But he will be remembered negatively for it in November either way.
Democrats who want to impeach the president will include it prominently in their campaigns against him.
Throwing a fit over this is about as smart as attacking Iran without a plan to keep the Strait of Hormuz open.
House passes affordable housing bill, sends it to Trump’s desk
The U.S. House voted Tuesday night 358-32 in favor of a sprawling housing package designed to lower costs for homebuyers and increase supply. ...
The broad bi-partisan support for the bill tells you it won't do much for very many people anytime soon.
But expect the politicians to brag on it as silly season ramps up.
A key provision of the bill caps institutional investor ownership of single family homes at 350 from here on out.
Investors already owning single family homes, however, at whatever level, are grandfathered in. Blackstone, for example, owns approximately 58k such homes. It is thus prevented from buying number 58,001 under the bill.
That means that the approximately 530k+ homes currently owned by institutions, which is only about 4% of the single family housing rental pie, will not be forcibly sold into the market.
About 87% of the pie is individual investors who own in the neighborhood of 1-5 homes. There will be no change mandated there either, which is where most of the available single family housing stock is.
There are 46.4 million renter-occupied housing units in the United States in the first quarter. Of those, approximately 11.3 million are single family homes. That means that the number of owners of those rental homes ranges roughly between 9.8 million and 2 million individual investors, probably living in a rich suburb right near you.
The bill does prevent umbrella companies from owning multiple small entities created by individual investors to beat the 350 cap, with stiff penalties, so that is good.
The problem is this bill entrenches the status quo of the rich preying on both ends of the housing spectrum.
Mobile homes in parks are not considered single family homes under the bill. They are considered multi-unit commercial real estate. Private equity investors are notorious for buying up these parks full of affordable housing and jacking up lot rents on approximately 4.3 million homesites to the moon. Up to 12 million mostly low income Americans live in such parks.
The bill eliminates the mobile chassis rule for new manufactured homes, marginally reducing their cost. But imagine parking one in one of those parks and being unable to move it while the landlord holds a rent gun to your head. There are other provisions in the bill to help these existing park owners, and the mobile home owners who live there to borrow more to pay the greedy bastards.
11.3 million hostages to the rich on the front end, 12 million on the ass end.
The bill had passed in the U.S. Senate 85-5 on Monday.
Since the beginning of the 21st century in the United States, growth of renter-occupied housing continues in the ascendant while growth of owner-occupied housing continues south.
We still live with the deleterious effects of the Great Recession, when more than 6 million residences were completely foreclosed in the United States, and this is the best our elected representatives can do almost two decades on.
Congress is already getting Mamdanied as this goes to Trump for his signature.
... For decades, the state government has ceded control over housing policy to its 351 cities and towns. When it comes to housing policy, the state of Massachusetts is often a bystander, allowing town governments to impose classic “not in my backyard” policies. ... The initiative would prevent many towns from setting needlessly large minimums for lot sizes and effectively blocking the construction of middle-class homes. The campaign, Legalize Starter Homes, is now trying to gather the nearly 12,500 signatures it needs before June 17 to place the measure on the ballot. We endorse the initiative. ... The initiative would create a statewide minimum of 5,000 square feet, which is about the size of a basketball court, and bar towns from setting their own standards. ...
That's less than 1/8 acre lol.
The editorial is here.
Yuri Zhivago once had his "too big" house taken away from him by the communists, too, to make room for thirteen families:
Remember when the Obamacare provisions in March 2010 were deemed to have passed when they hadn't?
Remember how the Big Ugly Bill which passed last summer under reconciliation rules deemed that the Trump tax cuts of 2017 which had had a cost in 2017 no longer had a cost in 2025?
Remember how your mother told you "Saying doesn't make it so?"
That's how all this works now, including son saying to mom, "Mom, I'm a girl now".
Our rotten society views reality as the enemy.
When the Democrats can't get what they want, a Republican chump comes along who does it for them.
The power of existing businesses will only get stronger thanks to Trump, so mum's the word.
The Trump administration’s portfolio of equity stakes in U.S. companies has reached a scale that is unprecedented outside economic crisis or wartime....
“It is a invisible barrier to startups and new market entrants,” said Scott Lincicome, an international trade lawyer affiliated with Cato Institute. “Why would you ever want to enter a market that you know your chief competitor is backed by the U.S. government?”...
The Trump administration’s approach is a major ideological departure for the Republican Party, which has traditionally championed free market capitalism and excoriated government intervention. The Democrats have typically been the party of industrial policy and intervention in markets.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for example, introduced an amendment to Biden’s CHIPS Act that would have allowed the government to take stakes in companies that accept federal funding for semiconductor manufacturing. The measure ultimately died in the Senate....
Top executives have voiced virtually no public criticism of the Trump administration taking stakes....
Before the U.S. took its stake in Intel, Trump said CEO Lip-Bu Tan was “highly conflicted” and called for his resignation over his ties to Chinese companies. The comments sparked a brief sell-off of Intel shares....
Trump bought 433.3 million shares of Intel in August 2025 at $20.47, about $3 off its recent lows around $17.66, risking taxpayer money, not his own.
Just like Obama abandoned the Green Movement in 2009.
