Derek Thompson

We're saying that Donald Trump wins this affordability election.

where if you ask people who switched the Democratic to the Republican column, why did you switch?

They said over and over again, it's cost of living, it's affordability, it's the price of housing.

What's happened to cost of living, affordability under Donald Trump?

All of it has gotten worse.

And it's not just that it's gotten worse because like a comet came in from outer space that Donald Trump couldn't possibly change.

It's often directly because of Trump's policies.

I

as a scarcity candidate.

There's a scarcity of labor in large part because the amount of legal and undocumented immigration coming into this country has fallen off a map such that the labor market is barely growing anymore.

We have trade scarcity.

We've essentially made it illegal for all sorts of goods to be, not illegal, but highly taxed, all sorts of goods to be sold into the country.

Some of those goods are inputs into things like

building transformers.

And if you look at why the cost of electricity and energy is rising, despite the fact that within the context of AI, it's often blamed on the data centers.

When you talk to energy experts, they will say almost to a person, it's not so much about the exciting reason of AI is driving up the cost of electricity.

It's much more the slightly more boring reason, which is that the hardware guts of the electrical grid are

are getting scarce and more expensive in large part because we have tariffed the inputs, which makes it harder to build transformers and stations.

So he's made it difficult in so many different ways in order to allow him to achieve the very thing that he was elected to achieve.

That is, I think, an absolute tragedy for America, for consumers, for families.