Donald Trump Takes to X To Attack Kamala Harris on House Prices

Donald Trump took to Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to attack Kamala Harris on her housing policies, sharing data showing that home prices rose under the Biden administration.

The former president and Republican presidential nominee was responding to Harris’ pledge to help aspiring homebuyers get on the property ladder, which she has said she plans on doing by providing first-time buyers with $25,000 in assistance.

“Even if aspiring homeowners save for years, it is often still not enough,” Harris wrote on X on Monday. “My administration will provide first-time homebuyers with $25,000 to help with the down payment on a new home.”

Trump responded by sharing the vice president’s post on his X profile on Wednesday with the addition of a screenshot from Fox News showing that existing home median sale prices surged by 39 percent between January 2021 and now. According to data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), the median sale price of existing homes in the U.S. when Joe Biden took office was $307,300; now, it’s $426,900.

Trump Back on Twitter (Now X)

The post is one of many the former president published on Musk’s X in the past couple of weeks. Trump has made a surprise comeback on the platform after sharing only one post since his profile was reinstated by the businessman in November 2022. The renewed activity on the platform follow Musk’s interview of Trump on August 12 on X’s audio feature, Spaces.

Trump was permanently suspended on Twitter after calling the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, “patriots.” His account was reinstated by Musk after the entrepreneur bought the platform two years ago, changing its name to X.

For the past couple of years, the former president appeared to have moved past X, preferring to instead use his own social media platform, Truth Social, to communicate with his followers. The only post he published between November 2022 and August this year was his mugshot, on August 25, 2023.

But things have changed since Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee. Between August 12 and Wednesday, Trump has published and/or reshared a total of 61 posts on X, including at least 22 naming and attacking Harris and her policies. These include an A.I. image of Harris standing in front of a communist flag and several posts where Trump calls the vice president “Comrade Kamala Harris” and “Border Czar.”

One post that the former president shared twice on his profile shows the price of several goods and services, including eggs, gasoline, eggs, electricity, and rent, increased under the Biden administration. As in the case of the Fox News screenshot on home prices, the post is a response to Harris’ pledge to “lower the cost of everyday needs like healthcare, housing, and groceries.”

Newsweek has contacted Trump’s and Harris’s 2024 campaign teams for comment by email on Wednesday morning, outside of standard working hours.

Have House Prices Gone Up Under the Biden Administration?

While it’s true that home and rent prices rose in the past four years, the trend has more to do with supply and demand in the U.S. housing market than any policies implemented by the Biden administration. Prices skyrocketed during the pandemic as demand was high, mortgage rates were relatively low, and supply was insufficient, triggering ruthless bidding wars in some markets.

Despite a modest price correction across the country between late summer 2022 and spring 2023 sparked by the sudden rise of mortgage rates and a slowdown in demand, homes this year continue to be nearly as expensive as they had been during their 2022 peaks. According to data from the real estate company Redfin, the median sale price of a home in the U.S. was $438,815 in July, up 4 percent year-over-year.

This rise in prices is mainly due to pent-up demand being higher than supply, as the U.S. chronically underbuilt following the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Crucially, this shortage of available housing existed when Trump was in the Oval Office and has continued during Biden’s presidency—but the post-pandemic rise of inflation exacerbated the situation.

As Trump suggests in his post, many Americans blame the Biden-Harris administration for the higher cost of living they’re now facing. A recent poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek found that of the 41 percent of Americans who thought the U.S. economy was “bad” or “very bad,” 93 percent believed Biden was responsible for it and 88 percent thought Harris was.

“Persistent inflation was a significant political burden for Joe Biden, and now it weighs heavily on Kamala Harris, as well,” Thomas Gift, an associate professor of political science and director of the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London, U.K., previously told Newsweek.

“Harris has vowed to confront the cost of living crisis, but she seems to conveniently forget that she’s been in office the last three and a half years advocating ‘Bidenomics’,” he added.

Trump vs. Harris: Plans To Tackle the Housing Crisis

In a recently released ad, Harris said she plans on building 3 million new homes over four years if she was elected to fix the current supply gap in the U.S. housing market. The vice president said she would also create tax breaks for homebuilders targeting first-time buyers and double the available funding to $40 billion to encourage local governments to remove regulations slowing down new construction.

So far, Trump hasn’t said he wants to focus on building new homes to fix the current affordability crisis in the U.S. housing market; instead, he has said he wants to stop illegal immigration to reduce demand for homes and bring down prices.

David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal & Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution think tank, told Newsweek that “anything that will increase the supply of housing—particularly affordable housing—is welcome.”

Commenting on Harris’ housing policies, Wessel said: “I don’t think we have a crying need for more tax incentives for real estate, but we are going to adopt some because they are so popular, then the tax incentives for building more starter homes and affordable rental housing units are OK.”

He said: “Even though the federal government doesn’t have a lot of influence over state and local zoning rules, anything Washington can do to nudge local governments in the right direction is welcome—and perhaps that innovation fund will do that and whatever Washington can do to deliver on the pledge ‘to cut red tape and needless bureaucracy’ would be excellent.”

But Wessel is not as positive about the proposed $25,000 in assistance to first-time homebuyers. “I’m not convinced the $25,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers is a good idea, but I don’t fully understand how it’d work,” he said.

“The fact sheet says ‘on average $25,000 for all eligible first-time home buyers, while ensuring full participation by first-generation home buyers.’ Increasing the demand for houses doesn’t seem like a step in the right direction and administering a program that, like the Biden proposal, gives extra credit to folks whose parents didn’t own homes sounds challenging.”