Americans — it is becoming increasingly clear — are struggling to pay for basic necessities, like groceries, utility bills, health care, housing, and transportation. This is President Donald Trump’s “blind spot” and “Achilles heel,” according to Politico Playbook, based on a just-released Politico poll which calls its findings “a grim portrait of spending constraints.”

“Half of those surveyed said they find it difficult to pay for food. And a majority, 55 percent, blame the Trump administration for the high prices — even as the White House emphasizes its focus on affordability and the economy ahead of the midterm,” Politico noted.

On health care — one of the top concerns along with food and housing — nearly half of American adults find it “difficult” to afford. About one quarter of Americans (27%) have skipped a doctor’s visit or a prescription dose (23%) because of cost.

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Pointing to Trump’s Tuesday night Pennsylvania rally, where he read the script and ad libbed his thoughts — “calling affordability a ‘hoax’ — before admitting he’s no longer ‘allowed’ to use the phrase,” Playbook reported that the president “made clear his lack of conviction in the whole premise.”

He mocked the word “affordability,” his own price charts, his pre-prepared speech, and “admitted he was only on tour at the urging of chief of staff Susie Wiles.”

“Trump revived his ill-advised line that it’s fine if parents can’t afford so many toys and pencils for their kids now prices are higher due to tariffs. ‘You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter,’ he told the crowd. ‘Two or three is nice.'”

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This speech was supposed to be — according to the White House — “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.”

After detailing many other off-script remarks, Playbook reported, “None of this should be surprising. We all know Trump likes to ramble. ‘I love the weave,’ he mused at one point. ‘If I read what’s on the teleprompter, you would all be falling asleep right now.’ On this topic, his heart just ain’t in it.”

“How much does all this matter?” Playbook asked. “Potentially, quite a lot. In theory, this was the first date of a multi-leg tour running right through 2026. If Trump doesn’t hone his messaging on affordability, it’s going to create a lot more ammunition for opponents over the next 11 months.”

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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.”

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