Affordability

Week of December 5-11, 2025

Welcome to TRACKING THE CRISIS, a weekly round-up from The Democracy Collaborative tracking the administrative, legislative, and other actions of the Trump Administration as well as the many forms of legal and movement response from across a broad range of social, political, and economic actors. TDC is providing this service for collective informational purposes, as a tool for understanding the times during a period of disorientingly rapid flux and change in the U.S. political economy. TDC should not be understood as endorsing or otherwise any of the specific content of the information round-up.

TRUMP TRACKER: Administration actions

• Dueling healthcare bills fail in Senate less than 20 days before costs skyrocket for over 20 million Americans. This week, Congress failed to find a solution to the looming healthcare affordability crisis and time is running out before premiums are set to skyrocket for more than 24 million Americans enrolled in ACA/Obamacare plans. On Thursday, December 11, the Senate rejected two rival healthcare bills largely along partisan lines; four Republicans crossed the line to vote for Democrats’ bid for a three-year extension of ACA subsidies, while Rand Paul joined Democrats to reject Sens. Cassidy and Crapo’s proposal to replace subsidies with privatized healthcare ‘savings accounts.’ The vote was scheduled in accordance with the controversial deal Republicans made with eight Senate Democrats who had agreed to capitulate on ending the government shutdown last month; however, as many Capitol Hill observers report, neither party had made meaningful efforts to negotiate a bipartisan solution in the interim, and as late as Monday, December 8, Republicans appeared unable to reach consensus on one of as many as 10 different proposals that circulated among GOP lawmakers in both chambers. House Speaker Johnson on Wednesday made it clear that he will not entertain a vote to extend subsidies for Obamacare, and presented GOP lawmakers with ten options for a bill to be brought to the floor next week, which will be similar to the Cassidy-Crapo bill.
  
  Democrats denounced both proposals as an attempt to kill Obamacare altogether and instead push “junk insurance plans” that will trap Americans into crippling medical debt; and the GOP’s proposed $1,500 payment for low-income earners enrolled in the ACA’s $7,500-deductible ‘bronze’ plans was criticized by policy experts as “offering people a 1-foot rope to get out of a 10-foot hole.” Late on Wednesday, a bipartisan group of 35 House members introduced a last-minute discharge petition to force a vote on a two-year extension of ACA subsidies, led by a handful of rank-and-file House Republicans who see a potential political crisis on their hands if premiums are allowed to skyrocket. A poll released on Thursday by healthcare policy thinktank KFF showed that an overwhelming majority (84%) of voters, including 7 in 10 Republicans, support extending the subsidies. The poll found that more than 60% of Americans are already struggling to meet healthcare costs; and as premiums are set to more than double on average if subsidies expire, 1 in 3 ACA Marketplace enrollees plan to downgrade their coverage, and up to 25% may have to drop their coverage altogether.

• As economic pressures intensify for U.S. working class, Trump ‘affordability tour’ kicks off on sour note amid gaslighting of constituents, farmer bailouts, suggestion to limit Christmas presents for kids. Spurred on by a chorus of Republican lawmakers and party strategists who warn of a ‘wipeout’ in the midterms if the affordability crisis continues to go unaddressed, Trump traveled to Pennsylvania this week to kick off a series of campaign-style rallies billed by the White House to promote his economic agenda and assuage struggling voters’ concerns. Speaking to a crowd of several hundred working-class supporters on Tuesday, December 9, Trump appeared to veer off course from the jump and instead mocked the word ‘affordability’ in a rambling speech that did little to calm economic anxieties, as Trump once again blamed Democrats for the affordability ‘hoax,’ repeated his false claim that “inflation is essentially gone” and insisted to his constituents that they “are doing better than you’ve ever done.” Trump spent much of his 90-minute address mainly diverging into familiar campaign territory with rants against immigrants and transgender people, as well as ‘dirty, filthy’ Somalis and people from other “s**thole countries.” 
  
