Trump flips Dems’ ‘affordability’ script, turning buzzword into MAGA material as Mamdani visit looms

“Affordability” was the hot-button word on the 2025 campaign trail, as Democrats separated themselves from the Biden-era economy and lobbed attacks on President Donald Trump for current cost of living woes. 

And on Friday, the main champion of the “affordability” platform in the 2025 election cycle, socialist New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, will travel to the White House for his first meeting with Trump. 

The socialist candidate, who was relatively unknown until his primary defeat against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, hammered home during his campaign that his policies would ease New Yorkers’ notoriously high housing prices, cut food costs and bring down the cost of living overall — including by hiking taxes on the wealthy and corporations to bridge the financial gap. 

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“I know that for tens of thousands of New Yorkers, this meeting is between two very different candidates who they voted for, for the same reason,” Mamdani said Thursday about his meeting with Trump. “They wanted a leader who would take on the cost-of-living crisis. That makes it impossible for working people to afford living in this city.” 

A winning economic strategy is nothing new to the president, however, considering his first administration and 2024 election platform focused on pulling the U.S. out of an economic hole. And Trump is making moves to lay claim over the word “affordability” while taking shots at the Biden administration’s record on prices. 

“The word is affordable and affordable. It should be our word, not theirs,” Trump said Monday evening during McDonald’s Impact Summit 2025 in Washington. “Because the Democrats got up in affordability, the front of it. And they don’t say that they had the worst inflation in history, the highest energy prices in history. Everything was the worst. What? The great ad is lying. They say affordability. This stuff was all much more expensive.” 

The White House told Fox News Digital Tuesday that Democrats don’t have “a leg to stand on” with the economy following the Biden administration, which saw inflation spike to the highest levels in nearly 40 years, while arguing Trump has focused on real-life deals that translate to American jobs and lower costs since his first day back in office. 

To the White House, Fox Digital learned, Democrats touting the word “affordability” is simultaneously an act of “desperation” following their 2024 losses, as well as “meaningless” as there’s a “difference between talking about a problem and then actually doing something about it.” 

Fox News Digital took a look back at how “affordability” grew in prominence as a top campaign platform in 2025 among Democrats, and Trump’s history of employing variations of the word “affordable” in his political efforts. 

‘Make America Affordable Again’ 

“Make America Affordable Again” was touted at points by the 2024 Trump campaign, while the president signed an executive order under his first administration related to “affordable housing,” and the White House celebrating in 2020 that Trump was improving “the affordability and accessibility of life-saving prescription drugs.”

“We will target everything from car affordability to housing affordability to insurance costs to supply chain issues,” Trump said from the campaign trail in North Carolina in 2024, The New York Times reported. 

The president, however, has largely steered clear of the word “affordability” in his public remarks and social media posts, instead focusing his language around tariffs and paying off the national debt, increasing the U.S. job market, onshoring companies that moved overseas and hitting back at the inflation woes that spiraled under the Biden administration and continue to loom over the Trump economy. 

The White House pointed to a bevy of deals Trump has made since his return to the Oval Office that underscore his focus on affordability for the American people: cutting regulations to unleash American energy to lower fuel and other costs, multiple deals to lower drug prices and attracting business to set up shop on U.S. soil to promote American jobs. 

The White House said that it is in the midst of “cleaning up” the woes left behind by the Biden administration, with an official telling Fox News Digital: “They got us in this mess in the first place.” 

Voters casting ballots for Democrats in the name of affordability “is like hiring the arsonists to put out the fire,” former Republican Kentucky Congressman and 2026 Senate candidate Andy Barr remarked to Fox News Digital. 

“Complete Democrat control of Washington brought us the highest inflation in decades,” he said. “President Trump and Republicans already delivered the lowest gas prices in years, the largest tax cut in history, and will keep fighting to Make America Great Again.” 

Just on Tuesday, the White House hosted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, where he announced that Saudi Arabia was increasing its planned investment into the U.S. economy to nearly $1 trillion, up from $600 billion in May. The deal translates to Americans directly benefiting, with the White House pointing to GE Vernova, an energy equipment manufacturing company, as it celebrates the investment and its impact on American jobs. 

