President Donald Trump promised to revive the American Dream on Thursday by reducing the cost of housing for young Americans.
“It’s all about the American Dream,” Trump told a roomful of business elites and billionaires at the Economic Club of New York.
“We will make housing much more affordable… [and] we will get [mortgage rates] back down to 3 percent … [so] young people will be able to buy a home again and be part of the American dream,” he said, adding:
Millions of people will take part … [in] reviving the American Dream. It’s about the American Dream. It’s all about the American Dream. We don’t talk [about the] American Dream with these [Democratic] people in office. they don’t want to talk about the American dream because they are the exact opposite.
Trump’s “exact opposite” comment likely referred to the easy-migration, pro-diversity policies adopted by top Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and the Democrats’ 2024 candidate, Kamala Harris.
Their welcome for roughly 10 million migrants has spiked the cost of apartments and homes.
Democrats recognize that migration-inflated housing costs are a threat to their election. So Harris is promising to offset the impact of migration on housing costs by offering a package of Democratic regulations, apparent subsidies to home-buyers, and $40 billion in subsidies for towns and construction companies. However, she has not suggested that she will curb the inflow of migrants who compete for housing against Americans.
Trump, however, promised to reduce costs by excluding illegals from the housing market. “We also can’t ignore the impact of the flood of 21 million illegal aliens has had in driving up housing costs. That’s why my plan will ban [federally backed] mortgages for illegal aliens.”
If fewer migrants are “trying to rent the same amount of spaces, economics would tell us rents are likely to decrease,” Wall Street economist Nick Luettke, told the Marketplace.org radio show reported on September 5.
Trump also promised to reduce the cost of housing by selling federal land and reducing federal regulations. The goal is “cutting the cost of a new home in half,” he said.
“We will open portions of federal land for large-scale housing construction. These homes will be ultra-low tax and ultra-low regulation … so young people and other people can buy homes,” he said.
Trump complained about state Democrats offering housing aid to migrants. “In California, [Democrats] are passing a law where they will give illegal aliens money to buy a house, but our soldiers, our veterans that are laying on the streets can’t have the [loans],” he said.
He continued;
You have soldiers laying on the streets of different cities — all Democratic-run … and you have illegal immigrants coming in and living in those hotels and laughing at our soldiers as they walk by.
Trump also slammed federal funding for illegal migrants, saying: “These migrants are consuming hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits.”
The revival of the American Dream is a growing theme in Trump’s campaign.
“It’s about the American Dream,” Trump told Elon Musk on August 12. “Elon, you’re the American Dream in the truest sense, but you don’t hear about the American Dream anymore.”
The pitch portrays Trump as a helpful optimist in a close race in which the Harris campaign has adopted a strategy, style, and tone to maximize support from women.
The term was invented by American writer and historian James Truslow Adams, who described it as:
That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement … It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
The idea emerged in the early 1930s and then blossomed in the post-war prosperity made possible by low migration and rising productivity. Trump was born in 1946, so he grew up with the American Dream expectation of everyday prosperity.
But the American Dream has been downplayed since the 1990s, partly because Democrats switched their focus from transferring wealth from the rich to ordinary Americans. Instead, progressive Democrats now talk about transferring “equity” from ordinary Americans to migrants, racial minorities, and sexual minorities.
Progressives also attack the family-centered American Dream as they push their alternative government-enforced dream of civil rights and diversities within a “Nation of Immigrants.”
This shift away from Americans is exemplified by the Democrats’ current celebration of illegal migrants as “Dreamers.”
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency within the Department of Homeland Security is boasting about how it is helping migrants achieve their American Dream: