Americans Revolt Over High Prices Under Trump

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1:06Top news story tonight begins with a very telling moment. You're going to see it right now as a Republican Congresswoman's Iowa town hall boiled over with voter anger regarding health care costs that even led to heckling. When the Affordable Care Act was passed, the reason why I was doing a lower cost, the greater transparency. Be a leader!

1:37On the Affordable Care Act or the Unaffordable Care Act, there was no... What's your plan? It's minimal number of people. How much? How much? that is the sound in one place anecdotal, but it's backed by a lot of data I can show you tonight. It's the sound of talking points from the right wing running into Iowa voters, a place where Trump, of course, has done very well repeatedly, not just some super liberal place stocked with Democratic talking points. But if you deny people health care funding, if you deny people the programs that support their ability to get care, and then you run around saying things like the unaffordable health care bill because you think that's a neat play on words.

2:23Right now, you're going to run into angry voters. We saw that a week ago, Tuesday, in the voting. We're seeing it now. And Americans are clear on this issue. 66 % say Trump has fallen short or broken his vows on the key campaign promise to bring down costs. Over 70 % say they know their grocery costs have gone up, just like utilities. Most blame Trump. I'm going to leave this up for a second. When you see the 59 % blame Trump. By definition, that includes people who voted for Trump. They were hoping for better. They might have liked what he said last year, but they blame him here on planet Earth in reality land because he's done very little to bring down the prices.

3:03He doesn't even hold events or talk about it, let alone do anything about it. We know this is part of the anger that drove the Dems' sweep. I have more on that coming up tonight. As for what people are going through, and this is the shift in the polling you can see, Trump now in the Biden land of where Biden was when he was ultimately deemed a kind of a failed president at the end or drove out of the race by his own Democratic Party. Well, that's where Trump is. Trump may have a better knack for social media. He may have a voice that is a little louder and stronger. The SNL impression may be a little different.

3:37But when it comes to how people feel about them, well, Mr. President, early in your term. Welcome to Biden year four land. It's not pretty. Here's where the public is in their own words. I work two jobs right now and I feel like I can't even afford, you know, what I'm trying to pay for. Look at the price I paid for this just a year ago. Welcome to that just don't make sense. The price of beef is, is, wow. These grocery store prices got me thinking Thanksgiving about to be spaghetti. The way that groceries are grocering, the way the gas prices are gassing. $3.50 a gallon? Brr! I don't know if I'll be able to survive this.

4:18Real people feeling priced out of their lives, even holiday spending. They're acutely aware that these are the problems Donald Trump vowed to fix on day one, only to start governing on a long list of other items, from the controversial White House demolition and renovation, to publicly admitting an unlawful demand for revenge indictments to personally trying to pocket hundreds of millions of dollars from crypto to a plot to seize taxpayer money from the DOJ. If you listen only to Trump fans or some of what's discussed in sort of the MAGA media universe and podcast, they'll say nobody cares about this and nobody cares about that and it's okay and look what he quote gets away with.

4:59Well, he didn't get away with it on Tuesday, number one. That's just covering the facts. And number two, do you really want your president to be trying to get away with stuff in his second term when he has, as Obama put it, no more races to run? Now, the sentiments you heard from people there helped power the sweeping Democratic victories. The things Trump is more focused on that I just listed off have nothing to do with lowering grocery prices. And here we are exactly one week later from the Democratic sweep, and boy, a lot can change in politics in a week, especially in election week, the voters' message and anger is not going away.

5:41In other words, what hurt Trump last week is hurting him this week. And every week going forward until something changes, or perhaps people don't see a better alternative in politics, it's always what you have and what's the alternative. At least for the time being, Democrats from the far left to the center in Virginia seem to hold up one big message. Trump is a failure. He's also corrupt. We don't want kings in this country. And we will do what he is not. Focus like a laser on affordability and lower prices for you. Maybe throw in some health care while they're at it. Those are the messages. We know what voters picked on Tuesday.

6:22I want to get right to it and bring in New York Times contributing opinion writer Molly Jong-Fast and pollster Cornell Belcher, Democratic strategist to work with Brilliant Corners. research and has worked for many Democratic campaigns. Welcome to both of you. Cornell, what do you see there in the sort of national mood? It's a dark period, Ari, and quite frankly, you know, I've been looking back on data going back to 2008, remember when we actually were in a full-out, you know, recession, and many of the metrics and many of the attitudes that Americans have are very much in line to where we were when the economy completely collapsed and we were losing, what, 100 ,000 jobs a week or so.