  Ahead of Christmas season, as prices for popular gifts spiked by over 26%, he also shocked many American parents and faced panicked backlash from Republican strategists after he suggested that kids could do with less of ‘certain products’ like ‘dolls’ and ‘pencils’, telling parents that “they can have five [pencils].” Democratic lawmakers expressed outrage over the billionaire president’s notion that American families should cut back on Christmas presents; Rep. Maxine Waters called him “the Grinch that stole Christmas” while Rep. Ruben Gallego hit back by suggesting that “presidents don’t need golden frickin jets gifted from Qatar.”  Karoline Leavitt went into damage control mode this week in the wake of Trump’s affordability fumble, as Republicans scrambled to find a new pivot on economic messaging after another round of electoral defeats and new polling that shows a significant and growing proportion of Trump’s own base holding him responsible for ‘not doing enough’ to ease the cost of living crisis. GOP lawmakers and White House advisers privately admit that Trump’s continued denial of economic realities for the majority of Americans poses a huge problem for their party in 2026.
  
  Despite Trump giving the economy an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus” rating in his interview with Politico earlier this week, hard data – not just the souring vibes among working people – illuminates an acute and deepening crisis as surging costs impact nearly every facet of daily life among the U.S. working class and previously robust macroeconomic and financial indicators begin to flash warning signs. As winter sets in, rural households unable to afford soaring natural gas and electricity costs have been forming community ‘firewood banks’ to survive through the season. Skyrocketing beef prices, coupled with reduced customer patronage as families tighten their belts, are squeezing small businesses in the restaurant industry. The Guardian reports this week on the ‘financial nihilism’ among younger Millennials and Gen Z as housing prices remain stubbornly high due to the dominance of private equity in housing markets, putting homeownership impossibly out of reach. Even before the looming spike in healthcare costs beginning next year, more and more households are taking on heavy debt loads, increasingly from opaque, unregulated ‘alternative consumer lending’ sources of private credit as people utilize ‘buy now, pay later’ services for basic needs such as groceries; which, as the Wall Street Journal reports this week, complicates standard economic methods for estimating the true degree of consumer distress and gauging the potential risks to fragile financial markets in the event of mass defaults. Rural mental health hotlines are reporting a surge in calls from struggling farmers who are reeling from the decimation of U.S. export markets precipitated by Trump’s trade war; Trump this week announced a $12 billion one-time bailout for farmers impacted by tariffs, which was met with mixed reactions from farmers who called it ‘a Band-Aid on an open wound’.

• Leaked DOJ memo reveals Trump/Bondi directive to compile ‘domestic terrorism’ list targeting ‘anti-American’ groups and criminalizing dissent. Over the weekend, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein released an exclusive report on a leaked DOJ memo, signed by Pam Bondi, that directed the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute ‘domestic terrorism,’ defined according to broad criteria laid out in the Trump executive order designating ‘Antifa’ as a terrorist organization and its corresponding National Security Memorandum (NSPM-7), both signed by Trump in September. In the NSPM-7 document, the Trump Administration criminalized so-called  ‘Antifa’ groups and individuals who express what it called “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment,” views aligned with ‘anti-capitalism,’ ‘anti-Christianity’, and/or ‘hostility to traditional views on family, religion and morality.” The DOJ memo appears intended to serve as the operational framework and implementation plan for NSPM-7. Legal experts note that the new memo represents a qualitative and dangerous shift in DOJ counter-terrorism policy by establishing a specific set of ideological affiliations – rather than violent acts – as primary indicators of terrorist threats. Other targets include those motivated by “opposition to law and immigration enforcement,” which Klippenstein points out could describe half the country, according to recent polling. The memo instructs the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to “use all available investigative tools” to “map the full network of culpable actors” – including organizers and funders inside and outside the United States – that are “involved in all domestic terrorism activities”. It also expands a 9/11-era ‘tip line’ created by the Bush Administration by implementing an additional “cash reward system” to incentivize public reporting of alleged ‘terrorist’ activity.
  
