This posture is defensive, but Vance has coupled his ask from voters with an offensive narrative.
The president says the dissatisfaction voters are registering with consumer costs is a “hoax” – a “con job by Democrats,” he said last month. Maybe he thought he had no choice. To countenance the existence of an affordability crisis would be to abandon the notion that the American “golden age” began shortly after Donald Trump’s second inaugural.
The vice president has taken a different approach — one with far more potential to earn the public’s sympathy and patience:
“The thing I’d ask for the American people is a little bit of patience,” JD Vance told reporters at a November confab organized by the outlet Breitbart. That solicitation — a statement that betrays a level of uncertainty and humility to which the president himself is allergic — represented a welcome shift from the administration’s typical bravado.
Of course, Vance rejected the notion that the Trump administration’s economic policies had contributed to the consumer cost burden that voters already resented when they put Trump back into office. But Vance steered clear of the trap into which Joe Biden fell — one that Trump risks careening into with his insistence that voters should compartmentalize their own financial experience. “And as much progress as we’ve made,” he continued, “it’s going to take a little bit of time for every American to feel that economic boom, which we really do believe is coming.”
This posture is defensive, but Vance has coupled his ask from voters with an offensive narrative as well:
JD Vance: “Every affordability crisis that’s confronting the American people today, it is traceable directly to a problem caused by Joe Biden and congressional Democrats.” pic.twitter.com/bvTQZ5ynM6
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) December 13, 2025
This is at least recognizable as a political strategy. But maybe Trump cannot replicate it. “I alone can fix it” is wholly incompatible with Vance’s contention that it “would be preposterous to fix every problem caused over the last four years in just ten months.” And simply asking voters for their forbearance enlists them in the administration’s project, making them stakeholders in its success.
Recently, it seems like Trump has taken a page from Vance’s playbook. “I have no higher priority than making America affordable again,” Trump said at a political rally last week in what The Guardian confessed sounded to them like “a rare moment of message discipline.” After all, Trump added, Democrats “caused the high prices and we’re bringing them down.”
It lacks the savvy Vance deployed, but it’s essentially the same message. In lieu of the total repeal of the market-distorting tariffs and a retreat back to the deregulatory agenda that made the Trump economy the envy of the world in 2018-2019, it’s better than nothing. It’s certainly better than telling the public, in effect, you’ve never had it so good!