Foreclosures Surge While Trump Calls the Crisis a Hoax
Filings are up 21% in a year and 28% over two years. Credit-card delinquencies have hit a 15-year high. Tariffs are adding thousands to the price of every new home. And the president dismisses affordability as a Democratic “con job.” The economy is telling us something. So is his refusal to hear it.
The country is losing its homes again. Not at the catastrophic pace of 2009 — not yet — but at a rate that has climbed for six straight quarters, in a housing market already choked by unaffordability, layered on top of a consumer credit system flashing red, presided over by a president who insists nothing is wrong. According to ATTOM’s Mid-Year 2026 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report, more than 227,000 properties carried a foreclosure filing in just the first six months of this year — up 21% from the same period in 2025, and up 28% from the first half of 2024. In the meantime, Donald Trump held a Cabinet meeting in December and called the very idea of an affordability crisis a “con job.”
He said the quiet part loud. And then he said it again in Pennsylvania. And again in Florida. Affordability is a “hoax,” the president told his supporters — a “fake narrative” invented by Democrats. The people losing their homes did not get the memo.
I. The Numbers Nobody Should Ignore
ATTOM’s data — the industry standard, compiled from more than 3,000 counties covering 99% of the U.S. population — is unambiguous. First-half foreclosure filings jumped from 187,659 in 2025 to 227,548 in 2026, a 21.3% year-over-year increase. Compared to the first half of 2024, foreclosures are up 28.2%. The Q1 2026 numbers alone were 26% above Q1 2025, according to HousingWire’s reporting on ATTOM’s quarterly release. Bank repossessions — the terminal end of the pipeline, when a family loses the house — surged 45% year-over-year in the first quarter.
The geography is telling. Foreclosure activity in Idaho jumped 59%. Colorado, up 57%. Georgia, 52%. North Carolina, 47%. Mississippi, 45%. These are Sun Belt and Mountain West states that saw explosive pandemic-era home-price appreciation, followed by punishing increases in insurance premiums and property taxes. Rob Barber, CEO of ATTOM, told National Mortgage News that the rise reflects a market “gradually returning to more typical patterns.” That is one reading. The other, offered by Mirza Hodzic of BlackWolf Advisory Group in the same coverage, is more sobering: “Higher taxes, insurance, and everyday household costs are making it harder for some borrowers to recover once they fall behind, even when the mortgage payment itself has not changed.”
H1 2026 Foreclosure Filings
Total U.S. properties with a foreclosure filing in the first six months of 2026 — up 21% year-over-year and 28% over two years, per ATTOM via MBA Newslink.
Q1 REO Repossessions
Bank repossessions — completed foreclosures — rose 45% year-over-year in Q1 2026, the sharpest signal of stress at the end of the pipeline.
Credit Card 90+ DPD
Share of credit card balances 90+ days delinquent, a 15-year high, per the New York Fed data reported by CardRates.
Added Cost Per New Home
Additional cost per newly built home from Trump administration tariffs, per the Center for American Progress.
II. Affordability Is Not a Hoax
The word Trump wants outlawed from political speech is doing precise work. Inflation as a monthly rate has cooled — the March 2026 CPI came in at 3.3%, per Salon’s reporting on Bureau of Labor Statistics data — but a cooler rate of increase does not undo four years of accumulated price growth. A carton of eggs that is no longer rising in price is still, as one recent analysis put it, roughly 138% more expensive than it was in 2021. That gap between what the statistics report and what a household actually experiences is precisely what the word “affordability” was reintroduced to describe.
The president understood that, and he did not like it. During his December 2 Cabinet meeting, as Fox News reported, Trump denounced the entire framing: “You just say it. Affordability. I inherited the worst inflation in history. There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything. The prices were massively high. But the word affordability is a con job by the Democrats.” A week later, in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, NPR reported he escalated the language, telling the crowd he believed “affordability” was a “hoax.”
“You just say it. Affordability. I inherited the worst inflation in history… But the word affordability is a con job by the Democrats.”
