The GOP Was Never Going to Fix Affordability

I saw this l0m3zz article, a doorstopper at 4,100 words:

The midterms themselves are irrelevant, IMHO. The House and Senate will remain gridlocked—the same as they have been since the late ’60s. Given the GOP’s history of squandering wins, even a favorable outcome won’t move the needle much.

Towards the end he talks about affordability and other issues of importance to him. He is pitching ideas the GOP has no appetite for and no ability to carry out. That’s assuming they even have the power to lower the cost of living, which they don’t, as this is due to autonomous factors outside anyone’s control. The president or Congress cannot just pull a lever to make healthcare or housing more affordable. You can’t just force companies to lower prices, force employers to relocate to more affordable areas, or stop requiring so many credentials for hiring.

That’s even assuming they want to. The GOP has never shown much inclination towards pursuing affordability as an issue, compared to tax cuts or defense. As I wrote before, if these are issues important to you, you are not going to find them addressed by the GOP—under Trump or anyone else for that matter. At best you may get some marginal rebates or discounts on certain prescription drugs, but otherwise do not expect much as far as lowering cost of living is concerned. Same for excess credentialism and woke colleges; the GOP has never cared about those issues either.

The only time Republicans came down on colleges or credentialism was for the whole “BDS controversy,” not because of wokeness or DEI. As soon as Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern, etc. promised to crack down on supposed antisemitism and paid fines, Trump backed off and restored funding. I was the only one who predicted this outcome in 2025. Everyone else projected their own beliefs onto Trump or the GOP, believing they would bring down the hammer on woke colleges. The same goes for affordability.

About Tucker, he and others are still popular because he actually addresses affordability and opposed the strikes on Iran, and he correctly predicted (as did I) that it would drag on, similar to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Iran was not 4D chess; Trump had simply miscalculated. What was supposed to be an easy and decisive win in time for the midterms is still ongoing, and oil and gas prices have risen instead of falling. The tariffs were a wash: companies passed the costs to consumers, while collecting refunds after the courts overturned the bulk of the tariffs. The ousting of Maduro failed to revive his polling numbers either. So what was left was another Middle East war as a midterm gambit. He’s also taken a great interest in AI in trying to position America as a world leader over China, but the public doesn’t care that much.

The most accurate mental model of Trump is that he cares about being liked by powerful people, being seen as a “great man of history,” and winning. This makes his second term—along with the disappointment and his obsession with AI—all predictable. Tech CEOs and AI fall under “powerful.” The “AI arms race” and Iran fall under “winning at all costs.” His similar obsession with the Nobel Prize and his need to shape geopolitics, even as people complain about affordability, fall under “great man of history.” The great leaders of history are remembered more for winning wars than for the economy (e.g., Churchill).

If Trump had more time he could maybe realize all those things. But elections are won or lost on short-term sentiment, such as the state of the economy on election night. Voters cannot think 20 years ahead about whether Trump’s Iran gamble might pay off if given more time, and who can blame them?

Lomez writes:

Opposing the Iran War, just like opposing the Iraq War, is not itself a foreign policy philosophy, let alone a broader governing philosophy, and there really isn’t much to Tuckerism beyond this. Scratch at the surface of his stated political concerns even a little bit and you find little more than generalized grievance against the administration and whatever it happens to be doing at any given moment.

He’s right about the second part. As discussed in “Nick Fuentes – the Firestarter of the Right,” the likes of Fuentes and Tucker criticize Trump no matter what he does, and want to see the administration crash and burn because it raises their own relative status as people tune into their shows or podcasts for updates. Fuentes exploded in popularity during Biden’s term. A weaker Trump and Musk, such as in 2021-2023, means Fuentes and a miscellany of various critics see their status rise.

About the first part, the thing is, Trump already had a successful “foreign policy philosophy” in 2025 with limited strikes on Iran, in the same spirit as Biden’s limited retaliation against Iran-backed militias. But after Khamenei was killed and the Strait of Hormuz was closed, I knew we were in for the long haul. There would be no further productive negotiations. My thinking was, “You’re trying to force regime change in Iran; there is no way this can work.” I placed bets accordingly on Polymarket and profited considerably (the position is still open and up 400-500%).

Even though I’m bullish on the US economy and stock market, it’s annoying seeing the market fall every other week, like last week. Iran has contributed to this due to inflation fears. I changed my investing strategy accordingly between 2025 and 2026, as I will discuss in a forthcoming post. We probably are not going to get a decent-sized rally until after he leaves office.

Trump’s approval ratings keep falling:

By my estimate, Iran and tariffs probably account for 5-10 percent of Trump’s approval decline, driven by constant negative media coverage: first the stock market crash in April 2025, then the coverage of Iran. The market recovered quickly to new highs after the April tariffs, but the damage was done and he lost “the middle.” The steady decline since then suggests a broader loss of credibility that can’t be repaired immediately. Surging oil prices and rising inflation as a consequence added to the loss of public support.

Had he ditched the tariffs and Iran and instead focused on immigration, and on redoing or extending DOGE (making it permanent instead of only 90 days and appointing anti-woke “tech people” to run it), he would be polling higher. Immigration is the key or pivotal issue for supporters and why he won in 2016. DOGE was also very popular among his base.

Lomez also writes:

Trumpism is ending, yes, but the circumstances that produced it are not. Nor, unfortunately, are the old guard Republicans whose failures made Trump necessary. I don’t mean here just the disgruntled Never Trumpers at the Lincoln Project or Bulwark or whatever remains of the neoconservatives and who by now exist exclusively to be the house pets for NPR and MSNBC liberals.

About “Trumpism,” I agree that outside of his core base, it’s pretty much dead. I would go so far as to say that if Trump were to resign and give the keys to Vance, it would help in two ways. First, Vance would be more successful at fixing the mess in Iran his boss started. Second, he would have an incumbency advantage come 2028. The core Trump base would warm up to him. It would be a huge upheaval, but there would still be two years to work it out. Fence-sitters would see Vance as a smarter and saner alternative to Trump, while still keeping the MAGA base.