Good morning. It is 11 o'clock on the East Coast. 8 a.m. in the West Coast. I'm Ali Valshi,

and we're live from MS Now's brand new studios in Times Square. We begin this hour with a new line of messaging that you might have noticed coming from the White House this week.

It wasn't that long

ago, right around the Democrats' clean sweep in the November 4th elections, to be exact, that Donald

Trump suddenly seemed to discover the meaning of the A word, the affordability, as he calls it.

In classic Trump fashion, it started that very morning with you guessed it, a post, as if someone

on his team had whispered,

use this word, it pulls well. And ever since, he's been trying out the sentence,

trying it out in sentences the way a kid tests a new vocabulary word, awkwardly, unevenly,

what the kids would call cringe.

Our energy costs are way down, our groceries are way down, everything is way down.

So I don't want to hear about the affordability.

So the affordability is much better with the Republicans.

The only problem is the Republicans don't talk about it.

You can probably empathize with Donald Trump for fumbling with a word with which he's never had much of a

relationship, a man best known for the gaudy, the gilded, and the grossly overpriced. For him,

affordability, or as he likes to call it, the affordability, is just another buzzword to toss into a post,

embraced half-heartedly and discarded just as quickly. But the so-called affordability,

particularly housing affordability, is very real, very urgent. It's a worsening problem in the United States. And the old pyramid

of the American dream owning a home sat at the very top, a defining milestone, and the clearest path to

generational wealth. But for millions of ordinary Americans, that pyramid has crumbled.

Years of runaway costs turbocharged by a rogue Wall Street and a distorted housing market

...