Trump and Memory

He won by telling voters to feel rather than remember. "Affordability is a hoax" requires the opposite.

President Trump won in the past by telling voters to trust present feelings over past concerns. Now he’s banking they’ll do the opposite.

At the cabinet meeting Tuesday, the president said “Affordability is a hoax,” when asked about the 2026 election issue. This is the metaphysical opposite of “it’s the economy stupid”—the maxim from the 1992 presidential race coined by Clinton strategist James Carville. The president is attempting to reverse the direction of causality: instead of economics shaping politics, as Carville asserted, Trump is arguing that politics reshapes what counts as economics. Democrats are deciding it’s “affordability” when the president would like it to be something else—specifically, a memory of how bad things were under Biden.

Voters, of course, have views on what they’re feeling and where it comes from. At the moment, polls consistently show they have a negative rating of the president’s handling of economic matters. Reuters/Ipsos polling shows only 26% of Americans believe he is managing the cost of living well. More polls on the economy below [^1]

This contributes to Trump’s overall approval rating, which is at historic lows. It sits at 36% in Gallup’s latest survey and remains similarly low in recent polling by the Associated Press. The only other time it was as bad: after the 1/6/21 attacks.

Defining what is and isn’t affordability and who is and isn’t to blame is a debate that Democrats presumably would like to have in a midterm where presidential approval affects the vote. Since World War II, presidents with approval below 50% lose, on average, 30+ House seats.[^2]

The problem for Trump is that he trained voters to do exactly what now hurts him. Voters twice rewarded him for encouraging them to stay rooted in the emotional present rather than in their memories—first in 2016, when frustration with drift outweighed concern about his past (Access Hollywood, etc.), and again in 2024, when anxiety over prices and disorder eclipsed reservations about his first term. Voters’ retrospective approval of his first term was higher than it actually was while he was in it.

[^1]:

A Fox News national poll finds roughly 6 in 10 voters disapprove of his economic performance, while CNN reports that disapproval regarding his handling of inflation has reached 72%. Even among his base, economic enthusiasm is waning; a CBS News/YouGov survey shows his economic approval sliding to 36%, with a majority saying his policies are driving up food and grocery prices

[^2]

Careful: post-WWII trends don’t take into account the hyper-partisan nature of politics today. Also, freak events can change this relationship—impeachment in 1998 and post-9/11. See Gallup’s historical analysis for more on seat losses. (If interested, I’ll explain, but the train is arriving in Washington.)