7:05And particularly with the middle of the electorate, Ari, you showed those numbers, but, you know, we like to pay a lot of attention to those independent voters. And in CNN's polling, it's even worse where independent voters, 67 % of independent voters say Trump's policies have made the economy worse. So it's not just that, it's not that he's doing nothing, but they feel that he's actively, his policies are actively making things worse. And I think that helps explain why, why, while voters aren't necessarily crazy and in love with Democrats, they still are preferring Democrats and breaking Democrats away over Trump and Republicans.

7:42Right. You mentioned the OA crash. I mean, the consumer confidence index is down around those levels, which again is striking because as you point out, it shows that maybe it's a overall fatigue, having gone through COVID and the rebound and now have AI job risks and a lot of other things. Maybe it's all sort of congealed in a different way. But nobody thinks as bad as it is that we are in the financial crash of 08, at least not yet, not right now. But that tells you where the pain is. And politicians and the Republicans who run the White House and the Congress can underestimate that at their peril.

8:16James Carville is known as a pollster with or a campaign operative with less hair than you, but more experience. So, you know, take it or leave it. Depends what you want, what you prize. This is how he summed it up briefly last night. I understand this was about affordability. It was a big issue, and, you know, it was the economy stupid. But I think corruption and cruelty also had a lot to do with this. I think that was just a revulsion. I think people saw the gratuitous cruelty. Where does that factor in? No, I think that's absolutely right. I think we could oversimplify and bus in the media.

8:55We tend to oversimplify things as though there's only one variable at play. But clearly underlying, look, you know, she, you know, both both Spanberger and Terrell ran up scores among minority voters that Ari, I haven't seen since Obama. And I didn't think a Democrat would do. And we had tremendous turnout. That wasn't simply about, you know, Democrats talking about affordability. It had a lot to do with it, but there's something bigger and larger angst piece going on here. When people see in their own communities, ICE tearing apart families and going into the daycares and schools, there's something fundamentally not right about that.

9:35even right here in Washington, D.C., where we have, you know, God bless our National Guard. They didn't ask to be put in this political place. But you have, you know, the armed forces marching through the cities of our country. You know, there's more here than just affordability. There's a bit wet blanket thrown over America. And it's about a lot of different things, about the very nature of America right now, just not just the cost of things. Molly? Yeah, you know, I think it's a really good point, this idea. There's so much unprecedented stuff here. It's hard to even like, you know, a big X factor is the tariffs.

10:09We have never been tariffed at this rate in modern life. So we don't really know what any of this is going to look like. But certainly the ICE, the National Guard, the mood of people having, you know, in D.C., a lot of people know people who've been disappeared, you know, who've been sent to these facilities in Louisiana, who've been deported to countries they never were from. I mean, this stuff is really unprecedented, you know, and I do think and even like the East Wing, you know, things that seem aesthetic are actually a really big deal. And so I do think it's a combination of all these things that has really created an atmosphere where, you know, Donald Trump, you have voters who are genuinely, you know, just dismayed.

10:55Yeah. And and against that, Cornell, you have a kind of pushback that just doesn't seem to land for people. Donald Trump has been caught lying more than any other politician in history. The Washington Post has a whole department and they track it and it's sort of people become inured to it, normalized. It's also fair to say that other politicians try to spin the hand they have. We heard Biden officials, as you know, try to downplay prices and inflation. They didn't say we get how bad it is we wake up every morning thinking about it. They kind of by year four were saying it's a lot better. Don't you see it's better?

11:33It's better. It's better. People didn't feel that way. What's funny is, you know, how often do you say, oh, there goes Donald Trump, just like Joe Biden. You know, that's what we all say. Maybe not on every issue, but on this problem and maybe, you know, better educated historians than I could come up with all the comparisons of why people in power get like this. But here they are trying to look everyone in the face with the numbers we just showed and the election we just lived through. And here is the Treasury chief. Take a look. We're comfortable that inflation has come way down, even though it's been increasing for five straight months as of September.

12:13Well, I guess if you look at it from January, there's ups and downs and seasonals. The issue of affordability. My rent's too high. I can't afford to buy a house. Groceries are too expensive. if you think they're just misperceiving what's happening in their lives? I think that we inherited an affordability crisis. We inherited a mess. It was the worst inflation 40 or 50 years. Cornell, you can give a grade on that messaging. It's D, right? D minus at best. Here's the problem. And with a little sort of nod to the Obama administration, I think the Obama administration at least was making the point that, look, we're moving in the right direction.

12:55And it's not where we want it to be. But certainly our policies that we put in place are beginning to move in the right direction. And you look at the economic numbers and especially job numbers, we're beginning to move in the right direction. As the host in the first clip you saw fact check them, they're just flat out line, right? The election numbers aren't going down. They've been going up. And so they're trying to spin it. And here's the thing. If you look inside the data and look around sort of the direction of the country and even sort of the direction of the economy, you do see differences between those who are very favorable towards Trump and those who are not very favorable towards Trump.

13:34And even more so when you look inside numbers and who are frequent Fox viewers. What I'm going to do is thank Cornell, Molly. I got something else for you in a second. But you walked us through a lot of this. It makes sense when you lay it out like that. And the data has problems, as you say, for the incumbent Republicans if it stays like this a year out from the midterms. Thank you. I'll be back with Molly and the trillionaire era in 90 seconds.

14:08Welcome back. We just covered the voters who are speaking out on high prices in this economy. And that's just what they're going through. Then there's the wealth gap. Tech boom, Wall Street bull market raging on. And this gap is not just about political messaging. In fact, if there were no elections on Tuesday and none of this had taken flight in sort of the public debate, income inequality would still be surging, driven both by the stock market gains and choices in U.S. law and regulation, which currently reward the wealthy far more than most democracies do. And that's something that lawmakers can decide on.

14:46In the U.S. right now, the richest people are richer than ever, literally. That's not rhetoric. That's what's happened in the year 2025, because the richest own far more stock than everybody else. And those richest people are smashing records this year, as you can see for the top 1%. Now, back in the Reagan era, we talked about millionaires. That was the big, rich milestone. Tonight, I can tell you that in a sign of capitalism in some kind of overdrive, the controversial new Tesla payment plan puts Elon Musk on a path to become the world's first trillionaire with a T. The company just voted for a plan for a potential payout that if he meets certain marks would be the largest ever granted to any single person.

15:35Keep in mind that Tesla, which has been lauded as a good company in certain ways, well, they pay the regular workers about$50 ,000 a year. This kind of wealth makes Musk more rich and powerful than entire countries. If he hits the mark, a trillion is larger than the whole economy GDP of Poland or of Argentina or of Sweden. I mean, it's wild. There's very few ways we can really try to use words to encapsulate what it means for Tesla to tell Elon Musk he can become a trillionaire. Here's how he reacted to the vote from his company stockholders. Thanks, guys. First of all, I'd like to just give a heartfelt thanks to everyone who supported the show of votes.

16:23I super appreciate it. He super appreciates it. Now, this is happening, and again, we sometimes are so focused in news and political news on the elections and then what's driving them, but all of this is happening anyway. It's happening even if Elon Musk was not Donald Trump's buddy, even if he didn't take a rightward turn. This is the macro economy, and so while you have a political conversation about messaging, affordability, and ideology, and some saying, well, Democrats shouldn't go too far left and all that. And there's nuance in all of that because not every city or country is going to tax the same way.

16:59But the wider thing going on very clearly are these unprecedented rewards for the ultra-rich at the expense of others. And that's in the face of what regular people went through in the COVID economy, the new risk of AI to their jobs, to some people in line for food this year. So all of this cuts deeper than just an ad campaign or poster about affordability, which has become an important thing and also a political buzzword. Indeed, it has stoked a revolt which has now come to the nation's financial capital, the home of Wall Street, New York City. And remember, many people come to New York City precisely to make it in a capitalist town.

17:41It is not just some cliche of a Berkeley burnout that's a coffee shop. These are ambitious young people who come here and some of them stay. People who tend to enjoy making and spending money. They are not the sort of first obvious place to pitch a democratic socialist campaign unless they've been going through what I just told you about. And now they've turned to a young democratic socialist who was literally unknown in the city a year ago. When Zoran Mamdani faces pushback on taxing millionaires, he insists they can still afford just 2 % more, as he told us in our Election Eve interview. I continue to think that having the top 1 % of New York City who are making more than a million dollars a year, having them pay 2 % more for an economic agenda that would transform every New Yorker's life, including their own, is something that is worthwhile.

18:36Back with Molly, we turn to that because it's so much broader than any one election. Minting trillionaires and this level of inequality is actually not something we've ever lived through. No. I mean, it's the closest to the Gilded Age, right? It's closest to that period. But we've never had someone like Elon Musk go into the government, become a special government employee, practice reverse philanthropy with money that was taxpayer dollars, moving it around, right? Cancelling NIH grants, doing the kind of stuff that is not, you know, the job is the job of Congress and not of the executive branch to begin with.

