Donald Trump has apparently woken up and realized he is getting beaten badly on a big political issue -- and one that he leaned on heavily during his last presidential campaign. So he's been complaining about Democrats hitting him on affordability since last week's election (where Republicans got spanked in pretty much every race they ran in). Trump insists that all prices are way, way down and Democrats are just lying about affordability being a big issue.

He is, of course, delusional about this. Affordability is a huge political issue right now, and it is one of the main reasons Democrats did so well at the ballot box last week. In the two big governors' races and the New York City mayoral race, Democratic candidates from across the political spectrum campaigned heavily on exactly the same issue -- and won.

Trump's response was typical -- an off-the-cuff knee-jerk idea that is so unworkable as to be breathtaking. He obviously didn't discuss it with anyone who can actually do math, he just blurted it out on social media and left his aides to attempt to clean up the mess. His idea? He's going to send everyone in America a check for $2,000, to prove that his trade war is going swimmingly. The tariffs are raking in so much money that he's just going to hand it all out as a "dividend" or "rebate" to all of us.

The very next day his Treasury secretary was desperately trying to walk this back, by trying to spin it out of existence. Americans are already going to get a $2,000 benefit, he insisted, through all the wonderful tax cuts they're going to get next year. They'll get it "in lots of forms, in lots of ways." Just not in an actual check in your mailbox, in other words.

The reason for this backpedal is pretty obvious. America has roughly 340 million people in it. If you cut a $2,000 check for every man, woman, and child, it would cost a whopping $680 billion. Even if you limited it in some way (cut the children out, for instance), it's still going to cost far more than the tariffs have brought in. If you conservatively limited it down to only handing out checks to, say, 150 million people, it would still cost $300 billion -- which is twice what the tariffs have so far brought in. That amount of money could (coincidentally enough) cover exactly what the Democrats were pushing for in the government shutdown -- extending Obamacare subsidies for ten more years.

The political battle in Washington is going to quickly move on from ending the shutdown to the push to extend the Obamacare subsidies (for the promised December vote on a bill in the Senate). Nobody knows what the end result will be. Will enough Republicans actually support the concept (even with new limits on who gets them)? Will the House even hold a vote on a bill, if one manages somehow to get passed by the Senate? Will Trump sign such a bill or veto it out of spite? Nobody knows. But if the effort fails, the skyrocketing cost of health insurance is going to be an enormous political issue in next year's midterms (which is the sole reason why enough Republicans to pass such a bill might actually materialize, to de-fang the issue pre-emptively).

Health insurance costs are just one aspect of affordability, though. There are plenty of others as well, and so far Trump has been completely ignoring them all. The only thing he's done is to make the cost of living worse, with all his tariffs, even though inflation and the economy (taken together) figured heavily in his campaign. Trump's two major campaign issues were the economy and immigration, in fact, and he's been completely ignoring one of them (when he's not making it worse). This is why Democrats have such a huge political opening on it.

Trump and (more importantly) those around him are just now realizing that they are politically vulnerable on the issue. However, Trump can never admit that anything is going wrong on his watch, so he has taken a "Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin' eyes?" approach. He figures if he can just repeat the refrain of "prices are way, way down and inflation has disappeared" over and over again, eventually his supporters will believe him.

But reality has a way of hitting voters in the pocketbook so hard that this approach seems destined to fail. Being sunny and talking about how wonderful things are doesn't really work when people aren't feeling it -- just ask Joe Biden. Consumer sentiment is now lower than it was during Biden's entire term, which doesn't exactly bode well for Trump's sunshine-and-roses tactic. People are feeling economic pain and they don't expect things to get better any time soon.

Trump loves to make sweeping promises, but he's not very good at following through on most of them. During his campaign, he promised Americans would be paying less for everything, including one rather specific benchmark: "That means we're going down and getting gasoline below $2.00 a gallon, bring down the price of everything from electricity rates to groceries, airfares, and housing costs." More often, he would promise to get prices down by half within his first year in office: "We're going to get your energy prices down by 50 percent."

In nine days, Trump will have been in office for ten months. And (of course) he's nowhere near making good on his promises. Let's take a look at the price of gasoline. Recently, many mainstream media outlets have credulously bought into the idea that "gas prices are down" -- sometimes using words such as "plummeting," even, or "have fallen sharply" or similar language signifying a huge change in prices. But the actual data does not back any of this exuberance up.

Using the GasBuddy.com website, which tracks the average price of a gallon of regular gas across the country, we see that the reality is far less impressive and does not justify exuberance at all. On the day that Donald Trump took office, the average price of a gallon of gas in America was $3.10.

Since then, Trump has routinely just flat-out lied about how wonderful his influence has been. Very early on in his second term, he regularly bragged that the price of gas was now down to $2.00 a gallon (or slightly lower, just to gild this fake lily) in multiple states. But rather tellingly, he would never name any of these states. He couldn't, because they did not exist, period. The price of gas this year has been nowhere near two bucks a gallon anywhere in America, no matter what Trump says about it.

Instead, gas prices have essentially remained flat. For most of the year, they have fluctuated in the range between about $3.09 and $3.20 a gallon. This is normal marketplace churn, but the overall trendline has been pretty flat -- not going up or down at all.

There have been brief periods outside this range, but not by much and not for long. In March, prices dipped down to $3.02 but then almost immediately spiked back up to $3.26, before settling back down into the $3.09-3.20 range once again.

Over the last few months, prices have come down, from roughly $3.20 down to just below $3.00 a gallon ($2.98 or $2.99, both for just one day before rising back above $3.00 again. Today the average price of a gallon of gas is back up to $3.08 -- down precisely two cents from the day Trump took office. Even the most dramatic drop in price (in the past two months) was only a change of roughly twenty-five cents per gallon -- which is a fluctuation of around eight percent, total. Gas prices have not "plummeted" at all.

This data is easily available to all -- even mainstream media reporters. When Trump brags about how gas prices are "way, way down," all they have to do is check the reality of the situation. For average people, this is not necessary since they see the price of gas every time they fill up their tanks. People are relieved prices have fallen a little bit, but even so, nobody's buying gas for two bucks a gallon anywhere. And nobody in their right mind expects to be paying $1.55 a gallon within two months -- which is what Trump promised he'd do by then (reduce the price by half).

Meanwhile, other energy costs are up -- way up, in some places. Electric bills have been climbing, and in fact were one of the biggest issues in the New Jersey governor's race. That race was predicted to be a close one, with many speculating that the Republican candidate might just pull off an upset win. But the Democrat -- who campaigned on freezing the price of electricity -- easily won by double digits instead.

Under Trump, inflation has gone up, food prices have gone up, coffee prices have gone way up, gasoline prices have stayed flat, electricity prices have gone up, and now health insurance costs are going to double or even triple for some families. Meanwhile, Trump is calling the issue of affordability a "con job" from the Democrats.

With the federal government reopening again, we will soon start to get hard data about the state of the economy once again. The jobs market is soft, and may actually be contracting. Inflation may have gone up. People are living this reality, whether Trump wants to face it or not. So yes indeed, this is going to be a very potent political issue heading into next year's midterms. Democrats are going to be running on Trump's broken promises to fix the economy and bring everyone's prices down, while Trump is going to be trying to gaslight everyone into believing that everything is wonderful. Democrats will be addressing the reality that voters are living, while Trump will continue to insist: "Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin' pocketbook?"

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant