Trump Openly Said He Wants To Punish The Poor. Believe Him

There is something deeply American about the idea of a suffering class. 

From the outset, America has maintained the unspoken Constitutional fine print that the poor must stay poor. That’s the logic behind gated communities, redlining, and predatory lending. It’s what emboldens residents to question Blacks about whether they live in the building. 

So when Donald Trump says housing prices should stay high to protect homeowners, he isn’t offering a bold economic vision — he’s repeating one of the oldest scripts in the country: protect wealth at the top and call it fairness.

And then he said the quiet part out loud: “People that own their homes, we’re gonna keep them wealthy. We’re gonna keep those prices up,” he said. “We’re not gonna destroy the value of their homes so that somebody who didn’t work very hard can buy a home.”

Because President Donald Trump hates the poor. He always has. Which is why he’s spent his entire life working to create this image of opulence that always comes across as overly wrought and tacky. He’s the rich guy who isn’t rich but wants everyone else to believe he is. It’s why his New York apartment looks like Liberace took an e-pill, got dizzy, and vomited all over the walls and chairs. 

Or, as House and Garden explains it: “The apartment overlooks Central Park from the top three floors of Trump Tower in New York – floors 66 to 68 – and was decorated to emulate the Palace of Versailles, decked out in 24-carat gold, marble and mirrors.”

Because much like the vertically challenged man with the Ferrari, Trump is overcompensating for his shortcomings. He went so far as to have gold trimmings placed around the Oval Office and even replaced the flowers adorning the mantle with gold urn-looking things. 

But all of it, his recent comments on housing, the obsession with gold, the push to keep low-income renters from living in his buildings, is part of his continued assault on the poor. 

Let’s be clear about what “keeping housing prices high” actually means in real life. It means locking poor people out of stability. It means telling working-class families that shelter is an investment vehicle first and a human necessity second. It means turning housing into a privilege instead of a foundation for survival. You can wrap it in “protecting homeowners” rhetoric all you want, but the outcome is the same: the people who already have more will get more, and the people who don’t get pushed further away from everything that looks like security.

Remember, despite what crypto bros try to push about those invisible coins, or whatever TikTok stock experts try to sell, homeownership is still the main way to build wealth in this country. And when the president pushes the idea of keeping housing prices high, what he’s really pushing is the privatization of wealth, not a pathway.

Black and brown families, already locked out of wealth by centuries of policy violence, get told to bootstrap their way into a market designed to exclude them. Young people get told to “save more” while rent eats half their income. Poor families get told to “work harder” while wages stagnate and housing costs explode.

Because the winners are those who can already afford whatever prices inflation creates, while the rest of us are barely scraping enough to pay bills. The real winners are investors, landlords, hedge funds, and corporate buyers who treat neighborhoods like portfolios and families like revenue streams. High prices don’t stabilize communities — they financialize them. They turn housing into a commodity instead of a community.

And renters just keep getting crushed. When home prices rise, rents rise. There is no version of the economy in which rising housing markets produce cheaper or even cheap rents. Poor families will end up paying more for smaller spaces, worse conditions, and weaker protections. In the black sludge where his heart should be, Trump has always been a slumlord, and when rent rises, renters are forced to make difficult decisions like pay rent or get medicine. Evictions become normal. Homelessness becomes “inevitable.” And the country shrugs, as if this is just how the market works.

America always seems to have money for wars and ballrooms and Qatar bank accounts, but when it comes to working to undo the gap between the haves and the have-nots, there doesn’t seem to be anything in the coffers. Which proves this isn’t accidental. Scarcity is policy. Zoning laws that block multifamily housing, resistance to affordable housing, underfunded public housing, and the worship of “property values” all create artificial shortages that drive up prices. Then politicians pretend that the market is a natural force, like gravity, rather than a system designed by laws, incentives, and political choices. High housing prices aren’t destiny — they’re decisions.

And here’s the most dangerous part: when housing becomes untouchable, inequality becomes permanent. People can’t move to better jobs. Kids grow up in unstable housing. Schools stay segregated by zip code. Opportunity becomes geographic. Poverty becomes inherited. Wealth becomes insulated. The ladder doesn’t just get pulled up — it gets locked behind glass and labeled “private property.”

Keeping house prices high is not about protecting the middle class. It’s about protecting capital. It’s about choosing asset values over human lives. It’s about deciding that the comfort of owners matters more than the survival of renters. And it’s about preserving a system where inequality is not a bug — it’s the business model.

Affordable housing isn’t a threat to stability. It is stability. And when Trump notes that he doesn’t want to open up the exclusivity of home ownership so that “somebody who didn’t work very hard can buy a home,” it’s because he equates personal economic instability to laziness which is rich coming from a man that has had his whole life from properties to The Apprentice to his current squatting address gifted to him. 

Hating those who are fighting to get up that hill isn’t policy; it’s an ideology, and Trump has always hated the poor. So let’s stop pretending this is about economics or market wisdom. It’s about power. It’s about who gets protected and who gets sacrificed. 

Trump’s housing rhetoric isn’t a slip of the tongue — it’s a worldview. One that sees poverty as a moral failure, wealth as proof of virtue, and exclusion as a feature, not a flaw. In that world, suffering isn’t a problem to solve; it’s leverage. It’s how you keep people desperate, compliant, and grateful for scraps while the owners toast rising values from behind locked doors.

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