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David Broomwell, who oversees three GE Vernova factories, said during the Oval Office meeting Tuesday, “If you look at the landscape for GE Vernova investment, over $750 million in the U.S. focused on true manufacture, bring jobs here stateside. We’re looking at tripling the output of our Greenville, South Carolina facility where we make the gas turbines that are supporting U.S. needs as well as the Saudi Arabia needs. So real jobs, $300 million in gas investment, resulting in over 500 pieces of new equipment being installed in the Greenville, South Carolina facility. That translates into roughly 1,800 jobs across the board for GE Vernova.”

IT’S NOT JUST THE ECONOMY — THIS IS HOW DEMOCRATS BEAT THE GOP ACROSS THE COUNTRY

Winning strategy

Just more than a year ago, economic anxiety under the Biden administration came to a vigorous boil and the election was thrown into a tailspin as the president dropped out of running for re-election and endorsed then-Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Harris’ campaign was viewed as carrying out a series of missteps that led to her loss, with the economy seen as one of the top areas of concern by both pundits and voters. 

Voters during the 2024 federal election pointed to the economy as far and away their top issue. Americans flooded the polls a year ago with their wallets at the top of their minds, backing Trump on the ballot as the majority of voters reported they were concerned they could not afford food, healthcare, housing and gas for their car, previous Fox News Voter Analysis data showed. 

Liberal political pundits lamented that the Democratic Party was weak on the economy, with even MSNBC’s Joe Scarbourgh unleashing shortly after the election that voters “were looking at what groceries cost, what gas costs, what rent costs” while Democrats focused their campaign on deriding Trump for what they viewed as rhetoric that threatened democracy. 

Then, a year later, Democrats pivoted to what would prove to be a winning strategy: affordability. 

Each of the Democrats in the three high-profile elections — Virginia’s gubernatorial election, New Jersey’s gubernatorial election and New York City’s mayoral election — prominently listed affordability as their top campaign issue. In fact, each campaign website boasts “affordable” or “affordability” on its homepage.

“New York is too expensive. Zohran will lower costs and make life easier,” Mamdani’s campaign website boasts, with an entire “affordability” platform dedicated to explaining his plan on city-run grocery stores to lower costs, eliminating bus fares and “fighting corporate exploitation.” 

Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani’s team for comment ahead of his meeting with Trump but did not immediately receive a reply. 

ELECTION REFLECTION: ‘DEMOCRATS FLIPPED THE SCRIPT’ ON AFFORDABILITY IN BALLOT BOX SHOWDOWNS

A former Trump White House official and candidate for the U.S. Senate in Alabama, Morgan Murphy, told Fox News Digital that “listening to Democrats on the economy makes as much sense as asking your drunk uncle for stock tips at Thanksgiving.”

“These are the same people who jacked inflation to 9%, tried to tank the U.S. economy by shutting down the government for 43 days, and just elected a full-blown communist to lead New York,” Murphy said. “They talk affordability but end up fleecing the American people. Americans are struggling economically from a hangover because of Bidenomics. It is important to grow the economy, re-shore manufacturing, grow our energy sector, and increase opportunity, which will decrease prices and make life more affordable.” 

Earlier in November, Trump remarked that the Democrats had leaned into the “new word” while admonishing Republicans for not promoting similar platforms enough. 

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“They have this new word called affordability and (Republicans) don’t talk about it enough,” Trump said during an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier following the elections. “The Democrats make it up because we took over a mess. Think of energy. Energy was so expensive, and now I have it down to half what it was.” 

Mamdani and Trump are expected to have a fiery relationship upon the upcoming mayor’s inauguration in January, with the White House’s top spox Karoline Leavitt describing Mamdani as a “communist” who ascended to the top of the increasingly left-wing Democratic Party, while adding Trump’s door is open to any U.S. leader. 

Original News Source Link – Fox News

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