‘Great Work, @realDonaldTrump.’ Newsom Posted a Housing Chart That Blames the Wrong President.
On Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) posted a chart from his personal X account titled “U.S. Homes are now the most unaffordable in history,” captioning it “Great work, @realDonaldTrump!” The implication was unmistakable: Trump made housing unaffordable.
There is just one problem. The steep climb in the very chart Newsom shared happened almost entirely on someone else’s watch — and the public data closest to what that chart measures has been flat to slightly down since Trump took office in January 2025.
- $65,292Feb. 2021income needed to afford the median-priced U.S. home — Redfin
- $114,627Oct. 2023, +76%then-record high, reached under President Biden — Redfin
- 2.96% → 6.81%2021 → 2023average 30-year mortgage rate — FRED / Freddie Mac
- $109,796June 2026, -0.5% YoYincome needed to afford median home under Trump — Redfin
- $930,260CA median, 2025-26up from $784,800 in 2021, under Newsom's own tenure — C.A.R.
The chart Newsom quote-tweeted originated with the market-data account @Barchart, plotting a measure of U.S. home unaffordability that climbs sharply from roughly 2021 onward and levels off toward the right edge of the graphic. Newsom added no analysis, no timeframe, no caveat — just the sarcastic caption crediting President Donald Trump (R) for the line on the screen.
Great work, @realDonaldTrump!
The reaction was swift, and it came largely from people who simply looked at the dates on the x-axis. Commentary sites from Twitchy to Townhall to PJ Media picked up the post within a day, all making the same basic observation: the chart’s dramatic upward slope corresponds almost exactly to the four years before Trump took office, not the eight months since. Within hours, the post had become a case study in what happens when a chart is shared for its shape rather than its labels — a familiar trap on both sides of the aisle, but a notable one for a sitting governor to walk into on his own account.
Redfin’s “income needed to afford the median-priced home” series — the best public proxy for the kind of chart Newsom shared — tells a specific story with specific dates. In February 2021, a household needed roughly $65,292 in annual income to afford the median home. By October 2023, that figure had climbed to a then-record $114,627— a roughly 76% increase in under three years. Pandemic-era home-price spikes drove part of it; a near-tripling of borrowing costs drove the rest, with the average 30-year mortgage rate rising from 2.96% in 2021 to 6.81% in 2023, per Freddie Mac data tracked by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
That entire climb happened under President Biden, whose term ran from January 2021 to January 2025. Two forces drove it at the same time. Ultra-low pandemic-era rates pulled buyers into a market with too few homes for sale, pushing prices up; then the Federal Reserve’s inflation-fighting rate hikes more than doubled the cost of a mortgage in barely two years, so even as price growth cooled, the monthly payment on a median home kept climbing. Both dynamics were well underway before Trump was sworn in for his second term. It is the period the “Great work” caption skips past entirely.
Trump’s second term began January 20, 2025. Since then, the same Redfin affordability figure has been roughly flat, not worse: $110,382 in June 2025, drifting down to $109,796 by June 2026 — a 0.5% year-over-year decline, according to Redfin’s August 2026 report. Average mortgage rates have eased slightly too, to roughly 6.60% in 2025 from their 2023 peak. None of that is a dramatic improvement, and it does not mean housing has become affordable — a household still needs roughly $45,000 more a year than it did in early 2021 to buy the typical home. But it is a plateau after a spike, not a fresh climb. That distinction is the entire point: the honest complaint about this chart is precision, not which party gets to claim credit or blame. Overcorrecting into “costs are still skyrocketing under Trump” would repeat the same error in the other direction.
“Evidently, @GavinNewsom doesn't know how to read graphs. Housing prices skyrocketed under Joe Biden's presidency.”
Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX), meteorologist and commentator · X, September 2026
Evidently, @GavinNewsom doesn't know how to read graphs. Housing prices skyrocketed under Joe Biden's presidency.
There is a second irony in Newsom crediting Trump with a national affordability problem: California’s own statewide median home price has risen throughout Newsom’s tenure as governor, which began in January 2019. The California Association of Realtors put the statewide median at $784,800 in 2021, climbing to roughly $930,260 by its 2025-26 forecast — on top of a housing market that was already among the least affordable in the country before Newsom took office. That trend line belongs to state-level land-use rules, permitting timelines, and construction costs largely outside federal control — the same category of local factors that shape affordability nationwide, regardless of who occupies the White House. A governor whose own state regularly ranks among the hardest places in America to buy a starter home is not an obviously credible messenger on a chart about who broke housing affordability.
None of that means Newsom bears sole responsibility for California prices either — local zoning boards, county permitting offices, and construction-material costs all play a role no single governor fully controls. The point is narrower: a chart used to assign blame for a national trend invites the same scrutiny of the messenger’s own record, and California’s does not make the case Newsom was implicitly making about his own party’s housing stewardship.
Nice own goal @GavinNewsom.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle (Trump administration) told Fox News Digital that Trump is “laser-focused” on affordability, contrasting that with what he called “incompetent Governor Gavin Newscum.” Ingle pointed to three specific actions: an executive order barring large Wall Street firms from buying up single-family homes, a directive for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200,000,000,000 in mortgage bonds, and deregulation aimed at speeding home construction.
Whether those specific measures move the affordability needle further is a separate question the data above cannot yet answer — the mortgage-bond purchase directive and the construction deregulation push are recent enough that their effects, if any, will not show up cleanly in the numbers for months. What the numbers already show, unambiguously, is which administration presided over the steep part of the line in Newsom’s own chart.
Newsom’s chart was real. The unaffordability it shows was real. What was misleading was the caption — crediting the wrong president for a run-up in housing costs that occurred almost entirely under his predecessor, while the period he blamed has actually been flat to slightly improved. Naming the correct timeframe is not a defense of either administration’s housing record; it is the difference between an argument and a chart shared for its shape.
