Sarah McCammon / Tamara Keith / Domenico Montanaro (primary hosts; multi-voice label primarily Sarah McCammon)

What is the White House trying to do to address affordability?

Well, last weekend and into early this week, President Trump started talking about a 50-year mortgage, which would bring down the individual mortgage payments by a few hundred dollars.

But then people did the math and discovered that it would dramatically increase the amount of money that people are paying on interest and would mean that people had less equity in their homes.

In fact, there was a lot of MAGA pushback on that idea because they were saying like, hey, this would just help the banks.

Another thing that the White House is doing is rushing to reverse some of the president's tariffs.

And we've talked a lot on this podcast about how much President Trump loves tariffs as a tool and believes that they solve all kinds of problems.

Now, administration officials, including the Treasury secretary and the U.S.

trade representative, are talking about rolling back tariffs on key products that can't be grown in the U.S., like bananas, coffee, cocoa.

vanilla beans, things where prices have really gone up because of the tariffs and where there is no great U.S.

alternative.

And they are rushing to get those out possibly as soon as today.

It's not clear how quickly that would actually work its way through the economy, but it is a signal, a pretty strong signal, that the White House realizes there's an affordability problem and they are attempting to take actions to improve it.

You know, Trump starts out behind the eight ball on affordability, not just because he's a rich guy surrounded by billionaires who say things like the American dream is not the right to buy cheap stuff, as his Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said at one point, but because he has actively said he doesn't think costs are the most important thing.

He talked about immigration being much more important and has said so on multiple occasions at the beginning of his second term here.

And as Tam points out, he's actively made things more

more expensive with his tariffs.

We know that costs are important to voters, though.

Voters really seem to indicate that in last week's elections.

Democrats did very well, largely based on economic messaging.

How much could Democrats continue to capitalize on this economic message in the midterms?