pay the tariffs, and on Thursday he backtracked a bit.
“Maybe they’re paying something,” he said. “But when you look at the overall impact, the benefits for Americans are enormous.”
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Associated Press writers Will Weissert and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.