— President Donald Trump, Cabinet Meeting, December 2, 2025
The response from Congressional Democrats was immediate and specific. Representative Hillary Scholten of Michigan, co-chair of the Lowering Costs Caucus, issued a joint statement with Representatives Greg Landsman of Ohio and Derek Tran of California. “Make no mistake: the affordability crisis is real, and it is crippling the American dream,” Scholten said. “The only people who don’t realize that are the out of touch billionaires that the president continues to put before American families.” Tran added that “affordability means everything to the parents working multiple jobs, seniors living on fixed incomes, and young people trying to build their future.”
Those Americans are exactly the ones filling ATTOM’s foreclosure database.
III. The Stress Beneath the Banks
A foreclosure wave does not exist in isolation. It is one line on a household balance sheet that has other lines going the wrong way at the same time. CardRates, citing Federal Reserve Bank of New York data, reports that 13.12% of credit card balances were 90 or more days delinquent in the first quarter of 2026 — the highest level in fifteen years, since the immediate aftermath of the 2008 collapse. Total credit card debt reached $1.25 trillion. The average credit card interest rate is roughly 21.5%. Consumers are financing basic living costs at loan-shark rates and falling behind at a pace last seen when Lehman Brothers was still a memory in the present tense.
The pain is not evenly distributed inside the banking system, and that matters. According to American Default’s analysis of Federal Reserve series data, delinquency at banks outside the top 100 is running at 6.4% — roughly 3.5 percentage points above the aggregate rate. The largest issuers tightened underwriting after 2008. Subprime card exposure now concentrates at smaller, less-capitalized institutions. Lambda Finance’s bank-by-bank breakdown shows the spread between JPMorgan’s 2.3% delinquency and Synchrony’s 4.8% is wider than at any point since 2010 — the single clearest signal that consumer credit stress is concentrating exactly where a shock would do the most damage.
Layer that credit-card stress on top of rising foreclosures, add tariff-driven inflation on essentials, subtract the shrinking universe of home-equity cushion available to households whose home values are softening, and the arithmetic gets ugly quickly. This is what economists mean when they talk about the transmission mechanism from a household-level crisis to a systemic one. It is not that any single number is 2008. It is that the numbers are moving in the same direction, at the same time, in the same households.
IV. What Trump Is Doing to Make It Worse
The administration is not a passive observer of these trends. It is an active accelerant. The Center for American Progress estimated in late 2025 that Trump’s tariffs on lumber, copper, cabinets, and steel are adding approximately $17,500 to the cost of every newly built home, and will result in roughly 450,000 fewer homes constructed over the next five years. The National Association of Home Builders, cited in reporting on tariff impacts, projects a $7,500-to-$10,000 per-home increase in construction costs from tariffs on materials imported from Canada, Mexico, and China. Reuters data cited in the same coverage showed U.S. single-family home construction fell 14.2% in a single month in March 2025 — the lowest level since the prior July — with builder confidence sinking on the same tariff concerns.
Gregg Colburn, a real estate professor at the University of Washington, put it plainly to ABC News: “There are a lot of questions about how we can deal with the housing affordability crisis — these tariffs would do the exact opposite.” In March 2025, Senator Jacky Rosen sent a formal letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick calling the tariffs “reckless and self-defeating” and warning they would “drastically increase the cost of constructing housing in the United States.” That letter was written before the president expanded tariffs further. It was ignored.
The administration’s actual housing plan, floated in November 2025, was to invent a 50-year mortgage. Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte announced on X that the administration was “indeed working on The 50 year Mortgage — a complete game changer.” National Mortgage News reported the president juxtaposed his own image with Franklin Roosevelt’s, positioning himself as the heir to the New Deal architect of the 30-year mortgage. The proposal was immediately excoriated on both left and right — a 50-year term would trim monthly payments by roughly 9% while dramatically increasing lifetime interest costs and, as the Center for Economic and Policy Research pointed out, likely raising home prices by expanding the debt capacity buyers can carry. By January, Pulte was walking it back.
Pulte’s day job, meanwhile, has consisted largely of trawling mortgage applications for evidence of alleged wrongdoing by Trump’s political enemies — New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and Representative Eric Swalwell, per the same CEPR reporting. The chief regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the agency that oversees the market infrastructure through which roughly half of American mortgages flow, is spending his energy on political enforcement. This is what leadership on the housing crisis looks like inside the second Trump administration.
