Affordability is the watchword of the moment. From progressive mayors, like Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson, to more moderate governors, like Mikie Sherill and Abigail Spanberger, figures from across the political left are embracing the need to respond to the cost of living crisis that has long plagued American life.
There are good reasons for this. The affordability narrative—exemplified by policies to provide free childcare, expand affordable housing, and lower the cost of groceries—speaks directly to the electorate’s daily concerns. Putting people’s lives at the center of our economic debates is not only the best way to build a resilient macroeconomy, but also a response to the disaffection that led to Trump’s second term.
One significant risk, however, is that this framework will be co-opted by candidates and policymakers who fail to grasp its true power. This coterie will focus narrowly on technocratic or deregulatory fixes—licensing reforms, prescription drug price comparison tools, and the elimination of environmental and labor standards in service of “efficiency”—that fundamentally misunderstand the significance of affordability. The true power of this frame lies in both its accessibility and its ability to excavate the power dynamics that have driven our cost of living crisis for decades. Without grappling with the oligarchs and giant corporations that hold our economy in a death grip, the affordability frame will fall flat.
It will also fail to meet the moment. The past 17 months have seen militarized immigration enforcement snatching people’s neighbors off the streets, the Supreme Court green-lighting racial profiling, rampant no-bid contracts enriching Trump’s allies, and the desecration of national symbols. Against this backdrop, a narrow focus on affordability—one that fails to grapple with the ways in which the wealthy and large corporations have engineered this cost of living crisis to line their own pockets—risks appearing complacent and myopic. Moreover, unless we confront the Trump administration’s consolidated cultural and bureaucratic power, any attempt to deliver an affordability agenda is likely to fail. Rather than attempting to unwind this Gordian knot, we must slice through it with a reconstructionist approach that fundamentally reimagines our government, our economy, and core cultural assumptions.
The new terrain
It is not hyperbole to say that American democracy is in an existential crisis. Since the start of his second term, Trump has fundamentally changed the terrain of policy and politics. This sometimes reads as a series of shocking but unconnected choices: accepting a Qatari jet without consideration for the national security consequences, chaotically imposing and rescinding tariffs, tearing down whole agencies overnight, promising suspended enforcement actions against universities and law firms who bend the knee. But when we zoom out, these are all puzzle pieces that add up to a system that is designed to funnel wealth, power, and control to Trump, his families, and his political allies.
The administration has built a durable system of extraction and violence that relies on a web of cultural, institutional, and economic policy decisions that will be impossible to disentangle. As Melanie Brusseler and I explain in a recent report, the administration has scattered the seeds of authoritarianism into our bureaucracy, where they can take root and strangle the capacity of our government to deliver services and safeguard our rights. The administration has made a farce of our already tilted economic system by transforming it into a naked system of grift, extraction, and corruption, while advancing an “us-versus-them” narrative of exclusion that not only justifies violence and harm against immigrants, transgender people, and others, but also provides a justification for why those who benefit from Trump’s pay-to-play economy deserve to do so.
While the challenges to contesting this new apparatus of power abound, there are also important openings for Democrats to capitalize on. Trump’s power grab has laid bare the rigged economy that has long been hidden in plain view. The pay-to-play dealmaking that characterizes Trump’s administration is the natural outcome of a system in which inequality is rampant and the wealthy hold so much sway over our political system. And the Trump family’s increasingly brazen self-enrichment has been accompanied by unpopular policy decisions that are driving prices even higher for everyday people. These are gaps that can be exploited by Democrats, but to do so effectively requires going beyond a thin affordability approach.
A more muscular approach
In order for an affordability message to be credible and actionable, we must have a three-pronged strategy that takes equally seriously the damage Trump has done to our institutions, our values, and our economy.
From an institutional standpoint, a government that is sharpened as a tool for violence instead of provision will not be able to deliver an affordability agenda. On the one hand, DOGE has done lasting damage to the capacity of agency after agency that provide critical services, raise revenue, and regulate bad actors. On the other, Trump and his Republican allies have delivered a bloated slush fund to ICE and CPB to vastly expand the policing capacity of the state. At the most basic level, resources that could be going to supporting people and their well-being are instead being used for violence and coercion. Given the stickiness of institutional design, we must deliberately retool our institutions and root out the capacity for coercion and violence while building up government capacity that empowers regular people. Without fundamentally reshifting this balance of capacity within our government, an affordability agenda is a non-starter.
Similarly, the cultural narratives that Trump has propagandized—the vilification and dehumanization of immigrants and trans people, the shunning of childless women, the idea that Black public officials are all unqualified—stand as a significant barrier to delivering an affordability agenda. After all, if whole swathes of our population are understood to be underdeserving, it will be harder to generate the political will for investing public resources in public goods and more universalistic approaches.
Finally, it is obvious that affordability stands in direct contrast to the pay-to-play dealmaking of the Trump administration. But the naked corruption by those in power offers an opportunity to more explicitly go after villains and tackle outsized corporate power. Some of the policies on offer—price controls, AI data center moratoria—are necessary but insufficient. These policies do not tackle the underlying power dynamics of our economy that has driven an affordability crisis for decades. This is an opportunity for us to use the resonant affordability frame to tackle the very rules that have allowed Trump’s power grab in the first place, from rampant deregulation to outrageous tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations.
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People are hungry for change. Across the board, confidence in institutions is in freefall. But Trump has leveraged the anti-institutionalism that buoyed him to office in service of self-enrichment rather than the public good. The Democrats have the opportunity to meet this political hunger and the policy need. This will require taking two key steps: embedding a power analysis into the affordability narrative and building the bureaucracy and values set that will supercharge a people-focused affordability agenda rather than hold it back.
