Dispatch writer Nick Catoggio says he knows what probably drove President Donald Trump’s little hissy fit in the Senate earlier this week and his threat to veto a popular housing bill. The bill would have made housing cheaper, for starters.
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“Americans want cheaper housing, [Trump] wants the SAVE America Act. He didn’t debate for a second whose desire should take precedence, I’m sure,” said Catoggio. “Still, there might be more to his Trumper tantrum over the housing bill than rank spite at not getting his way on election reform. … For all his pretensions to being an avatar of ‘the forgotten man,’ the president remains a Manhattan real estate developer at heart. And real estate developers have been conditioned by their trade to want property to grow more expensive, not less.
“Just ask him. ‘I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes,’ Trump admitted in January. Later, in March, the Great Populist assured House Speaker Mike Johnson that ‘no one gives a s—— about housing,’ according to four sources who spoke to Punchbowl News. Some of the president’s infamous quotes about the cost of living have been taken out of context to make him sound more callous (some, not all), but his attitude toward high housing prices is what it is. He doesn’t care. At best.”
But the potential electoral consequences for his party don’t seem to be keeping him up at night either, said Catoggio.
“He’s not behaving like somebody who cares. Maybe he will start to at some point, but he is not right now,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman wondered Thursday about the GOP’s affordability problem after the housing bill went unsigned.
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“I doubt it,” said Catoggio. “An old guy who’s entered the “YOLO phase” of life is unlikely to revert to worrying about what other people — that is, 150 million American voters — think of him. All told, in Trump we have a president who got elected on populism and popularism yet has functionally renounced both in less than two years in office. He plainly isn’t prioritizing the welfare of the working man and he also plainly no longer worries about making the average voter happy, at least when doing so would conflict with his own whims. Even his decision to strike a terrible deal with Iran for the sake of bringing down gas prices was framed less as a matter of helping Americans than of protecting his own legacy.”
But Trump is a weird mishmash of psychology issues, Catoggio said
“… [I]t’s always been hard to tell … whether his paranoia about elections is a knowing lie told by a dissembling megalomaniac to discredit a threat to his power or a sincerely held delusion by a fragile egomaniac to reassure himself that the people love him,” Catoggio said. “If you see him mostly as a strongman, you think it’s the first. If you see him mostly as a narcissist, you think it’s the second.”
Regardless, Trump knows his bad behavior is sinking his popularity, and he desperately needs to do what he can to upset a natural democratic order that tends to toss out a president who stops caring about what the voters want.
“Enjoy ‘Stop the Steal 2.0’ this fall, American voters. You earned it,” Catoggio said.
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