“Every day, Donald Trump commits acts unfit for the office of the President… These threats make America less safe and are driving us towards another Great Recession.”
— Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), April 7, 2026
V. The Ghost of 2008
Housing economists are largely, and correctly, resistant to full 2008 comparisons. Dodd-Frank’s ability-to-repay rule wiped out the no-doc, teaser-rate subprime lending that fueled the last collapse. Households entered 2026 with debt at roughly two-thirds of GDP, versus nearly 100% at the 2007 peak, per Forbes’ review of the deleveraging data. Inventory of unsold homes sits around 3.8 months, per Yahoo Finance’s reporting on NAR data, versus the 13 months of oversupply that preceded the 2008 collapse. The banking system is better capitalized. The lending is more disciplined.
But it is exactly this — the reassurance that we are not repeating 2008 — that risks obscuring what is happening now. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent himself, in comments reported by Yahoo Finance, has already described the housing market as being in a “recession” driven by Federal Reserve policy. Independent analyst Melody Wright, cited in the same coverage, predicted the downturn could “begin in earnest” this year. And even the more cautious voices — like ATTOM’s own Rob Barber — describe “continued financial pressure” and note that repossessions climbing 45% year-over-year does not point toward stabilization.
The 2008 crisis did not begin the day Lehman failed. It began years earlier, in exactly this kind of data — foreclosures rising steadily, subprime credit stress concentrating in the weakest institutions, consumer balance sheets fraying, and a political leadership that spent every quarter of the buildup telling the country that fundamentals were strong. What is different now is not that the ingredients are absent. It is that some of the shock absorbers built after the last crisis are still in place — and that the White House is systematically weakening the rest.
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Sen. Jacky Rosen formally warns Commerce Secretary Lutnick that Trump’s 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods will “drastically increase” U.S. housing construction costs. Warning ignored.
FHFA Director Bill Pulte announces the administration is “working on The 50 year Mortgage — a complete game changer.” Broad criticism from housing economists follows.
At his final Cabinet meeting of 2025, President Trump calls affordability a “con job by the Democrats” and a “fake narrative.”
Trump escalates in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, labeling affordability a “hoax.” Reps. Scholten, Landsman, and Tran issue a coordinated pushback statement.
ATTOM releases Q1 2026 data: 118,727 foreclosure filings, up 26% year-over-year. Bank repossessions rise 45%.
NY Fed data confirms credit-card 90+ day delinquencies hit 13.12% — a 15-year high, echoing early-2010 crisis conditions.
ATTOM Mid-Year Report: 227,548 filings in H1 2026, up 21% year-over-year and 28% over two years. Idaho +59%, Colorado +57%, Georgia +52%.
“Unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” — and the deliberate silence at the heart of it.
Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment gives the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet — or a body Congress designates — the authority to declare a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” at which point the Vice President assumes those powers as Acting President. The amendment was ratified in 1967, drafted in the shadow of the Kennedy assassination and the Wilson stroke, and its language is deliberately capacious. The drafters never defined “unable” or “inability.” They discussed doing so and chose not to. John Feerick — the young lawyer whose 1965 constitutional scholarship shaped the amendment’s language, quoted in PBS NewsHour’s reporting — has been explicit that the term was left open on purpose. Physical incapacity, mental incapacity, and, in the words of the amendment’s own architects, an inability that includes a president “unable to make or communicate his decisions” all qualify.
That framing has already been invoked, by name, by sitting members of Congress in 2026. After Trump’s Easter Truth Social post threatening to bomb Iranian civilian infrastructure, more than 85 House and Senate Democrats — according to Axios — called for either impeachment or removal via the 25th Amendment. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) wrote: “If I were in Trump’s Cabinet, I would spend Easter calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th Amendment.” Representative Mike Quigley (D-IL) issued a formal call for Cabinet removal, citing acts that are “driving us towards another Great Recession.” Representative Jamie Raskin introduced legislation to create a commission empowered to assess presidential inability under Section 4. Representative Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) wrote: “The emperor has no clothes. Time for the #25thAmendment. Congress and the Cabinet must act.” Governor Gavin Newsom, after Trump’s July 16 prime-time election-fraud speech, told reporters: “This is a 25th Amendment moment.”
