In his second term, Trump is clearly focused on building his legacy.
He is building a large new ballroom in the White House to leave his mark on the historic building. Similarly, he renamed the Kennedy Center after himself. The president was also clearly angling for a Nobel Peace Prize last year and threw a fit when he didn’t win it—eventually prompting the winner to “transfer” the award to him in an attempt to convince him to carry out a regime change in Venezuela on her behalf.
And, as I covered last week, he launched what was quickly becoming an international crisis over Greenland, only to pivot and pass off a “deal” containing no meaningful changes from the status quo as if it meant the US was gaining partial sovereignty over the Arctic territory.
None of this will be particularly meaningful for anyone but Trump once he’s out of office. But it does offer a helpful window into his mindset as we get closer to the end of his time as president.
And that mindset is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. To build a positive legacy, a president needs to be thinking about the consequences of their policies decades down the road. Very few politicians do that—to our great detriment.
The problem is not that Trump is interested in a legacy, it’s that his attempt to build one has involved a mix of extremely risky foreign interventions and meaningless domestic vanity projects, none of which offer real, lasting benefits for the American people.
And, despite the president’s efforts, his actual legacy is shaping up to be defined by his lack of progress on the affordability front. New polling released earlier in the week confirmed that voters are still very unhappy with how expensive everything is and are pessimistic about that reversing anytime soon.
As I explained a few months ago, the causes and cures of the so-called affordability crisis are not a mystery. To truly fix this problem, the inflationist monetary regime that is deliberately destroying the value of our money needs to be abolished and replaced by some form of market-determined sound money. And the myriad laws and regulations that artificially constrain supply in important sectors like housing and healthcare need to be repealed—along with the many price-amplifying, demand-side subsidies that have been building up in the wake of the artificial shortages.
The Trump administration has shown no real interest in pursuing either of these solutions, which is bad enough. But Trump is also actively pursuing policies that, from an affordability standpoint, are worse than doing nothing.
Trump has spent his entire term so far pressing for the Federal Reserve to accelerate the kind of inflationist monetary policy that is primarily responsible for the crisis. And he has, of course, raised taxes on the goods American consumers and businesses buy from foreign producers. And now, as the midterms approach and Republican strategists scream at the president that he has to do something about affordability, Trump has reportedly looked to the left for ideas.
After Elizabeth Warren gave a speech on economic policy, Trump called her to discuss working together to enact a price ceiling on credit cards—a policy the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has been dreaming of for years.
Trump is also using price controls to try and bring down some drug prices and has said he wants to make it illegal for institutional investors to buy and rent out single-family homes.
That institutional homebuying ban is a leftist policy that has recently gained a lot of popularity on the right. And, while the instinct to go after the financial giants that are so clearly benefiting from a crony economic system that’s designed to benefit them is understandable, the homebuying issue specifically is not the answer.
Big firms like Blackstone buying large concentrations of homes is more a symptom of our highly-financialized economy and the artificial housing shortage than a cause of the crisis. Focusing on the symptom leaves the root causes in place. The houses being rented out by these firms also account for less than one percent of the nation’s supply of single-family homes. A ban is not going to solve or even make a meaningful dent in the housing affordability crisis. It will, at most, make it a bit tougher for families that can afford to rent a home, but not buy one.
Using price controls on drugs will just further warp an already heavily warped market and, again, leave all the root causes of America’s insane drug prices in place. It’s not a real or lasting solution.
And, finally, the cap on credit card interest rates also leaves all the causes of the affordability crisis in place. But on top of that, this price control would also cause significant pain for some of the poorest and most economically vulnerable Americans by cutting them off from their main source of credit, forcing them to either go without or switch to even higher-interest payday lenders. There’s a good reason this was dismissed as a crazy idea when Bernie Sanders and AOC tried to get this passed back in 2019.
Trump’s embrace of economic leftism is not just politically foolish, it’s dangerous for the American people. If he really commits to this, on top of his inflationism and higher import taxes, it won’t matter how nice his new ballroom is. He will be remembered as the president who answered the public’s cry for help with cruel neglect and deliberate aggravation.
