The real affordability hoax
Trump's vow to lower prices was always a lie.
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“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” Donald Trump boasted last week on Truth Social.
Oil prices are, of course, going up because Trump launched an illegal war of aggression against Iran without considering the (incredibly obvious) possibility that Iran might retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Gas prices have spiked 60 cents this month as oil hit $100 a barrel, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright refused yesterday to rule out the possibility oil might even rise to $200 a barrel.
Trump’s blasé trumpeting of the virtues of rising prices is in part simple fecklessness — he’s a liar who insists everything he does is brilliant and awesome.
But Trump’s decision to attack Iran and put upward pressure on prices at home puts him a political pickle, since he excoriated Biden for the high cost of gas during the 2024 campaign. In fact, the day before he launched his war, Trump preened about how far prices had fallen. But suddenly high prices are good, because as long as Trump is shuffling gaseously from Mar-a-Lago to the White House, it’s always an orange utopia in America.
To some degree, though, Trump’s love of high prices is sincere. Our current fascist president is a crony capitalist and loves the idea of screwing consumers, who he sees as suckers and marks. He identifies with the wealthy and likes it when the rich get richer. His populist mouth noises have always been a put on — as an instinctual oligarch, he gets a little shiver of pleasure whenever he can harm the little guy.
He can’t fail, he can only be failed
The immediate reason Trump is trumpeting high prices is that he just refuses to admit — to himself or anyone else — that anything could ever go wrong in the administration of one Donald J. Trump. This was most flagrantly evident during the covid crisis in his first administration, when he repeatedly and grotesquely pretended that the massive, terrifying pandemic was no big deal.
“We have it totally under control,” Trump boasted in early 2020 — right before thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, of Americans started dying.
Trump’s taken the same approach to inflation and affordability. Again, during the 2024 campaign, he attacked Biden for high inflation and spiking prices. And he’s repeatedly lied that prices are plummeting under his administration.
“Everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under Sleepy Joe Biden. And the prices are way down,” he said in November 2025.
But everybody does not in fact know that, because these claims are a lie.
In fact, prices rose during Trump’s first year in office. Inflation did ease slightly from 2.9 percent in 2024 to 2.7 percent in 2025 — reflecting a trend that was well underway under Biden. Trump’s (illegal) tariffs, though, cost households $1,000 each in 2025.
In January, core prices rose 3.1 percent — the highest number in two years, and an indication that Trump’s inflationary policies have finally overcome the improving economy he inherited from Biden. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better now that Trump has destabilized the Middle East and sent oil prices skyrocketing.
When Trump fails, he simply lies. And when that doesn’t work, he claims up is down and consumer pain at the pump is actually good if you look at it from the perspective of the bloated oil executives who donated tens of millions of dollars to his campaign.
“They can have three or four dolls”
Despite his populist rhetoric (and populist lies) Trump does in fact reflexively look at things form the perspective of uber-rich oligarchs. There have been several moments during his presidency when he has let the mask slip.
Last year, for example, when Trump was asked about how his tariffs might affect the availability and price of consumer goods, he went on a bizarre rant sneering at supposedly entitled American children.
“I don’t think that a beautiful baby girl needs – that’s 11 years old – needs to have 30 dolls,” Trump said on Meet the Press. “I think they can have three dolls or four dolls because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable.” (He also suggested school children in the US have too many pencils.)
This year, Trump returned to the idea that low prices are a luxury good and whiners just need to tighten their belts.
During a cabinet discussion of home prices and affordability, Trump stomped all over his populist talking points, insisting that “people that own their homes, we’re going to keep them wealthy. We’re going to keep those prices up, we’re not going to destroy the value of their homes, so that someone who didn’t work very hard can buy a home.”
For Trump — a wealthy real estate heir who spends hours a day watching cable news and who put gold fixtures in the Lincoln bathroom — the rich work hard and the have-nots are lazy wastrels who deserve the nothing they get. The goal of the government, in his view, is to preserve inequality and the status quo.
This commitment to crushing consumers isn’t just rhetorical. Trump’s actual policies have been laser-focused on screwing workers in a range of inventive ways. His FTC repealed Joe Biden’s ban on noncompete clauses that put a huge burden on workers. Trump also dropped Biden’s push to force airlines to compensate passengers for delayed flights and scrapped rules limiting credit card late fees and bank overdraft fees.
And there’s more. Trump’s Justice Department ended its antitrust lawsuit against Live-Nation/Ticketmaster, letting the ticketing oligopoly off with “a slap on the wrist” while allowing the company to “continue its abusive practices,” in the words of Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Trump has attacked collective bargaining for government workers and gutted the NLRB. He and Republicans have attacked the Affordable Care Act, causing prices on the exchange to skyrocket and forcing many to abandon health insurance altogether.
Most recently, Trump is working to sink a bipartisan housing affordability bill that passed the Senate 89-10. The bill relaxes regulations to boost homebuilding, provides grants to homeowners and landlords to encourage repairs, and bans institutional investors from buying some single-family homes.
The bill in theory addresses housing issues that Trump has claimed are a priority for his administration. But after the bill’s passage in the Senate, Trump told House Republicans that nobody cares about housing — by which he of course meant that he didn’t care about housing.
Instead, Trump insists that Congress pass his anti-voting, anti-democracy SAVE America Act before the midterms. Given the choice between real accomplishments that would benefit consumers and might provide an election platform and outright cheating, Trump chooses cheating every time.
Trump wants you poor and supine
The reason Trump chooses cheating rather than actual accomplishments for working people is straightforward — he does not want to help working people.
As he showed in his massive Trump University scam, in which he pretended to offer students valuable business advice and in fact offered them garbage, Trump sees working people as dupes he can cheat and defraud. He believes he deserves your money more than you do, and his whole career has been devoted to transferring that money from you to him — not least through the massive corruption he’s engaged in during his second term.
Trump will continue to claim prices are falling when they aren’t, because he doesn’t care whether prices are falling and thinks the electorate is too stupid to notice his lies. He will also occasionally continue to boast that prices are up while doing everything he can to enact policies that fleece consumers and harm working people.
The Trump administration is by and for the oligarchs — not least for the oil companies for whom war, death, and suffering have provided a windfall.
That’s it for today
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The “affordability hoax” connects directly to the gradient I’ve been documenting: some people are people, some people are variables.
Trump’s “we make a lot of money when oil prices go up” isn’t gaffe, it’s revealed preference. Oligarchical extraction class (oil executives, defense contractors, Kushner Gulf deals) profit from chaos. American consumers are variables to be managed through lies. — Remember when Trump said he loves the uneducated, yeah, exactly.
Extraction as strategy.
The sequencing shows priority: gut consumer protections while launching war that spikes gas prices. Then claim high prices are good because “we” (oligarchs) profit.
Protect hierarchy, not people. Same logic that got us civilian casualty offices gutted before bombing Iranian schools.
Oil $100/barrel benefits Russia (Trump won’t criticize Putin), hurts Americans (gas $3.70), enriches connected class. Not failure of policy, successful extraction wearing governance as costume.
The hoax wasn’t promising affordability. The hoax is pretending government exists to serve anyone outside the protected tier.
—Johan
This constant lying has somehow become - “Oh, it’s just Trump being Trump” - acceptable … like (thanks to Trump) rape, fraud, racism, misogyny, and the massacre of the English language.