Just because the coal miners voted for you doesn’t mean they want a lump of coal in every stocking.

“I will use my presidential authority to set import quotas. . . . We can manage the short-term shortages more effectively and we will, but there are no short-term solutions to our long-range problems. There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice.” — Jimmy Carter, the “malaise speech,” July 1979

“You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” — Bernie Sanders, May 2015

“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream.” — Scott Bessent, March 2025.

“[China] made a trillion dollars . . . selling us stuff — much of it we don’t need. You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.” — Donald Trump, April 2025

Trump got elected in 2024, for a couple of reasons, but maybe the biggest one can be summed up as abundance. People had it under Trump in 2019, they suffered through shortages and inflation under Joe Biden, and they wanted the Trump economy back. Democrats have been struggling to match that message, given how much of their economic thinking is about asking people to accept less in exchange for a sense of doing something for the environment, and how much of their economic practice is about making it harder and more expensive to make and build things. That’s been a theme of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance, which argues that Democrats should pitch their message as one of providing abundance to Americans, but the pitch is one thing, and Klein has struggled to explain what sacrifices he would actually require of Democratic politicians and interest groups in terms of changing their agenda and demands in order to produce abundance for consumers. Josh Barro contrasted Klein’s vision with this quote from Ruben Gallego about campaigning in Arizona:

I was talking to men, especially Latino men, about the feeling of pride, bringing money home, being able to support your family, the feeling of bringing security — they wanted to hear that someone understood that need. . . . It was a joke, but I said a lot when I was talking to Latino men: “I’m going to make sure you get out of your mom’s house, get your troquita.” For English speakers, that means your truck. Every Latino man wants a big-a** truck, which, nothing wrong with that. “And you’re gonna go start your own job, and you’re gonna become rich, right?” These are the conversations that we should be having. We’re afraid of saying, like, “Hey, let’s help you get a job so you can become rich.” We use terms like “bring more economic stability.” These guys don’t want that. They don’t want “economic stability.” They want to really live the American dream.

A big-a** truck in every driveway sounds like a winning message to me. As I argued back in 2017, the cost of living is an issue that connects traditional Republican policy prescriptions with the concerns of working-class Americans who may not care so much about marginal tax rates or believe in some of the things Republicans have traditionally argued about pro-growth policies. By contrast, sneering at what Americans want to buy is a classic symptom of blinkered Washington central-planner thinking. My own response to Bernie, ten years ago:

You know why America has so many brands of deodorant? Because we’re a very diverse country. Bernie Sanders, being a 73-year-old white guy from a 95% white state, may not know this, but women buy different deodorants than men do, and people of different racial and ethnic groups tend to have different needs and wants as well when it comes to deodorant, shaving cream, shampoo, sunscreen, etc. . . . People with different skin and hair have different needs to care for their skin and their hair and whatnot. (Ask any black man about his shaving needs, or any Irishman about sunburns, and you’ll know what I mean).

And here’s a more serious point about diversity: in a free market, it doesn’t matter if our political leaders don’t know this stuff. You can sell hair straighteners and respiration masks (hello, Chinese immigrants) and all sorts of things that cater to the different needs of different niche markets, and if some guy in a Senate office in Washington has no clue, that doesn’t matter. But the more the government gets involved in the economy, the more those kinds of local, neighborhood needs get forgotten because powerful people don’t know anybody who buys that stuff.

There were a lot of memes during the campaign contrasting Trump’s promises of abundance with the sad state of prices and shelves under Biden. If Trump thinks that Americans are going to support his party when his message shifts to “suck it up and buy less stuff for your kids this Christmas,” Republicans are headed to a Carter-sized catastrophe. Just because the coal miners voted for you doesn’t mean they want a lump of coal in every stocking.