19:14and to get that job because you are a presidential donor is completely unprecedented. So, yes, there's a lot of politics in this. And also there's a lot of betrayal, you know, of the Republican base, too. And the trillion is hard to it's hard to get your head around. We have what a trillion dollars buys. Over 30 million Camrys, think about it that way. billion iPhones or 189 billion Big Macs. And McDonald's famously does, they track how many they sell. They have those old signs, remember? Billions and billions served. Against the backdrop of, say, a company like Amazon, which like Tesla has done well, they have the so-called top seven tech stocks.

19:58And they say, well, this creates wealth for everybody. And sometimes it does. The stock market is a great thing for a lot of people's retirement if they can afford to be in But here's the Amazon headline. They're now targeting 30 ,000 job cuts. If they go forward after the recent 14 ,000, these could be the largest layoffs in history. So it's hard to sort of see why the tech boom is supposed to work for everyone if it doesn't even help the people working at Amazon. Well, and I don't think it is supposed to work for everyone. And Mondami is really a response, right? This is a candidate who was a very good candidate, who ran really well, But he also was able to message on affordability, just like Spanberger, just like Cheryl.

20:39They you know, he was like laser focused. I remember watching him in the polls. Someone came and said, well, you know, a journalist said, well, Donald Trump says he's handsomer than you are. And he was like, I'm laser focused on affordability. And and honestly, that's because there is a big sentiment in this country that it is not fair that the cap that completely unfettered and unchecked capitalism is not the move anymore. And in fact, Mandani put Lena Kahn in his cabinet. And Lena Kahn is one of the sort of great thinkers when it comes to antitrust. And her whole, you know, her whole gestalt is this belief that company, that capitalism needs some guardrails, that they are neat, that we have to have some kinds of rules, you know, a little bit.

21:22You know, we're not saying socialism. We're just saying that, you know, there needs to be progressive taxation and there needs to be, you know, this is a country that where there needs to be some help for people who have less. Yeah. And I think the the anger in 24 against Biden over the economy was it was this tracking thing. It got a little louder, but it really exploded on the election. People said, wow, it got these groups. And some people said, oh, those groups are now part of the MAGA coalition. The MAGA was quick to claim, oh, well, then I guess we got young people, Latinos, et cetera. Well, we're a week out of Tuesday where a lot of those people swung back.

22:00And so it doesn't mean the Democrats are great or can take this for granted. But it does suggest that's an inflationary. You know, we talk about general swing voters because they haven't made up their mind about anything. And everyone says, who are these people? Well, we clearly have a subset of inflation swing voters who don't care that much about red or blue. And they're swinging on that. And to state the obvious, which is part of our job. The richer you are, the less you notice inflation. I mean, every so often there might be a price that you notice theoretically. But when you look at I'm putting the political headline up.

22:31The flip side of America's price is also paltry playchecks, inflation climbing faster than after tax pay for lower and middle income households. And that's just math, because if you're making less and you go check to check, a 3 percent, a 4 or 5 percent matters. If you're making whatever, millions, then it's only a theoretical. And so it seems like some of the elite class, including clearly the MAGA folks at the elite level, missed this. No, Trump is the richest cabinet ever. OK, they're billionaires. So, like, obviously, they're not going to be sensitive to this stuff. But yes, voters are furious.

23:07And that's what we're seeing. And that's what I think Democrats have to be really mindful of is that they can maybe win. But, you know, it's not 2016. You can't just say orange man bad. Like, you really need to solve people's problems. People are hurting. There is a real inflation problem. and Democrats have to have a plan for that, which they do have much more than Republicans, but still it's not a fait accompli. It's funny you said that you can't just win on saying orange man bad because there was a great politician, RFK, rest in peace, who campaigned on saying I'm against more than just the man, but on behalf of actual policy.

23:47And Molly, thank you for being here. That is our sort of preview to looking at the RFK agenda with Chris Matthews when we come back.

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25:32We had Abigail Spanberger win and we had Zohran Mandami win. There are fights that are going to have to be fought, but that deep down, there is something core in us that we have in common that is extraordinary. Barack Obama touting unity across the different Democrats who won just a week ago today, the party finding energy in some new faces who inspire people with their own ideas, not simply drafting on the substantial energy against Trump. That is a theme once tapped by another Democrat seen at the time as liberal, sometimes arguably too liberal, Robert F. Kennedy. His 1968 presidential campaign tried to energize the left against the Democratic establishment, but he also talked about the goal of being about more than opposing any one man.