  Lawfare Media notes that the directive recalls the FBI’s illegal civil rights-era blacklists and intelligence abuses uncovered by the Church Committee in 1975, and effectively rolls back the important legal safeguards for civil liberties that resulted from that investigation, such as the Privacy Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Notably, they point out how the proposed ‘cash reward system’ recalls the FBI’s indiscriminate use of “red squads” and informant networks during that era, which “generated torrents of raw allegations based on lawful speech and association” and “tended to justify more and deeper surveillance.” The Brennan Center for Justice has warned of the implications of these orders for progressive- and left- aligned nonprofit organizations, and the Bondi memo “explicitly instructs Treasury and the IRS to examine financial networks and tax-exempt actors.” Former DOJ counterterrorism experts note that the directive casts a broad dragnet targeting leftist groups and ideology while the Trump Administration has simultaneously withdrawn funding and resources from longstanding investigations into far-right white nationalist extremist groups that had been identified by the FBI as the “biggest domestic terrorism threat” to the country in the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

• Disquiet on the Western Front: Trump deepens rift with Europe amid Ukraine talks; new National Security Strategy codifies far-right extremism in foreign policy, encourages intervention in support of neofascist movements. Amid rising tensions over the Russia-Ukraine peace deal that had already begun to open a rift in the longstanding alliance between the United States and Western Europe, the Trump Administration “blew up the world as we know it” this week as it unveiled its new National Security Strategy which blasts the “weakness” of European governments and embraces the continent’s far-right extremist movements, precipitating “one of the most profound crises for the Atlantic alliance since 1945.” Signaling a major foreign policy shift, the document laments Europe’s “cratering birthrates,” “loss of national identities” through immigration and warns of “civilizational erasure”; it further encourages the United States to “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory,” espousing the “aggressive form of foreign-policy interference” Europe had become accustomed to seeing the U.S. deploy in the Global South. French minister Alice Rufo called the document “an extremely brutal clarification of the United States’ ideological posture,” while former French Ambassador Gerard Araud noted that the “stunning” document “reads like a far-right pamphlet” that the Guardian said “lay bare Trump’s support for the far right” in Europe. The text echoes the extremist language of popular neofascist movements and far-right conspiracy theories within its framework.
  
  Following the Trump Administration’s new domestic policy targeting left-wing movements and designating ‘Antifa’ as a terrorist group, U.S. agencies have already begun targeting European anti-fascist groups on the continent, sparking outrage from EU leaders. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called parts of the strategy “unacceptable” and said it underscored the need for Europe to become “much more independent” of the United States in terms of security, adding that “I see no need for the Americans to now want to save democracy in Europe.” European Council president Antonio Costa warned that “Europe must be sovereign” and slammed the document’s overt “threat to interfere in European politics.” Costa also decried the document’s insinuation that the EU’s regulation of the AI industry was tantamount to “censorship of free speech,” hitting back by saying “there will never be free speech if the freedom of information of citizens is sacrificed for the aims of the tech oligarchs in the United States.” Italian foreign policy expert Nathalie Tocci framed the sudden turn as a critique of European leaders that had “lulled themselves into the belief” that Trump was “ultimately manageable.” She argued that Trump had laid out “a clear and consistent vision for Europe: one that prioritises U.S.-Russia ties and seeks to divide and conquer the continent, with much of the dirty work carried out by nationalist, far-right European forces,” and that “flattering Trump will not save the Transatlantic relationship.”  

