The Builder President and the Housing Crisis

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.If there’s one thing Donald Trump wants Americans to understand, it’s that he knows how to build.At a Pennsylvania petrochemical plant in 2019, he told workers, “I was a good builder. I built good. I love building.” Talking to reporters in the spring: “What I do best in life is build.” During last year’s Kennedy Center Honors, Trump joked that he has “two jobs”—the second being, naturally, construction.Even as past ventures have flopped, Trump continues to position himself as the kind of big-shot developer who blasts through red tape and never takes no for an answer. This is the president who once wooed voters by promising to build a “big, beautiful” wall along the southern border. Who, he argued on the 2016 campaign trail, was better positioned to make it happen? In his second term, he’s been focused on redesigning the landscape of Washington, D.C., in his own image.But earlier this week, Trump showed he’s willing to delay the construction of something that Americans have clearly indicated they need. On Tuesday, lawmakers passed the biggest housing bill in a generation, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Co-sponsored by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott, it’s a bipartisan omnibus with reforms meant to encourage development and push down prices. Trump needs the win; at the moment, most Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy. But on Wednesday, Trump abruptly canceled the signing ceremony for the bill. It will remain canceled, he wrote on Truth Social, until Congress passes the SAVE America Act, a completely unrelated and highly controversial piece of voter-ID legislation. (He’s called it his “No. 1 priority” ahead of the midterm elections.)The stalled bill targets a pressing national concern. About a third of American households spend more