Trump's surprising new source for 'affordability' ideas

President Donald Trump seems to have realized the American public is not picking up what he's putting down on the economy, so he's borrowing a fresh set of ideas from an unlikely place — the other side of the aisle.

Over the past few weeks, the White House has rolled out a blitz of proposals that sound more like something out of Bernie Sanders', Elizabeth Warren's, or Zohran Mamdani's offices than a Republican administration. Trump has called for institutional investors to be banned from buying single-family homes, and he's sought to block military contractors from undertaking stock buybacks and issuing dividends unless they step it up on production. He's also revived a pledge from the campaign trail to cap credit card interest rates at 10%. These moves follow a proposal late last year for what the White House dubbed "Trump accounts," a small-scale version of baby bonds that would allot $1,000 to children born from 2025 through 2028.

Stock buyback bans, credit card interest rate caps, baby bonds: These are all ideas progressives have been kicking around for years.

Trump has tended to take a heterodox approach to the economy that diverges from the more typical Republican "let the chips fall where they may" stance on markets. He's used his bully pulpit to stop companies from shipping jobs overseas and weighed in on mergers from the Oval Office. During his second term, the federal government has taken equity stakes in multiple American companies, marking a shift toward a more heavy-handed, interventionist approach to private industry. Now, Trump's original messaging on how to reshape the economy has faltered — it turns out Americans really love cheap stuff — so he's pivoting in what he hopes will be a more popular direction.

It's not clear how much of this is serious or achievable. And some items on Trump's agenda — namely, tariffs — stand to undercut any affordability-related measures. A cost-alleviating campaign also requires focus, and the president is prone to distraction, whether it be his recent push to acquire Greenland or his tendency to pick small fights with allies. However, the blitz of announcements is a sign that Trump recognizes his playbook wasn't appeasing the financially frustrated masses. And the ongoing shift toward more populist economic policies — wherever the ideas come from — is evidence of a broader shift away from market-first thinking that's dominated both the Republican and Democratic parties for decades.

Trump's second administration came into power with a fairly cohesive theory of how to better the economy and improve Americans' poor perceptions of it. Through a combination of tariffs, deregulation, tax cuts, and overhauling the federal government via DOGE, the Trump team anticipated an investment boom, particularly in manufacturing, that would lead to a significant boost to the economy. Things haven't really panned out as anticipated: The US lost manufacturing jobs in 2025, tariffs were mainly a headache for businesses and consumers, and while hard economic data shows solid growth, people's views on how things are going are much more dour.

Americans remain frustrated by high prices and a job market that's mediocre at best. They weren't sold on White House's initial message telling them to just buy less stuff, and the more recent line that concerns around affordability are a "hoax" didn't play great either. Which brings us to the White House's plan C: scrounging through various bags of tricks to see if there's anything good in there.

"They're scrambling to find things to do," says Mike Konczal, senior director of policy and research at the Economic Security Project.

Many of these new policy proposals have been percolating in Democratic offices for a while. Sanders has a bill to limit credit card interest rates, and he's said in the past that he'd work with Trump on the issue. Sen. Cory Booker is a longtime proponent of baby bonds, Warren has criticized buybacks as a "sugar high" for corporations, and kicking private equity funds out of the housing market is a lively debate on the left.

Trump's maneuvers aren't out of nowhere. He's never been a straight Reaganite, free-market-above-all Republican on the economy. Some of the issues he's targeting are ones that have garnered GOP support in the past. It's also clear that Mamdani's victory in New York City's mayoral race, thanks in large part to his affordability message, caught the president's attention. The horseshoe theory of politics suggests that the left and right are bound to intersect on certain issues, especially with a right-leaning president who is open to meddling directly into all kinds of matters. The president himself has acknowledged the atypical nature of his proposals — in an interview with CNBC, he joked that the credit card interest rate cap "sounds like the mayor of New York maybe came up with that."

"Right-wing populists and left-wing progressives are both populists of a sort," says James Pethokoukis, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. They tend to frame things as "the people vs. the elite," though their exact targets may differ. They don't worry about economic overreach or accept constraints that political moderates might take as a given.

"When someone says, 'Oh, we can't afford it,' or, 'Well, the rules don't really allow it,' Or, 'Oh, we can't do this because the markets won't like it,' I mean, those are not answers that populists and progressives like Elizabeth Warren will readily accept," Pethokoukis says.

In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Kush Desai told me that President Trump was given a "resounding mandate by the American people to smash Washington, DC's obsession with consensus orthodoxy that has let Americans down." He said Trump is turning the page on the Biden administration's "economic disaster" by implementing traditional free market policies such as deregulation and tax cuts, while rectifying the America Last policies that have Americans behind." In other words, they appear to be willing to get down and dirty on some issues.

If you're skeptical that Trump's embrace of these ideas will lead to a big bipartisan kumbaya moment, you would be correct. For one thing, the president tends to toss out declarations that aren't always straightforward or within his power to accomplish.

