MAGA world is giving the House GOP cover on Trump’s housing push

“The House does need to step up and just get this done. Look, everything incremental right now is going to help the housing problem. We need to throw everything at it,” Pulte said on Bannon’s show. “This thing’s very important. They got to pass it, and they got to pass it quick.”

The populist push comes less than 48 hours after the president took to Truth Social to urge Congress to pass the Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — a call that House Republicans so far have yet to heed. The bill, which aims to increase housing supply and homeownership, passed the Senate 89-10 but House Republicans are demanding tweaks and saying that the president’s call to pass the Senate version was an invitation to amend it.

A senior administration official, granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics, said it is critically important to score an affordability win before the midterms, pointing to the housing bill as a top target because it passed with such broad bipartisan support.

“I’m grateful for the outside cover. I know in the 21st Century, a lot of members listen to that kind of online conversation,” the official said.

The official said that some members of Congress may be more persuaded by hearing arguments from the MAGAverse instead of traditional surrogates, and pointed to the growing number of members who have since come out publicly in support of the legislation on X.

Posobiec and Pulte did not respond to a request for further comment on the housing bill. Cass referred to a thread he had posted on X on the topic, and said that he had originally planned to go on Bannon’s show to talk about China but added housing at the last minute.

A White House official, granted anonymity to speak about the push, said the administration is “communicating its aggressive housing affordability actions with influencers and other surrogates to get the presidents message out there.”

“This is standard operations,” the official added.

A recent poll from the Bipartisan Policy Center found that 89 percent of voters want Congress to pass legislation to make housing more affordable. And Republicans are facing broader economic headwinds amid high gas prices and the highest inflation rate since 2023.

But the White House’s inability to easily corral Republicans reflects a deep divide inside the GOP that Trump — for all his dominance over the party — hasn’t been able to paper over. A swath of House Republicans who are traditionally aligned with business interests still recoil at Trump’s more populist whims.

In a Wednesday morning interview on “Fox Business,” House Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill, the principal opposition, worried the Senate’s bill curtails investment into the housing industry.

That sentiment has some close to the White House skeptical that the cover from right-wing figures will be enough to get the Senate bill across the finish line.

Cass said that traditional Republicans are “putting out this, like old warmed-over leftover stuff about how obviously corporations only succeed if they’re serving people.”

“We’re all familiar with these arguments. They’re the ones that, certainly, drove the Republican Party into a ditch, and I think in a lot of ways really hurt our economy, really hurt affordability, really hurt middle-class families,” Cass said.

Some Republicans oppose a Senate provision that prevents large investors from owning more than 350 single-family homes because they see it as interference with the free market. But the unusually bipartisan coalition pushing the bill in the Senate, led by Banking Chair Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and ranking member Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), say that the ban — which the president pushed for in his State of the Union — will lower housing prices.

Separately, some GOP hardliners object to the Senate’s temporary ban on the Federal Reserve issuing a digital dollar.

Efforts to cajole Republicans have, so far, been relatively modest. But one person close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly about sensitive dynamics around the legislation, said the president is going to need to twist arms if he wants the Senate’s version to pass without tinkering from the House, a process that would certainly delay and possibly derail the effort. White House officials have not said when, or even if, the president will do so.

“The House will only move if the president starts direct member lobbying,” the person said.

That’s not likely to happen in the immediate future, the senior administration official said. Trump isn’t likely to browbeat or delve into the weeds on conservative philosophy.

“Any advocacy strategy involves the president, but the president is the closer, not the opener,” the official said.

The person added that the kind of vague public pressure the president has exerted so far would normally be “enough to get the House [Republicans] to back off and pass a Senate bill” but “the bill is not getting attention from the wider public.”

And the president has yet to change that with “a high volume effort,” the person added, as his attention is focused on China and Iran.

Katherine Hapgood and Cassandra Dumay contributed to this report.