The Uniparty. You can count on not counting on it.
The Golden Age . . . for business, not for you.
3Q2025, updated Jan 8, 2026:
The perfect storm of government MBS purchases and sub-3% mortgages through ZIRP in 2021 combined to rocket housing values by 50%.
Housing reached record low affordability a year later, falling to 17.22%.
Yeah, let's do more of that.
Back in the 1990s, before Bill Clinton and the Uniparty got a hold of it and turned it into a commodity, housing was stable and affordable as median income bought 25% of a home.
Trump hasn't gotta clue what to do.
... In the first two months of the Covid pandemic, as markets reeled, the Federal Reserve purchased $580 billion in agency MBS. It then continued buying more throughout the year. From March 2020 through June 2021, the Federal Reserve increased its agency MBS holdings from $1.4 trillion to $2.3 trillion, according to the Dallas Fed.
The Federal Reserve also lowered its own lending rate to zero. The combination brought the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage to record lows, hitting just 2.75% at the start of 2021, according to Mortgage News Daily. ...
... But Zelman also points out that in the broader home market it’s not just the mortgage rate, but overall affordability that is keeping buyers sidelined. Consumers are stretched, and home prices are close to 50% higher than they were pre-pandemic, ironically because of those record-low mortgage rates brought on by MBS purchases. ...
Government of the Uniparty, by the Uniparty, and for the Uniparty.
Trump fancies that he's different from George W. Bush, but he's the same guy.
Flashback: July 1, 2002
Striking First: President Bush's Preemptive Strike Policy
... We can't have one kind of law for the rest of the world that we impose on the rest of the world and an imperial law, if you will, a law of empire, that applies only to the United States. ... We were seeing the possibility of a new kind of law of empire where we would stand above the rest of the world, and the bottom line when we look at the question of attacking civilians, what happens when we're wrong? Like we were today in Afghanistan, where civilians died because of bad intelligence? ...
... Our current strategy of nation-building and regime-change is a proven, absolute failure. ...
Here.
Then: "The U.S. properly worked for China's inclusion".
Now: "An era of folly began in the new century. Leaders of both political parties supported China's entry into the World Trade Organization".
I can't wait for the Wall Street Journal to admit that America's decline actually began under Reagan forty years ago, not twenty-five, because at this rate I'll be dead before they do.
Trump last night reversed himself and said the House should vote to release the Epstein files.
Vote they will, except Speaker Johnson has rigged it so that the vote will be under suspension of the rules.
Which means they don't need a mere majority to pass it. They'll need 2/3 . . . of those present.
It's a 219 GOP to 214 Dem U. S. House.
If they all show up the bill needs 286 Yeas to pass.
Good luck with that.
"See, we voted. But aw shucks, it didn't get enough votes to pass. Oh well, time to move on as Trump said."
Why people vote is emotional to these people, not rational.
"I'm insulted Trump thinks Americans have no talent so I'm voting for the other guy".
OK whatever.
Trump meanwhile pretended in the interview with Laura Ingraham that he had nothing to do with the round-up and deportation of hundreds of Koreans from the Georgia battery plant, which was basically Obama's MO throughout his presidency when a problem occurred in the country under his watch.
"You didn't build that over there, and I didn't do that other thing over here."
... The Georgia facility, operated by Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution, saw 475 of its workers arrested on allegations that they were in the U.S. illegally, or without the proper work permits, with hundreds of detained South Koreans sent home Thursday.
The raid was part of a broader deportation drive by the Trump administration, which the White House has described as central to fulfilling U.S. President Donald Trump’s election campaign promises. Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser, has pushed for 3,000 arrests a day. ...
He has no clue what to do about Obamacare, so he proposes murdering it.
It's his solution for everything else, so why not?
Kill the lawfully allocated federal spending, kill the federal workers administering it, kill the agencies they worked for, kill the inspectors general making sure you comply with the federal laws you break with every breath, kill Greenland, kill Canada, kill the Houthis, kill the Iranians, and kill the drug boat operators.
Are Venezuelans next? Nigerians? And how many U.S. citizens swept up in ICE raids will die in custody, like the 20 foreigners who already have?
Bankrupting the insurance companies overnight as he is suggesting is simply the political equivalent of what Luigi Mangione did to the United Healthcare CEO.
These pronunciamentos he keeps uttering are piling up into one great heap of nothing more than a mountain of irritable mental gestures, if you don't count the actual bodies left behind.
Republicans repealed Obamacare 37 times after 2010, but it's still alive.
They still have nothing.
A sane person observes that the options are limited with a five seat majority in the U.S. House and a three seat majority in the U.S. Senate, but sane does not describe Mad King Ludwig. He is intent on shoving down the throats of the American people whatever he can no less than Democrats did with Obamacare fifteen years ago. The Uniparty, folks.
Everything Trump does is done with the subtlety of a brick. If only he restricted himself to building.
But that is impossible for him, because he has desires . . ..
The more the Uniparty changes, the more it stays the same.
Bush invades Iraq. Putin invades Ukraine. Trump invades Venezuela.
Expect Xi to invade Taiwan at any minute.
One big happy family of invaders, carving up the world.
