President Donald Trump and Republicans are down in the polls with less than 10 months until the midterm elections. Now, Trump is giving the economic populism of the left a try.
Last week, Trump called for a one-year cap on credit card interest at 10%, unveiled plans to bar large private-equity funds from buying up housing and said he would bar defense companies from issuing dividends or stock buybacks. These moves check off many policy wishes of the populist progressive left and borrow from political opponents like former Vice President Kamala Harris.
It comes as Trump, who strode into a second term on a pledge to lower costs, finds himself underwater on the economy. A recent CBS News poll found that only 39% of voters approved of his performance on the issue, while 61% disapproved, one of his worst polls since retaking the presidency.
That’s a big problem for Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill, who could lose their slim majorities in both the House and the Senate in the November elections. Democrats are pounding the administration with an election-year message centered on affordability, arguing that the president and his allies have failed to bring down costs for everyday Americans. This line of attack on the cost of goods worked well for Democrats in gubernatorial races in late 2025.
Republicans hold a razor-thin 218-213 vote majority in the House and a 53-47 seat majority in the Senate. A growing number of Republicans in the House have decided to retire at the end of this term, and Trump has warned that if Democrats take the House, “they’ll find a reason to impeach me.”
Trump’s moves appear aimed at addressing voters’ concerns around affordability — in the Truth Social post where he announced the credit card interest cap, the president wrote “AFFORDABILITY!” But not all Republicans on Capitol Hill are convinced that Trump’s populist shift represents a life raft as Democrats take a consistent lead in generic congressional ballot polling.
“Self-control, clear messaging, clear priorities would be helpful,” said Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican who will retire at the end of this term, in an interview with CNBC. “He actually sounds more and more like a Democrat, if you think about it.”
“When you talk about limiting businesses buying houses, limiting the salaries of corporate heads, I mean, that’s much more like a Democrat messaging to me,” Bacon said.
Other Republicans were even more dismissive of the effort.
One longtime House Republican, granted anonymity to discuss Trump’s proposals candidly, said, “The kind of stuff we’re talking about right now … is called hiding from your record.”
The Trump administration is defending the president’s populist shift amid the complaints from some in the GOP.
“President Trump was given a resounding mandate by the American people to smash Washington, D.C.’s obsession with consensus orthodoxy that has let Americans down,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai. “The Trump administration is turning the page on Joe Biden’s economic disaster by implementing traditional free market policies that do work – like deregulation and tax cuts – while rectifying the America Last policies that have Americans behind.”
But even top House and Senate Republicans have not exactly embraced Trump’s latest moves to lower costs for Americans, and appear to be coalescing around the message that Trump is an “ideas guy.” Trump in the past has thrown a myriad of policy proposals at the wall to see what will stick, forcing his Republican allies to quickly adjust their priorities.
“The president is the ideas guy, and what he’s doggedly determined to do, and laser-focused upon doing, is the same thing that we are, and that is reducing the cost of living,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at a press conference on Tuesday when asked about the credit card interest cap proposal.
“I wouldn’t get too spun up about ideas that are out of the box that are proposed or suggested,” Johnson added.
Republicans have largely echoed banks in warning against a 10% cap on credit card interest, arguing such a cap could result in fewer people being offered credit and depress spending.
Trump’s credit card interest cap proposal came in a Truth Social post, hours after Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., tweeted about it. Sanders, the former presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020, has long pushed a populist economic agenda and proposed a credit card interest cap in 2019. He sponsored a bill with Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican of Missouri with a populist streak, to impose the cap.
“Trump promised to cap credit card interest rates at 10% and stop Wall Street from getting away with murder,” Sanders wrote. “Instead, he deregulated big banks charging up to 30% interest on credit cards … Unacceptable.”
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks to the crowd at U.S. Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) campaign rally in the Bronx borough of New York City, U.S., June 22, 2024.
Joy Malone | Reuters
Hours later, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was “calling for a one year cap on Credit Card Interest Rates of 10%.”
Trump’s housing proposal, too, is similar to a proposal from former Vice President Kamala Harris. In 2024, during her presidential campaign, Harris urged Congress to pass a bill that would have curtailed investors from buying large numbers of single-family rental homes. Large private equity firms currently own less than five percent of single-family rental homes.
“I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it. People live in homes, not corporations,” Trump said in his Truth Social post announcing the policy.
It’s unclear whether Trump’s populist turn will end up providing any cover for Republicans, who are planning to crisscross the country selling voters on their “One Big Beautiful Bill” law that cut taxes and advanced other policy items sought by Trump.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who has become a frequent foil of the Trump administration after leading the charge to compel the release of files related to notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, said it’s unclear if the ideas will even be popular.
“Its populist economics is what it is,” Massie said in an interview. “It may very well be popular, I mean, there are going to be some downsides to it as well. We’ll see how it plays out and whether he can actually pull it off.”
Pollsters say Trump is looking for a “game changer” to change voters’ minds on the economy.
“He needs to convince people that things are going to be better economically in a short period of time and that’s what all of these moves, I think, are intended to do,” said Spencer Kimball, the executive director of Emerson College Polling. “It might tighten, and the bottom might come out, and the other side could run away with it.”
How Trump pulls it off remains to be seen. Many of the proposals would likely require congressional authorization.
To that end, Trump appears to be reaching out to Democrats — including those he has repeatedly maligned.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Trump called her on Monday after she gave a speech at the National Press Club, where she laid out a case for a Democratic victory in 2026 by arguing that “when the choice is between ‘make the rich richer’ and ‘help everybody else,’ winning elections is about choosing ‘everybody else.”
“I told him that Congress can pass legislation to cap credit card rates if he will actually fight for it,” Warren said in a statement after the president’s call. “I also urged him to get House Republicans to pass the bipartisan ROAD to Housing Act, which passed the Senate with unanimous support and would build more housing and lower costs.”
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who represents Silicon Valley and is an oft-discussed potential presidential candidate in 2028, welcomed the president in an interview with CNBC.
“Well, I’m glad Trump is proposing populist policies. I support the idea that we should ban private equity from buying up single-family homes; that was my bill,” Khanna said. “If he wants to propose policies that are progressive or populist that are going to help Americans, I’ll vote for them.”
That’s not to say all leading Democrats are ready to help Trump lower prices and salvage the midterms for Republicans.
“I don’t know why we would take what he says seriously, because it’s his policies that are jacking up prices,” said Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif, the vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus, during a press conference this week. “Unless he reverses his policies, these prices are going to keep on increasing.”
Then, there’s the possibility that Trump is using his slew of economic proposals to drive the news cycle away from his weak points. The president has recently come under immense scrutiny for his use of the military after the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, his appearances in the Epstein files and his aggressive deportation agenda.
“Quite frankly, he’s the master of distraction. In the middle of something, he’ll make a statement or then look over to something else,” said Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., who was Trump’s Secretary of the Interior in his first term.