In early January, Donald Trump published an item to his social media platform boasting about mortgage rates and taking credit for the fact that they were down to 5.7%. After claiming that “almost no young families could afford a home” during Joe Biden’s term, the Republican president insisted that he was delivering “real cost relief” with his “focus on Housing Affordability.”
In the weeks that followed, he posted a series of follow-up items, each of which hammered home the same point, culminating in a missive published on March 5 (roughly one week into the war with Iran) in which the president once again took credit for mortgage rates falling to roughly a three-year low.
Trump hasn’t mentioned mortgage rates since. Take a wild guess why not. The New York Times reported:
Mortgage rates jumped to 7 percent this week for the first time since January 2025, squeezing housing affordability when many Americans are grappling with higher energy costs and economic uncertainty brought on by the war with Iran.
The average 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage rate, the most common home loan in the United States, rose to 7.03 percent, up from 6.3 percent a year ago, the mortgage giant Freddie Mac said Thursday.
There’s no great mystery here. Mortgage rates fell below 6% in late February, which Trump saw as a reflection of his brilliance. What else happened in late February? Trump approved the launch of the war with Iran, which pushed energy prices higher, which in turn had an adverse effect on consumer prices across the board.
Inflation concerns rattled the bond market, which necessarily pushed mortgage rates higher, and which led Trump to stop talking about the issue on his social media platform.
At an event this week, a reporter asked JD Vance for his reaction to the growing number of Republicans in battleground states who have called for an end to the ongoing war. The vice president brushed it off, arguing that voters were “focused on the local issues that matter.”
That might have seemed vaguely persuasive — historically, foreign policy tends not to shape domestic election results — but the pitch suffered from a rather obvious flaw: The war is directly affecting local issues.
As for the president, it was two years ago this month when then-candidate Trump promised an audience in Arizona, “We’re going to bring [mortgage rates] down very fast. … We will drive down the rates, so you will be able to pay 2% again, and we will be able to finance or refinance your homes drastically at much lower costs.”
I have some bad news for the voters who believed him.
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