  Zelenskyy met with Merz, Macron and Starmer at Downing Street on Monday, December 8 to work out a new revision of the peace agreement; EU leaders took the opportunity to make a show of unity, rallying behind Ukraine in the face of Trump’s threats to withdraw security support for Ukraine and NATO. Zelenskyy reiterated his refusal to accept the land concessions to Russia that are part of the U.S. deal, which has Ukraine ceding nearly the entire Donbas region and parts of Donetsk as well as the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Trump sat down for an exclusive interview with Politico on Monday night where he amped up his rhetoric against Europe, calling out “weak” EU leaders and criticizing the “decaying” European countries for failing to curb migration and take decisive action to end the war in Ukraine, accusing them of “letting Ukraine fight till they drop.” Trump also criticized Zelenskyy for not holding elections at the end of his term in 2024, and pressed the Ukrainian president to accept the U.S. version of the deal, telling reporters that he “is going to have to get on the ball and start accepting things,” given his view that Kyiv “is losing.” In contrast – and perhaps in response – to Trump’s threats to withdraw support, the U.S. House passed its $900 billion National Defense Authorization Act for 2026 after adding an extra $8 billion earmarked for European defense, and setting aside another $400 million in security assistance for Ukraine to be guaranteed if other funding efforts failed.
  
  Trump spoke on the phone with Merz, Macron and Starmer on Wednesday, reportedly exchanging ‘pretty strong words’ with the three leaders as he appeared to be running out of patience with Europe, whom he saw as “wasting time.” At issue from the EU’s perspective was an internal debate regarding the European Commission’s proposal to use approximately €210bn in frozen Russian assets to underwrite reconstruction loans for Ukraine. In contrast, the rival U.S. proposal would allow U.S.-based financial firms and businesses to tap the assets for the purpose of building a massive AI datacenter in Ukraine, powered by the Zaporizhzhia plant (one of the world’s 10 biggest atomic plants) currently occupied by Russia. Another part of the proposal concerned “bringing the Russian economy in from the cold” by allowing U.S. financial firms to invest in rare-earth mining and oil extraction in a bid to ‘help’ restore flows of Russian oil to the rest of Europe and the world.  European officials panned the idea, likening the plan to Trump’s proposed ‘Gaza Riviera’ or the way European territory was ‘carved up’ at the Yalta Conference after World War II. On Wednesday, Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine had ‘agreed on key points’ focusing on economic elements of a post-war reconstruction plan in talks with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and unofficial White House “deal man,” Treasury Secretary Bessent, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. Washington sent a compromise proposal on Thursday that has Russia agreeing not to advance from its current position and Ukraine withdrawing its troops from the Donbas region, wherein the U.S. would create a “free economic zone.”Zelenskyy replied on Thursday reiterating that withdrawing from Donbas would be a concession Ukraine could not make without clarity on who would govern after the withdrawal, and binding guarantees – preferably through an act of Congress – that Russia would not be allowed to retake the region.
  

MOVEMENT TRACKER

• States resist Trump agenda: GOP-led Indiana legislature bucks Trump to reject redistricting; Pritzker strengthens immigrant rights protections in Illinois; 68 states & municipalities raise minimum wage ahead of ACA premium spike. In what CNN called “one of the most significant GOP rebukes of Trump to date,” more than half of the Indiana State Senate’s Republican supermajority crossed the aisle to vote 31-19 to reject a Trump-endorsed redistricting map that would have added 2 more GOP seats to the U.S. House of Representatives. The vote foiled a months-long pressure campaign from the White House to push through the redistricting measure; despite Trump’s threats to primary their seats, threats to withhold federal funding, visits from Vance, Johnson and other top leaders, and even physical threats from MAGA zealots, State senators refused to move the party one step closer toward Trump’s goal of a permanent Republican majority in Congress. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed a new bill into law on Tuesday that sought to limit immigration enforcement in the state as he pushes back on an aggressive federal campaign of mass deportations. The bill extends protections for immigrant families and others impacted by federal immigration enforcement, bans civil immigration arrests at state courthouses, and restricts what information Illinois hospitals, childcare centers and colleges can share with immigration authorities. The measure also makes it easier for people to sue immigration officers by establishing a state-level right to seek damages for constitutional violations during enforcement. The law authorizes recovery of legal costs and compensatory damages, filling a gap left by federal courts. As workers face a looming affordability cliff under one of the most anti-labor presidencies in history, a new report from the National Employment Law Project found that workers in 19 states and 49 cities and counties will see the minimum wage increase Jan. 1; and another four states and 22 localities are set to raise their wage floors later in the year. The report finds that after the increase, a majority of states will have a minimum $15 an hour wage, with many setting the floor at $17; a piecemeal but viable workaround to address a federal minimum wage which has been frozen at $7.25 since 2009.

