President Trump’s administration is trying to pivot to a message more focused on affordability by going after alleged price-fixing in certain industries. Mr. Trump himself has refused to talk about the cost of living issue without mentioning that he sees it all as a “Democrat hoax” or a “con job.”

Republicans started getting concerned with the president’s poor approval rating on the economy and inflation after last month’s elections, which saw Democrats swept into power by wide margins in Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia, New York, and elsewhere. 

On Saturday, as part of its response, the White House announced that it was borrowing a page from President Biden’s playbook and began blaming the private sector — not the president’s import taxes — for the price increases.  Mr. Trump signed an executive order establishing at least two task forces to ensure competitiveness in the food supply chain. 

“An affordable and secure food supply is vital to America’s national and economic security.  However, anti-competitive behavior, especially when carried out by foreign-controlled corporations, threatens the stability and affordability of America’s food supply,” the executive order setting up the new task forces states. 

The two separate panels will be under the umbrellas of the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission. The DOJ and FTC will both be required “to remedy any anti-competitive behavior that their respective investigations uncover, including bringing enforcement actions and proposing new regulatory approaches,” according to Mr. Trump’s executive order. 

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, aides have been pushing Mr. Trump to get more serious about the issue of affordability, especially with his approval rating dipping to around 40 percent. The slide has been driven, in part, by the poor marks Mr. Trump is receiving from voters on his economic management. 

He is reportedly telling his aides, however, exactly what he has been saying publicly for weeks now — it’s a “hoax.”

“Affordability is a hoax that was started by Democrats,” Mr. Trump told reporters during a cabinet meeting this past week. 

Seated behind the Resolute Desk on Thursday, Mr. Trump again insisted that talking about the economy in ways that are not positive would be taking the Democrats’ bait. 

“I think affordability is the biggest con job,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “They look at you and they say, ‘affordability!’ They don’t say anything else … They had the worst inflation.”

Mr. Trump’s insistence that the economy is doing wonderfully in the face of voters’ concerns is reminiscent of President Biden’s attempts to explain away the rampant inflation of his tenure. In the months leading up to the 2024 election — while he was still a candidate — Mr. Biden’s team also launched initiatives to crack down on what he saw as anti-competitive behavior in the private sector. 

“[C]ompanies are keeping prices high even though input costs are falling and supply chains are back to normal. President Biden is calling on corporations to pass along savings to consumers by bringing prices down,” the White House said in a press release in early March 2024. Around that same time, Mr. Biden was somewhere between 15 and 25 points underwater on how voters approved of his economic stewardship of the country. 

Now, Mr. Trump is in a similar spot headed into a midterm election year. 

According to one poll last month from CBS News and YouGov, voters are persistently disappointed by how Mr. Trump has failed to make life more affordable. By more than a two-to-one margin — 32 percent to 68 percent — voters disapprove of how Mr. Trump is handling the issue of inflation, according to that survey. Just 36 percent of respondents approve of how he is managing the economy, compared to 64 percent who disapprove. 

The vast majority of Americans — 58 percent — told pollsters they have been seeing their costs go up in recent weeks while only 31 percent say prices have been stable.