There are practical concerns about the feasibility and effectiveness of these plans. As it stands, there does not appear to be a political consensus on these ideas to bring them to fruition. A credit card interest rate cap, for example, would likely need congressional buy-in to implement. Historically, there has been little interest among legislators beyond progressives such as Warren, Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Members of Trump's own party have pushed back, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, who suggested the president "probably has not thought through" the cap. The president may be able to leverage government contracts to influence defense companies, such as Raytheon, but there aren't always obvious, immediate alternative suppliers for certain products. Companies also can't shift gears overnight.

"A lot of these things they seem to be trying to do on the cheap," says Brad Lipton, the director of corporate power and financial regulation at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. "It's not serious industrial policy to just kind of do these one-off things."

Then there are the questions of effectiveness. Take the idea of banning large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes. Entities such as Blackstone have become a "useful scapegoat" for rising housing costs in the US, says Jenny Schuetz, vice president of housing at Arnold Ventures, a policy advocacy group, but they're not the root of the problem. There are some 85 million single-family homes in the US; large institutions own about half a million of them, less than 1%.

There are some places where institutional investment ownership is concentrated, including Sun Belt cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, and Phoenix. While many Americans may instinctively balk at the idea of a private equity fund owning a cluster of homes, it's not unequivocally a bad thing. Having a group of houses together may help them keep down maintenance and amenities costs, and it opens up the door for renters to get into areas — and school districts — they might not be able to access if they had to buy.

"These institutional investors now operating as landlords are reallocating a very scarce good," says Caitlin Gorback, a microeconomist and assistant professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business. "When you're reallocating a scarce good, there are winners and losers. I think we've really been concerned about the losers."

There's only so much the federal government can do on housing at all, since most of what's needed to address the issue is on the state and local level. At the federal level, the president has also said he wants the government to buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds in order to bring down mortgage rates and floated the idea of a 50-year mortgage. Some economists note that those moves could actually worsen the situation by juicing demand without increasing supply.

"Huge monetary stimulus for mortgages is not really what the housing market needs right now," Konczal says. "What it really needs is more housing."

Finally, the president's own record has led many economists and policy experts to question his commitment to these causes. Trump isn't wrong to think that credit cards and debt are dogging many Americans. Credit card debt in the US is near record highs, and the average credit card interest rate is 23.79%, according to LendingTree, which is approximately 10 percentage points higher than it was a decade ago. Despite the president's rhetoric on the issue, however, his administration has actually exacerbated the problem. Last year, the president signed a resolution nullifying a Biden-era rule that would have limited overdraft fees to $5, and under his watch, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau tabled a rule that would have capped credit card late fees at $8.

In December, the president signed a required annual defense bill that was stripped of a bipartisan housing measure aimed at increasing the housing supply and therefore bringing down costs.

"They just weren't interested," Lipton says.

In mid-January, Sen. Warren said in a statement she had a call with the president in which they discussed credit card interest rate limits and the housing bill.

"I told him that Congress can pass legislation to cap credit card rates if he will actually fight for it. I also urged him to get House Republicans to pass the bipartisan ROAD to Housing Act, which passed the Senate with unanimous support and would build more housing and lower costs," she said. "No more delays. It's time to deliver relief for American families."

The president seems to be clear on his desire to take more direct action on the economy, though the why behind it is a separate story.

On both the right and the left, there's been a creep toward the government taking a more hands-on approach toward industry and the economy over the past decade. The Biden administration embraced industrial policy through legislation, such as the CHIPS Act, and sought to lower consumer costs by cracking down on junk fees. The Trump administration is taking stakes in companies such as Intel and MP Materials, and it's cut profit-sharing deals tied to AI chip exports. History doesn't move backward — these types of actions under both political parties are likely to continue to ramp up.

What sets Trump's latest interventions apart is not that they borrow from progressive proposals; it's that they lack a clear thesis about the problems they're meant to solve. These policies appear reactive, shaped more by political pressure and public anger than by a coherent economic framework. They've also been presented alongside a fresh set of tariff threats on Europe that would likely push prices up. Even though those tariffs have since been abandoned, they could come back. There's an understanding from the White House that Americans are dissatisfied with the country's financial state of affairs, they increasingly blame Trump for it. Therefore, the president needs to appear like he's doing something. That something, however, is all over the place.

"A lot of policy is downstream of how you diagnose the problem, and I think their diagnosis is wrong, which is why the policies don't fit really well," Konczal says. "They're doing a lot of victory laps on, 'Aha, the economy didn't collapse!' And it's like, yes, it did not. But what are we excited about? What's going to be on the other side of this?"

That's an open question. Trump can't do a lot of this on his own, and congressional Republicans aren't exactly lining up to cap credit card interest rates or clamp down on stock buybacks and executive pay. But as the White House works to shape its affordability narrative, we might expect more Sanders-esque proposals.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.