There is no love lost between President Trump and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She calls him a threat to democracy. He calls her a Marxist. And yet, as Trump may be entering his progressive era, the White House says the president is willing to work with lawmakers like Warren to make a one year 10% cap on credit card interest rates a reality.
Trump called Warren unprompted this week after the progressive Democrat delivered a speech criticizing inaction on affordability.
“After my speech, the president called me, and I delivered this same message on affordability to him directly,” Warren said in a statement. “I told him that Congress can pass legislation to cap credit card rates if he will actually fight for it.”
Asked if the president was serious about working with Warren, who Trump routinely mocks as “Pocahontas” in reference to her past claims of Native American ancestry, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told RealClearPolitics that the collab, as unlikely as it sounds, could be real.
“I think the president would work in good faith with anyone in Congress for a good legislative fix that would benefit the American people,” Leavitt said, “and that’s precisely why he called Sen. Warren earlier this week on that matter.”
Trump has been fast and furious with a spate of recommended reforms. In addition to his call to cap credit card interest, the president floated the idea of banning institutional investors, like Blackstone, from purchasing single-family homes, arguing that private capital pushes out middle-class buyers from the market. Both populist proposals were well-received online but less so in Congress. Republicans, not Democrats, represent the biggest obstacle to getting either idea into law.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune of Texas and House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana both warned of the possible unintended consequences of market meddling.
Thune told reporters that if Trump’s proposal became law, it would “probably deprive an awful lot of people of access to credit around the country” and “credit cards will probably become debit cards.” The Senate leader is not advocating for the change.
Johnson suggested that perhaps Trump was not thinking clearly. “One of the things that the president probably had not thought through is the negative secondary effect,” he said before explaining that credit card companies “would just stop lending money, and maybe they cap what people are able to borrow at a very low amount.”
Despite the initial poor reviews, Trump has a habit of upending the apple cart and remaking Republican orthodoxy in the process. His views on immigration were once considered extreme. Now they are part of the party platform. Similarly, tariffs amounted to economic heresy among free-market minded Republicans before the GOP embraced them as a necessary tool.
Motivating the latest presidential brainstorm: affordability.
While Trump has promised a new Golden Age for America, the benefits have yet to trickle down to the kitchen tables of regular families, judging by public polling. Despite healthy growth and inflation numbers, a majority of Americans, 55%, disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy. White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair put the electoral problem in blunt terms ahead of this year’s midterms, telling Vanity Fair if voters “don’t feel good about economics, we are fucked.”
There are some Republicans cheering Trump’s more muscular use of the federal government, most notably Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. He proposed legislation to cap credit card interest rates at 18% three years ago, telling RCP at the time that it would be a “fair” and “common-sense” way to give “the working class a chance.” The idea was panned by conservatives, who complained that Hawley sounded too much like his Democratic Socialist colleague, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Other Republicans do not recognize Trump 2.0. This includes former Vice President Mike Pence. In an interview with RealClearPolitics Thursday, Pence was aghast at the progressive turn of his former boss. “I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony,” he said. From the tariff policy to the new credit card proposal, he said, “I don’t know where to start.”
“The most rudimentary understanding of the financial industry tells you that this will just greatly reduce the availability of credit for middle- and low-income Americans,” he said. “It just will. Price controls don’t work.”
But Trump seems to believe that they do. And according to the White House, he is ready to sidestep his own party, to work with Warren and others, to give them a try.
Philip Wegmann is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.
