Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.
Following losses in this year’s elections, Republicans have tried to follow in the footsteps of successful Democratic candidates by claiming that they plan to focus on affordability.
The path to championing affordability and eventually backing government policies and legislation that address the cost of goods has not been smooth for the right. President Donald Trump put this on display during a recent interview with Fox News, where he told host Laura Ingraham that affordability is not a real issue.
“More than anything else it’s a con job by the Democrats,” Trump argued, weaving yet another conspiracy theory.
He went on to argue that Democrats falsely claim that prices are up and “they feed it to the anchors of ABC, CBS and NBC and a lot of others—CNN etc.”
Of course, this is false.
While not yet following Trump into the conspiracy muck on affordability, congressional Republicans have done their part to show indifference on the issue. When Democrats offered up an amendment to keep in place Affordable Care Act subsidies, Republicans voted down the legislation.
Meanwhile, “Fox & Friends” co-host Lawrence Jones berated the public for not being patient enough with Trump’s economic program as prices continue to rise.
President Donald Trump announces his long list of tariffs, which caused prices to skyrocket for Americans.
The Democratic wins in states like Virginia, Rhode Island, and New Jersey were in part secured with a focus on affordability, and the ensuing weeks have exposed the considerable GOP blind spot.
Conservative ideology is oriented around an inactive government that allows businesses to act unchecked, including in the area of raising prices on consumers to extract massive profits—even if the price increases are artificial.
At the same time, conservatives insist that the inability to get ahead—even lack of access to health care—is more of a personal failing than a systemic issue that requires the government to act.
This isn’t a new development. The worst economic crisis in U.S. history, the Great Depression, began under the watch of Republican President Herbert Hoover, who did not believe it was the place of the government to take action to alleviate mass suffering. Instead, he was a true believer in the market and purported individualism, leading to a calamity that claimed lives and skyrocketed unemployment and economic chaos.
The situation didn’t begin to improve until Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal put the power of the government behind helping families with basic affordability.
Despite the contrast between Hoover and Roosevelt and the aftermath of their policies—the economy eventually began to expand, and the middle class grew—conservative ideology has remained the same.
The right ultimately buys into the belief that nothing should be done to help middle- and lower-income families or people with serious health issues, and that the government should remain impotent—especially if those in need are from an ethnic minority.
A movement with those bedrock ideologies is effectively incompatible with that offered by progressive Democrats like New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani ran on the platform of creating a government involved in providing groceries, public transportation, and other city services while focusing on affordability.
By contrast, the last two Republican presidents pushed a legislative agenda centered around cutting taxes for the ultra-wealthy and large corporations. Former President George W. Bush pushed this agenda years before the Great Recession began on his watch, while Trump touted his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act before mishandling COVID-19 and seeing unemployment skyrocket.
A cartoon by Jack Ohman.
Trump has again pursued tax cuts for the rich in his second term.
Meanwhile, their Democratic counterparts backed government spending to combat the economic crises they inherited from Bush and Trump. Former President Barack Obama pushed through an economic stimulus bill and health care reform, and former President Joe Biden passed a stimulus bill, infrastructure legislation, and a massive investment in climate technology.
Trump campaigned in 2024 on high prices that occurred under Biden. Once he won the election, however, his promises to fix things “on Day 1” evaporated. Instead, Trump surrounded himself with a Cabinet of billionaires and advisers like Elon Musk and pursued an agenda meant to increase their net worth—and his own.
Trump has also enforced tariffs that have significantly raised prices, while insisting against all reality that prices have come down. That simply hasn’t happened.
A student of public opinion, Trump is aware that affordability is a top concern among Americans. But even as he tries to pivot to addressing the issue, he and other Republicans remain largely incapable of actually doing anything.
For decades, the right’s ideology has been that affordability is none of their concern—and certainly not something that the government can or should fix.
The right can give affordability all the lip service in the world—but that is all they will ever do.