• ‘Tis the Season: Nativity scenes protesting ICE displayed at churches across the country amid challenges to Catholic & Christian pro-MAGA narratives. This Christmas, churches around the country are installing ‘protest’ Nativity scenes on their grounds, portraying the Holy Family as refugees who today would have been seen as targets of ICE’s mass deportation program. At Lake Street Church in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, its Nativity scene featured a zip-tied baby Jesus, wrapped in the silver emergency blanket often used as bedding in ICE detention centers as he lay in the manger, while Mary stands nearby in a gas mask, flanked by ‘Roman’ soldiers in tactical vests marked ‘ICE’. At another Chicagoland church, not far from the Broadview ICE facility that has drawn a plethora of intensifying protests over the last several months, the scene sat empty, with a sign in the manger saying, “Due to ICE activity in our community, the Holy Family has gone into hiding.” Outside of Boston, the Nativity scene at St. Susanna Catholic Church features an empty manger with a missing Holy Family, replaced by a sign that says “ICE WAS HERE”; on closer inspection, a card in the manger says “The Holy Family is safe in the sanctuary of our church” and gives the number of a local immigrant advocacy group who tracks ICE sightings in the neighborhood.
  
  Not all the displays have been well received; a recent post shows an angry white man knocking down a protest-themed display at a church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and St. Susanna – where similar protest-themed Nativity scenes have gone viral in past years – was told by the Boston Archdiocese to take down its display due to its “divisive political messaging.” ICE director Todd Lyons also called for its removal, saying that it ‘pushed’ a “dangerous narrative.” Rev. Stephen Josoma, the church’s pastor, told reporters on Monday that the display was meant to “evoke emotion and dialogue,” and his decision to keep the display has garnered wide support from his congregation. Baptist minister Rev. Michael Woolf, pastor at the Lake Street Church and one of 7 interfaith leaders arrested by ICE last month at the Broadview facility, said that for churches, Christmas is a time “when we have public art out on the lawn and we get an opportunity to say something”; and the story of the Nativity, he reminded reporters, is already “about political violence. It's about authoritarianism… it is a powerful opportunity for churches to make clear their values.”  
  
  Faith leaders have been at the forefront of recent local mobilizations in support of immigrant communities; protesting ICE, supporting vulnerable families, ministering to detainees when possible, holding vigils at detention centers, and bearing sacred witness to the plight of migrants arrested in the sweeping crackdowns. Many Catholic activists are taking their cue from Pope Leo XIV’s recent statements taking a strong stance against ICE raids and calling for the humane treatment of migrants. By the same token, many St. Susanna parishioners questioned the Boston Archdiocese’s order to remove the display at their church, given the statement in support of immigrant rights that was unanimously signed by the U.S. Conference of Bishops last month. Pope Leo XIV discussed the issue again last week as he admonished the Trump Administration for its military threats against Venezuela, saying “we should perhaps be a little less fearful and look for ways of promoting authentic dialogue and respect.” Not every Catholic has absorbed these values, not least DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, whose already-awkward hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security this week was interrupted by two protestors in “The Exorcist” cosplay who shouted, “Stop ICE Raids! The power of Christ compels you!” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt faced scrutiny after it was revealed that her own nephew’s mother Bruna Ferreira, an immigrant from Brazil and former DACA recipient, had been detained by ICE on November 12. Appearing on CNN shortly after her release this week and asked what she would say to Leavitt today, Ferreira replied, “What I would have to say to Karoline is: Just because you went to a Catholic school doesn't make you a good Catholic.”

