Trump’s Economic Policy Legacy Is Shrinking. It Didn’t Have To Be This Way.

President Donald Trump earlier this year called for limits on Wall Street’s ownership of single-family homes, a policy that both polls well and reflects his populist instincts.

Four months later, despite the most toxic and divisive political environment in generations, bipartisan majorities in Congress voted such restrictions into law, part of a package aimed at expanding the supply of housing available for people to buy. It looked like a clear political win in a midterm election year dominated by cost-of-living concerns.

Trump wasn’t pleased.

“It’s a yawn,” he said of the bill this week, days after he canceled a signing ceremony for the legislation. “Democrats like it. They are getting things that I wouldn’t necessarily agree to.”

That response is a clear demonstration of why Trump hasn’t tried to get more populist items through Congress and why his list of legislative wins is both short and mostly partisan. It’s a theme that America’s foreign trading partners have learned all too well through the president’s sweeping tariff regime: Win-win compromise generally isn’t his thing.

But some of Trump’s allies also acknowledge that his decision to avoid legislative approaches is a choice that could limit his economic legacy.  

After all, it’s not hard to imagine an alternative world where Trump actively tried to capitalize on his successful scrambling of GOP orthodoxy by securing legislative outcomes no other president could pull off.

Where would Trump be now — politically, or in the eyes of history — if he had enacted durable, cross-party legislation around the populist priorities he campaigned on?

There are several areas where Trump’s stated policy preferences overlap with those of many Democrats (think: support for caps on credit card interest rates or opposition to the tax break for a type of Wall Street income known as carried interest). And while the president can’t force Republicans to back all of his whims, he has displayed remarkably tight control over the GOP-led Congress. The housing bill could have been one of a bundle.

It’s a route that he’s mostly ignored.

“Trump lacks focus,” a former Trump official told me, with palpable frustration. “Trump had the opportunity to be transformational. Instead, he’s going to be transitional at best.”

The president has undoubtedly reshaped the U.S. government in some ways that can’t be reversed on Day 1 by another president. But it’s also true that his go-it-alone approach on some of his biggest priorities, such as tariffs, leaves them open to simple erasure. Executive actions are easy to reverse, compared to laws.

The housing bill is a glimmer of a different approach.

Trump isn’t wrong that the bill’s effects are likely to be marginal at best. Even the key provision he pushed for, which caps the number of single-family homes investors can own, probably won’t do much to increase affordability. But the political achievement is notable. It’s typically industry-friendly stuff that secures bipartisan support — like last year’s legislation creating a regulatory framework for crypto tokens whose value is pegged to the dollar.

It’s only because of Trump’s backing that the provision targeting private equity landlords became law.

As much as Democrats despise Trump, the option of reaching out was still available only a few months ago. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) actually told me in February that he would be able to move the needle this way and said she’d be willing to work with him.

“If he would push his Republicans to get on board, we could turn that into law,” she said on the eve of the president’s State of the Union address, where he did, ultimately, argue that homes should be “for people, not for corporations.”

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement that the president has been “laser-focused on making housing more affordable” and “calls on Congress to pass further legislation.” But he said Trump’s legislative focus is elsewhere: passing the elections bill known as the SAVE America Act.

The housing package — where both parties in both chambers ended up putting their mark — was a rare circumstance where everyone wanted to fix the same problem (housing is expensive) with the same solution (more housing).

But with a more concerted legislative focus, it’s not hard to imagine Trump could achieve populist ambitions in other areas too.

It’s an interesting thought exercise, particularly because Democrats could conceivably take over one or both chambers of Congress come the midterm elections, opening the door to a different genre of policymaking than one that would make it through a Republican majority. Finding common ground with Democrats could be Trump’s only way to be relevant on Capitol Hill in the final years of his term.

Well, finding common ground with Democrats and muscling some Republicans.

“A lot of people assume the difference from a policymaking perspective between a Democratic House and an all-Dem Congress at the margins is kinda trivial,” said Rohit Kumar, a principal at PwC who was previously a top staffer to multiple Senate Republican leaders, including Mitch McConnell. “What you’ve hit on here is an area where perhaps it’s not so trivial.”

“If it’s something that Senate Republicans really didn’t want to do, the Senate majority leader has a lot of authority over what makes it to the floor and in what form,” he said. But in a world where Democrats run the table, they’d only need to flip, say, nine GOP senators rather than the entire conference, he added.

Democrats, who have extensively integrated opposition to Trump into the party’s DNA, might not be so eager to give wins to a president they see as dangerous to the country’s institutions. As he approaches the end of his presidency, Trump’s lame-duck status could even make it harder for him to strong-arm other Republicans.

Multiple Democratic operatives suggested to me that there could be areas of bipartisan cooperation with Trump, from restrictions on artificial intelligence to affordability measures.

Based on this housing episode, though, I’d bet against it.