Trump 2.0: The President’s Affordability Problem

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroff. This is The Daily. What was your most important issue when you voted in 2024? Probably the economy. Well, the economy, first and foremost. I live solely on Social Security, so the economy, it was extremely important to me. I didn't really think my dollar was going as far as it could. Donald Trump was elected in 2024 on the promise that he would fix the economy, the number one issue for a broad coalition of voters. Today, just after one year of president Trump, our economy is booming, incomes are rising, investment is soaring, inflation has been defeated. Now as the president goes out into the country to defend his economic agenda. Cost of gas still isn't where it was when he was in his first term. Housing affordability, that is nonexistent. Haven't started a family yet primarily because of the cost of living. My expectation was for prices to go down and not have to pay outrageous interest rates, but that's not what happened, is it? A new poll from The New York Times reveals that the issue that may have won the election for president Trump may now be driving voters away. His campaign promises were that the economy was going to be so much better. I don't see a lot of improvement since he has been back in office. I felt confident that he was gonna come and help us, but now that we're just one year into it, I feel bamboozled. I feel like I was stupid to vote for him. I should have known better. I I expected this guy to be a populist. No. I feel like he's You know? I feel like he's not different from any of the other presidents. Today, in the second in a series of episodes evaluating the first year of Trump's presidency, my colleague, Nate Cohn, explains what the poll tells us about how skeptical voters are of Trump, his handling of the economy, and their own chances of living the lives they dreamed of. It's Friday, January 30. Nate, we are coming to you because right now we're at this moment where we wanna step back and try to evaluate how president Trump has fared on his signature issues about a year into his presidency. And you, lucky for us, have just put out the latest results from this set of major polls that you're doing as our chief political analyst here at the Times. And that poll, it really drills down on Trump's performance on the key issue of the last election, which was the economy. But just to understand where Trump is at right now with voters, I wanna ask you to remind us of where voters were in the run up to the election and right after it as a way of understanding what people's hopes were for this year, you know, what they wanted. Explain that to me. Donald Trump entered office with relatively …