• Latest Polls.

• Approval Rating: A new AP-NORC poll finds Trump’s overall approval rating at an all-time low of 36% across both his first or second terms, as his rating on the economy took another dip this week to an all-time low of 31%. Approval continues to follow along stark partisan lines; overall, 6 in 10 have a negative opinion, including about 9 in 10 Democrats and 7 in 10 independents, while conversely, 8 in 10 Republicans approve.

• Affordability & Constraints on Consumer Spending: A new poll from Politico published this week painted a “grim picture of a nation under financial strain.” Approximately 27% of Americans said they have skipped a medical check-up because of costs within the last two years, and 23 percent said they have skipped a prescription dose for the same reason. More than one-third (37%) are starting to make cuts in their spending on recreation, and nearly half (46%) say they could not afford air travel. Half of those surveyed find it difficult to pay for food; and a majority (55%) blame the Trump administration for the high prices – including a meaningful share of Trump’s own voters (22%) who blame the president for high grocery costs.

• Consumer Sentiment: The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index rose just slightly in December to 53.3% from a low of 51% in November during the government shutdown, but remains dramatically lower than the 70% rating Trump saw after his inauguration, and only just slightly above the all-time low hit in 2022, when pandemic inflation was reaching historic highs. Consumers remain frustrated by high prices as wages have deteriorated and mass layoffs since October have soured chances in the labor market, especially for young people.

• Healthcare/Social Security: According to polling from Gallup and West Health, roughly six in 10 adults – 58% for Medicare and 61% for Social Security – say they are more worried today than a year ago about potential changes to these benefits, including about a third of Republicans. Notably, approval of his handling of healthcare issues, in the AP-NORC poll referenced earlier, have dipped 5% over the last month to a low of 29% – with most of the decline coming from Republicans.

• Wealth Inequality: Somewhat against received wisdom, a new Economist/YouGov poll released this week found that a majority of Americans believe in higher taxes on the rich, and believe that the federal government has an obligation to address wealth inequality. Approximately 61 percent said billionaires’ tax rates were either “somewhat too low” or “much too low”; and even amongst 2024 Trump voters, a plurality (34 percent) felt that taxes on billionaires were too low, while just 12 percent said that taxes on billionaires were too high. The poll comes as a new edition of the World Inequality Report has been published; which found that the top 0.001% of earners – fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires – now own about three times as much as the bottom 50% combined.

• Upcoming Actions, Protests, and Events.

• Saturday, December 13: Refuse Fascism is holding a second ‘Surround the White House’ protest in Washington, DC. More information on this action can be found at RefuseFascism.org.

• Saturday, December 13: 50501 SoCal is holding an “Unaccountable” demonstration to demand LAPD police reform. A list of demands can be found on the 50501SoCal website, and more information on the protest can be found on Bluesky.

• December 18-24: The Mass Blackout Coalition has announced a “Seven Days of Givemas” campaign challenging participants to commit to one mutual aid practice per day over the seven day period before Christmas. Several resources and a primer on mutual aid can be found on their website, including an ‘Acts of Solidarity Wheel’ to help people decide which practice they can do for each day.

• Tuesday, January 20: The Women’s March is calling for people and communities to stage mass walkouts from work or school to “walk out on fascism and toward a free America.” More information and a pledge form can be found on Mobilize. 

• Tuesday, February 17: FLARE and the Citizens Impeachment Coalition are organizing a National Day of Action to coordinate mass in-district lobbying at the district offices of all 435 members of Congress and 100 Senators to demand impeachment proceedings be brought against Donald Trump. Organizations interested in leading a lobbying action in their district can sign on to the Citizens Impeachment Coalition at this link.