A Wall Street Journal opinion columnist is blasting President Donald Trump’s policies and remarks, warning that the affordability issue “could sink” his presidency.

Trump is underwater on his handling of inflation, and will deliver a speech in Pennsylvania on Tuesday evening that the White House says will be “a positive economic, a focused speech, where he talks about all that he and his team has done to provide bigger paychecks and lower prices for the American people.”

But columnist William A. Galston says “there’s a problem: Mr. Trump isn’t buying it. He has denounced the focus on affordability as a Democratic ‘con job,’ a ‘scam’ and a ‘hoax.'”

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“Starting the day I take the oath of office,” Trump told voters last year on the campaign trail, “I will rapidly drive prices down, and we will make America affordable again.”

Galston noted: “The American people were listening, and they expect Mr. Trump to honor his promises. Right now, they couldn’t be blamed for thinking he isn’t even trying.”

And he blasted the president for ignoring the situation.

“’The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows it is far less expensive under Trump than it was under sleepy Joe Biden,’ he said at a recent White House event. In other words: Keep moving, folks, nothing to see here.”

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Galston noted that economist Stephen Moore, an outside Trump adviser, “says that the president’s low standing on the affordability issue is a ‘messaging problem.’ It isn’t; it’s a reality problem.”

Americans know the problem when they see that some items “are especially unaffordable,” Galston added.

He pointed out that the cost of shelter — rents and mortgage — are up 3.6% over the past year.

Home insurance premiums, he said, are expected to rise 8%. Electricity is up 11% since January, the month Trump took office.

By “rescinding duties on some agricultural goods last month, including beef, bananas and coffee, Mr. Trump tacitly conceded that tariffs put upward pressure on prices,” Galston wrote, adding that removing those tariffs is not enough.

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About 200 former attorneys and staff from the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice are warning of the “near destruction of DOJ’s once-revered crown jewel,” and what they call Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “demand” for “loyalty to the President, not the Constitution or the American people.”

“For decades, the non-partisan work of the Civil Rights Division at the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has protected all Americans—especially the most vulnerable—from unfair treatment and unequal opportunities,” they write in a letter dated Tuesday. They added that “after witnessing this Administration destroy much of our work, we made the heartbreaking decision to leave—along with hundreds of colleagues, including about 75 percent of attorneys.”

Bloomberg Law reported on Tuesday that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division will now focus only on “intentional discrimination,” and not “policies that may appear neutral but disproportionately affect racial minorities and other protected classes.”

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In their letter, the former attorneys and staff specifically state that they left the Civil Rights Division “because this Administration turned the Division’s core mission upside down, largely abandoning its duty to protect civil rights,” and that it “achieved this goal by discarding much of the Division’s most impactful work.”

The group blasted Attorney General Bondi, who, they said, “issued a series of memos that subverted the Division’s mission in favor of President Trump’s political agenda.”

“One stood out: it insinuated that DOJ attorneys were Trump’s personal lawyers, an assertion that struck at the heart of the agency’s independence. Bondi’s demand to us was obvious: loyalty to the President, not the Constitution or the American people.”

In another scathing section, they charged that Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon “focused her efforts on ‘driving [the Civil Rights Division] in the opposite direction’ of its longstanding purpose.”

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They allege she issued mission statements “that included fighting diversity initiatives instead of race-based discrimination, investigating baseless allegations of voter fraud rather than protecting the right to vote, and dropping any mention of the Fair Housing Act, a landmark 1968 law that protects Americans from landlords’ racial discrimination and sexual harassment.”

And they charge that the administration “demanded that we find facts to fit the Administration’s predetermined outcomes.”

“Having no use for the expertise of career staff, the Administration launched a coordinated effort to drive us out,” they wrote. “The campaign to purge staff culminated in Dhillon encouraging everyone to resign after a period of paid leave while threatening layoffs if enough staff did not accept.”

Christine Stoneman, one of the letter’s signatories, told Bloomberg Law, “It is a sad commentary that in this anniversary of the Civil Rights Division, the Trump administration has chosen to eliminate a regulation that, for nearly 60 years has helped root out illegal race and national origin discrimination by recipients of federal funds.”

READ MORE: White House Tees Up Trump Speech With ‘Con Artists’ Blast at Democrats

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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted loosened campaign finance rules during oral arguments in a case that would allow political parties to receive even more donations.

Calling it “the most consequential campaign finance-related dispute” since Citizens United, Axios explained that “the justices will decide whether to eliminate a federal law that limits the amount of money big-money party committees can spend in direct coordination with favored candidates.”

Appearing skeptical that the Court should rule in his favor, Justice Sotomayor walked Noel Francisco, the attorney for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, through some top donors to both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates while warning about the appearance of quid pro quo.

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“Your answer is suggesting to me that every time we interfere with the congressional design, we make matters worse,” Justice Sotomayor said. “You’re telling us that Citizens United and McCutcheon ended up, yes, in amplifying the voice of corporations, but diminishing another voice, that of the party.”

“Now, you want to now tinker some more and try to raise the voice of one party,” she explained. “Our tinkering causes more harm than it does good.”

Disagreeing, Francisco replied, “Your Honor, I personally never think free speech makes things worse. I think it virtually always makes it better.”

Without mentioning any donors’ names, Justice Sotomayor then said that “in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton set up a joint victory fund with the DNC, 32 state parties, which allowed a single donor to give up to $356,000.”

“In 2024, Donald Trump’s campaign launched a joint fundraising operation with his own leadership PAC, the RNC, and 40 State Republican Party committees, that saw donations of up to $814,600,” she said, noting, “I’m not picking on Donald Trump.”

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“Joe Biden’s victory fund, together with the DNC and the party committees of all 50 states, um, raised up to $1.3 billion,” the justice added.

She warned that “once we take off this coordinated expenditure limit, then what’s left? What’s left is nothing. No control whatsoever.”

Francisco disagreed again.

“You mean to suggest,” Justice Sotomayor replied, “that the fact that one major donor to the current president, the most major donor to the current president, got a very lucrative job immediately upon election from the new administration, does not give the appearance of quid pro quo?”

“Your Honor,” Francisco responded, “I’m not 100% sure about the example that you’re looking at, but if I am familiar, if I think I know what you’re talking about, I have a hard time thinking that his salary that he drew from the federal government was an effective quid pro quo bribery, which may be why nobody has even remotely suggested that.”

Sotomayor warned, “Maybe not the salary, but certainly, the lucrative government contracts might be.”

Justice Sotomayor: “You mean to suggest that the fact that one major donor to the current president, the most major donor to the president, got a very lucrative job immediately upon election from the new administration, does not give the appearance of quid pro quo?” pic.twitter.com/rgpXFz9QAz

— CSPAN (@cspan) December 9, 2025

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Image: Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States, Steve Petteway via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain