Trump turns to progressives for ideas on affordability

President Donald Trump is looking for unlikely allies as he rolls out a new agenda to try to address Americans’ concerns about affordability and position Republicans for the midterm elections: progressives.

On Monday, he called Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., after she delivered a speech excoriating her own party for being too cozy with its wealthy donors, according to Warren and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

“I delivered this same message on affordability to him directly,” Warren said. “I told him that Congress can pass legislation to cap credit card rates if he will actually fight for it. I also urged him to get House Republicans to pass the bipartisan ROAD to Housing Act, which passed the Senate with unanimous support and would build more housing and lower costs.”

In recent days, Trump has renewed a campaign promise to cap credit card interest rates at 10% after having failed to push it in the first year of his term, vowed to ban large investors from buying up housing and directed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to invest $200 billion in mortgage bonds.

Trump has also raised eyebrows among traditional economic conservatives by having the government take ownership stakes in some private companies, threatening to punish others for not complying with his demands and pressuring Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to lower interest rates — in conjunction with the Justice Department’s launching an investigation into the central bank.

“These are not limited-government, free-market policies, and it’s also creating a precedent for the next time a Democrat’s in the White House,” said Marc Short, who was director of White House legislative affairs and chief of staff to then-Vice President Mike Pence in Trump’s first term. “For all the Republicans and conservatives to stay quiet, how are they going to object when the next Democrat wants to exert the same power and influence over the private sector?”

For most of the first year of his second term, Trump has pursued economic policies that progressives detest: dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, cutting taxes for high earners in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and allowing Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies to expire. His plan to offer homebuyers 50-year mortgages landed like a lead balloon and has been abandoned.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., expressed skepticism about Trump’s embrace of some progressive policies, saying it wasn’t in line with what he has done thus far.

“Trump promised to cap credit card interest rates at 10% and stop Wall Street from getting away with murder. Instead, he deregulated big banks charging up to 30% interest on credit cards,” Sanders posted on social media last week.

Warren also said Monday that so far, Trump “has done nothing but raise costs for families,” and he needed to “use his leverage and pick up the phone” if he actually wanted to advance some of these economic policies.

Trump’s shift toward cost-control policies coincides with a broader effort to fight Democrats on the electoral battlefield over the issue of affordability, which helped carry them to sizable November victories in the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races and the New York mayoral election.

The details of Trump’s plans, some of which would require legislation, still need to be fleshed out. He will start to fill in the fine print in a speech at the Detroit Economic Club on Tuesday, according to a senior White House official. Trump plans to drive his affordability message and outline additional economic ideas, the official said, adding that a more comprehensive housing policy is forthcoming.

The credit card rate cap and the ban on investors’ buying housing stock would require Congress to act, and there’s little guarantee that will happen. While the latest moves may pick up support from populists in both parties, he would be likely to face stiff opposition from business-friendly Republicans and Democrats.

And yet, it is clear that some of his initiatives have at least a modicum of bipartisan backing.

Trump’s plan to stop large investors from buying up single-family homes — a move, he said, that would make housing more affordable for first-time buyers — echoes a yearslong push by liberal Democrats in the House and the Senate to lower home prices for consumers by targeting the same practices. Warren, Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have all sponsored or co-sponsored such bills.

Trump’s call to limit credit card interest rates for a year, a proposal he made on the campaign trail, has sat idle in legislative form since Sanders and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced it last year. Americans have, on average, credit card interest rates of 19.65% to 21.5%, according to the Federal Reserve and other industry sources.

In the case of his directive for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds, Trump says the maneuver will bring mortgage rates and monthly payments down, although some industry analysts predict it would have a negligible effect on the housing market.

For many Trump world insiders, his willingness to upend Republican orthodoxy in service of populism is a feature, not a bug, of his policymaking.

“While some of this stuff might seem outside of what Republicans would normally advocate for, that’s Trump,” a former Trump adviser said. “I don’t know if it wins him any awards with the Chamber of Commerce types, but he absolutely does not care about stuff like that.”

Though many headlines of late have been devoted to Trump’s foreign policy — from capturing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro to threatening hostile takeovers of Colombia, Cuba and Greenland — public polling has consistently shown that the economy is top of mind for voters heading into this year’s midterm elections. Polls have also shown that Americans aren’t optimistic about the economy or pleased with Trump’s performance on it.

Last month, an AP-NORC poll found just 31% approve of Trump’s “handling of the economy,” a number that was at 40% shortly after he returned to office. At that time, he had just campaigned on a pledge to fix an economy he long blamed former President Joe Biden for tanking.

But has been unable to lower stubbornly high prices, and the nation’s unemployment rate has also continued to creep up. That could be why he’s taking bigger economic policy swings, the former Trump adviser said.

The gap between how Trump views his economy and the way voters view it has led him to travel in recent weeks to states with key congressional races on the ballot — including Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina — to talk up his economic agenda.

“The entire key is getting prices down,” the former Trump adviser said. “If he can do that, I think it can only help Republicans in 2026.”

Some on the left say Trump can’t be for the working class and the wealthy elites he has surrounded himself with — from Wall Street investors to tech titans — at the same time.

“As long as you see him cozying up to those people, you know not to believe anything he says about populist economic policy, because those two things cannot exist in the same world,” said Josh Orton, president of the progressive group Demand Justice.

And this week, progressives, like many Republicans in Congress, have denounced the Trump administration’s decision to investigate the Federal Reserve.

Others aren’t convinced that the plans will work politically or practically.

Aaron Klein, an economist at the Brookings Institution, a left-of-center think tank, said Trump’s embrace of the political left’s policy playbook is like “George Constanza from ‘Seinfeld’ logic: If everything I’ve done is wrong, then the opposite must be right.”

Klein, who was a Treasury Department official during Barack Obama’s presidency and an aide to Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee, said Trump is putting his own party in the awkward position of potentially having to back policies that many of them have long opposed. Conversely, some Democrats would have to contort themselves ideologically to vote against him.

“How many members of Congress will be able to be consistent on either side?” Klein asked.

That’s why Trump’s focus concerns some Republicans who think his break from traditional conservative economic policy will hurt the party long term.

“Fiscal conservative was how the party forged victories in the aftermath of Watergate, how it attracted voters back when the Republican brand popularity was at its lowest,” said a longtime Republican operative who has represented business trade groups. “What Trump is doing is anathema of that.”