The economic case is narrower than the war-and-peace case, and it is not the same case. But it is not off the table. A president who calls a documented affordability crisis a “hoax,” who imposes tariffs his own advisors warn are counterproductive, who watches foreclosures climb for six straight quarters and responds with a 50-year mortgage proposal — that is a pattern the framers’ language contemplates. “Unable” is not the same as “unwilling.” It is broader than that. It includes a settled inability to perceive the country as it is.
The practical barriers are formidable and worth stating honestly. Section 4 requires the sitting Vice President — currently JD Vance — and a majority of Trump’s own Cabinet to act. If the president contests the declaration, Congress must ratify it by a two-thirds vote of both chambers within 21 days. Republican control of Congress makes the second step effectively impossible under current conditions. The 25th Amendment was not designed for the ordinary friction of partisan politics; it was designed for extraordinary incapacity, and it requires an extraordinary consensus to invoke.
None of that erases the constitutional argument. The Amendment exists precisely so that the country is not left defenseless when a president can no longer perform the job — and the definition of “the job” includes recognizing the reality of the economy the president governs. The high procedural bar is a feature, not a defense against ever using the tool. It is what makes the tool credible when its use is unavoidable. That day may not be today. It is closer than it was in January.
Editorial Conclusion
Foreclosures are rising. Consumer credit is failing at a rate last seen in the wreckage of 2008. Tariff policy is making homes more expensive to build at the exact moment American families are least able to afford them. The president of the United States has responded by declaring the crisis a fabrication.
This is not a policy disagreement. It is a refusal to see the country — the same refusal that turns rising defaults into cascading defaults, and a housing correction into a housing collapse. A leader unwilling to name what is in front of him is, by the plain text of Article II and the Twenty-fifth Amendment, doing something other than the job.
The economy will recover from a bad president. It has before. What we cannot afford is a democratic system unwilling to use the constitutional tools its own drafters left for exactly this moment. The tools exist. The question is whether we will use them.
Sources & References
- MBA Newslink / ATTOM — Foreclosure Activity Increased in 1H 2026
- HousingWire — Foreclosures climb 21% in first half of 2026
- ATTOM Data — Q1 2026 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report
- National Mortgage News — Spiking local foreclosures signal new credit risks
- HousingWire — U.S. foreclosure filings rise 26% in Q1 2026
- CardRates / NY Fed — Credit Card Delinquency Rate Hits 15-Year High
- American Default — Credit Card Default Statistics 2026
- Lambda Finance — Credit Card Delinquency Rate 2026: Bank-by-Bank
- Center for American Progress — Trump Tariffs Could Result in 450,000 Fewer New Homes
- Sen. Jacky Rosen — Letter to Commerce Secretary Lutnick on Tariffs
- ABC News (Yahoo) — Trump’s tariffs could increase home prices and mortgage rates
- National Mortgage News — Trump, Pulte float 50-year mortgage
- Center for Economic and Policy Research — 50-Year Mortgages: What Bill Pulte Does
- The MortgagePoint — Pulte Pulls Back on 50-Year Mortgage Plan
- Fox News — Trump calls affordability messaging a “con job”
- NPR — Trump calls affordability crisis a ‘hoax’
- Rep. Hillary Scholten — Lowering Costs Caucus Pushes Back on “Hoax” Comment
- Salon — Trump’s “affordability hoax” may doom him
- Forbes — How We Know The Housing Boom Became A Bubble
- Yahoo Finance / Newsweek — US housing market poised to crash “worse than 2008”
- Axios — House Democrats file 25th Amendment bill
- PBS NewsHour — Could the 25th Amendment be invoked against Trump?
- Rep. Mike Quigley — Quigley Calls for Trump’s Removal Under 25th Amendment
- The New Republic — Trump’s Election Speech Sparks 25th Amendment Calls
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