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Republicans are scrambling to reclaim affordability. Good luck with that | Judith Levine

Try as they might to present Zohran Mamdani as the exemplar of their opponents’ radical-left lunacy, the platform the New York mayor-elect and other Democrats won on was affordability – the same platform on which Trump ran, and has spectacularly failed to deliver.

So in their panic, Republicans are scrambling to reclaim affordability.

They have only two problems: their policies and their president.

On 4 November, as soon as election results were in, the entrepreneur and erstwhile presidential wannabe Vivek Ramaswamy posted a video on the lessons the party should learn. “Our side needs to focus on affordability. Make the American dream affordable,” he said. “Bring down costs. Electric costs, grocery costs, healthcare costs, and housing costs. And lay out how we’re gonna do it.”

The next morning, JD Vance, the vice-president, weighed in, bucking up the losers in the administration’s usual fashion: denying reality and making excuses. “The president has done a lot that has already paid off in lower interest rates and lower inflation, but we inherited a disaster from Joe Biden and Rome wasn’t built in a day. We’re going to keep on working to make a decent life affordable in this country.”

Other Republicans agreed on the political challenges the party faces, but were more honest about what it is, or is not, doing about affordability. During the shutdown, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a US representative from Georgia, railed against her colleagues for abandoning their constituents. In an interview on Real America’s Voice, she both denounced the Affordable Care Act and suggested that with no alternative in place, the GOP should not allow a lapse in the tax credits on health insurance premiums purchased through the ACA marketplace, which were enhanced during the pandemic.

If “regular innocent Americans’ health insurance premiums double, they’re not gonna be able to pay their rent”, Greene said. “Food prices have gone up this year,” an economic slowdown looms, “and I pray to God not a recession”. She continued: “So this is extremely serious. And here’s where I’m upset: Republicans are doing nothing.”

Nothing is what they intend to keep doing. In return for eight Democrats’ votes to end the shutdown, Republican majority leader John Thune discussed taking up the healthcare question by mid-December – a week before Congress’s winter recess, which ends 1 January, the day the credits lapse. In other words, they will lapse, and 24.3 million ACA enrollees, three-quarters of whom live in red states, will see their premiums skyrocket.

In fact, the party is doing worse than nothing. Ramaswamy wants it to show how it will bring down electric, grocery, housing and healthcare costs. How’s that going?

Electric costs: the low-income home energy assistance program (LIHEAP), which subsidizes the utility bills of low-income households, escaped the president’s axe. But the appropriation has always been drastically inadequate, and this year’s is still up in the air. Also, the program’s entire staff was fired in 2025’s purge of Health and Human Services, so it could take weeks to restore subsidies now, just as winter approaches.

Grocery costs: Trump’s tariffs are ballooning the prices of everything from rice to Halloween candy. Agricultural labor shortages exacerbated by mass deportation have boosted fruit and vegetable prices 15%this year, according to the agriculture analysis company Farmonaut.

Housing costs: proposed new rules at the agency of Housing & Urban Development threaten the rental assistance of 4 million low-income Americans, according to ProPublica. Meanwhile, potential funding cuts to a permanent housing program could drastically increase homelessness.

Healthcare costs: oh wait, didn’t the government just shut its doors for 42 days because the GOP refused to extend the tax credits that make healthcare affordable for millions?

Besides policy, the Republicans’ other problem is their president. Before this month’s election, he was ranting nonstop on Truth Social about the cost of living.

“VOTE REPUBLICAN for massive Energy Cost reductions, large scale Tax Cuts, and basic Common Sense! Under President Trump, ME, Gasoline will come down to approximately $2 a Gallon, very soon!” he posted on 2 November. “VOTE REPUBLICAN FOR A GREAT AND VERY AFFORDABLE LIFE.”

He spent the day after the vote celebrating the anniversary of his election and the prosperity he’s creating: “Our Economy is BOOMING, and Costs are coming way down. Affordability is our goal. Love to the American People!”

But he’s evidently vexed. First he claimed that Republicans were not talking enough about affordability. Then he called it a Democratic “con job”. Then he flew into a snit: “I don’t want to hear about the affordability.” At a news conference with Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, after a contretemps with reporters over the cost of living, he pulled out the all-purpose culprit: “The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows it is far less expensive under Trump than it was under sleepy Joe Biden,” he said, falsely.

While alleging there is no affordability crisis, the president tosses out dumb ideas to address it: a $2,000 tariff dividend to everybody except “high-income people”; 50-year mortgages; direct payments to people to buy health services, instead of the “bad healthcare provided by Obamacare”. The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has been left to play down some proposals, telling ABC on Sunday that “we don’t have a formal proposal” on the healthcare payments and that the tariff dividend “could come in lots of forms” and “could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president’s agenda”.

The optics look bad. To force the Democrats to surrender on the ACA, the Trump administration moved to halt benefits to the 42 million recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), or food stamps; officials later allowed they’d release half-payments. While food pantries stocked their shelves for the coming crisis, the president ate truffle dauphinoise and pan-seared scallops at a Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago and posted photos of the renovated marble-clad Lincoln bathroom.

And even as the shutdown appeared to be ending, the administration was asking the supreme court to stay a lower court’s order to distribute full Snap benefits immediately. Trump’s implicit message to the hungry and the sick – which might be summarized as “I’m starving you because the Democrats won’t let us take your healthcare away” – did not play well.

Fortunately, the GOP has its gentle House speaker, Mike Johnson, to communicate from the party’s heart: “Any hardworking American in any place who has missed a paycheck; anyone who has been made to suffer because [of interruptions in] the health services you rely upon, or the food and nutrition supplement for your family,” he cooed into the cameras last week. “Anyone who is hurting: you have a home in the Republican party.”

Come home, America! The Republicans will give you a cardboard box to sleep in and a nice hot bowl of gruel.