This is just the latest adventures with President Trump who seems to just spew new things off the top of his head, for reasons that are beyond me, unless he somehow is truly worried for the midterm elections and his legacy. He and quite a few other Republicans in both the House and the Senate don’t really mind moving left of center and doing things that stand in contravention of sound economic policies and the traditional conservative philosophy.

For over a decade now, I have repeatedly told people that Donald Trump is far from being a conservative as a goat is from being an elephant, and nevertheless, his better policy ideas regarding energy and the border helped propel him into the presidency. Now, once again President Trump is proving to me and all America that he is a yellow-dog Democrat holding tightly to Democrat idiotic notions, as he recently compared himself on Truth Social in glowing terms to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a socialist, and proposed implementing a fifty-year mortgage to help more Americans become first time homeowners, one of the worst effing ideas ever set forth by a sitting U.S. president.

On November 8th 2025, President Trump posted a graphic titled ‘Great American Presidents” with his portrait labeled “50-Year Mortgage next to a portrait of President Franklin Roosevelt labeled “30-Year Mortgage”. And shortly afterwards, his Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte, confirmed on the social media site “X” that the federal government is “working on The 50 year Mortgage – a complete game changer“.

Yep – Pulte gets the annual award for understatement with that one – a complete game changer indeed.

Please understand, Bill Pulte is also the heir to the Pulte home building fortune, and his namesake company is the third largest homebuilder in the world, with an annual revenue of $17 Billion. One can rest assured that there’s no conflict of interest here, now can’t they, with Pulte supporting a fifty-year mortgage scheme which will further enrich him and his family. And so it goes.

No matter how badly one wishes to escape renting and landlords, anyone who applies for a fifty-year mortgage – if the Trump administration can bring it to fruition – is an unbelievably and incredibly ignorant person, a true dumbass who will get raked over the economic coals on this one.

The Trump administration will have to take this through Congress, in order to change existing law, unless it can convince leaders to offer 50-year mortgages under some new twist and a manipulation of law under alternative terms. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Consumer Protection Act, the legislation that currently regulates mortgage underwriting, currently does not provide for qualified mortgages on a 50-year long term.

At the start of the 20th Century, mortgages were most usually fairly short, lasting five years or so and largely designed to ensure most of that was interest; and upon “final payment” day, the debtor had to return a big lump sum to the bank. House prices stayed relatively inexpensive in those days, because people couldn’t afford to borrow huge sums of money, but with the creation of the 30-year fully amortized mortgage in the 1930s things began to change in an undesirable direction, whereby houses weren’t made more affordable and the price ceiling had been removed. And the banks loved this, because the longer termed loans meant banks were raking in extremely greater financial gains through interest receipts.

Understand – today, the first five years of any home loan is almost totally towards interest payments, and it is only in the later years that a homeowner actually starts paying down his principal on the loan. If the interest rate on your new 50-year mortgage is 6.5% or 7%, you will have only paid approximately 1.3% of the principal over a five-year period, and anyone needing such a loan more than likely will not be able to put down a very sizable downpayment at closing. This alone is a recipe for default.

President Trump’s solution to today’s exorbitant home prices that are twice as high as they should be is to artificially push them even higher by luring millions more of financially illiterate dupes into buying a new home, because his fifty-year mortgage plan makes the monthly payment lower, insignificantly so. And millions of Trump’s MAGA supporters are singing his praises, never mind that this will help drive millions more Americans into debt servitude for life, paying thousands upon thousands more in interest to the Wall Street shysters and creating a housing catastrophe when this farce of an economy ultimately crashes and burns. Trump is setting up his second term to ultimately become a miserable failure, leading to a new financial crisis for the nation to bear.

This is a sign [in my way of thinking] that President Trump and his advisors just now beginning to acknowledge the housing crisis that has existed for at least the past decade. They also see the bank collateral issues at hand as home prices continue to roll higher and higher, due to a variety of factors and dynamics, including a developers’ rising monopoly on a good deal of today’s current real estate market. Home prices have spiked by fifty percent since 2020, and this has become a source of great frustration for younger Americans.

To his credit, President Trump did direct his administration in March to find a way to cut through the red tape and regulations and make federal lands available for new home construction, in order to address the housing affordability problem, in part. But even this will be a pointless endeavor, without mechanisms set in place to ensure these homes are only sold to single families and not the scheming land speculators, hedge funds and real estate developers, who more often than not bring to mind the Simon Legree archetype character or the self-serving corporatists with little care for anything other than the Almighty dollar.

The government must relinquish its claim on vast acreages of land to regular American citizens, to be sold to them at discounted rates without any strings attached, and while I am usually no advocate for government directed solutions, these lands must be free of property taxes in perpetuity. These lands must be sold, possibly even given away under a new homestead act of some sort, to those working families in need rather than vacation-home investors or folks buying them as a second property to use as an air-bed-and-breakfast income generator – and, just as an aside and since I mentioned property taxes, there should be a movement across all fifty states to stop levying all property taxes against family homes.

Look at the payment difference for a $375k home when we apply the two different types of mortgages and their corresponding interest rates of 6.15% for 30 years and 6.5% for 50 years:

A 50-year mortgage results in $480,334.80 more in interest [$926,970.00] due to the longer term and slightly higher rate. This is over double the interest of the 30-year loan. And although the 50-year loan lowers the monthly payment by a paltry $112.37 [$2,282.32 – $2,169.95] and makes home ownership somewhat more affordable in the short-term, it is ultimately significantly costlier in the end.

For the 30-year loan, interest is 119% of the principal [$446,635 divided by $375,000]. Significantly higher, the interest for the 50-year loan comes in at a whopping 247% over the principal [$926,970 divided by $375], revealing a person pays nearly 2.5 times the borrowed amount in interest alone.

A 50-year mortgage doesn’t address the core problem and the lack of affordable homes. In fact, by introducing more buyers – millions more of people into the market who actually are nowhere near being able to afford a new home – they are setting course for a new bubble that will blow like the Krakatoa volcano, because of the lack of affordable homes. Prices will rise until new payments cancel out any significant initial decrease in payments, because the same people will be competing for the same homes, with essentially the same budgets.

Trump’s 50-year mortgages will cause a massive increase in the price of houses in America.

Let’s not forget, that despite numerous bankruptcies in his resume and his subsequent successes, Trump loves debt, and he doesn’t seem to mind placing the rest of us in debt in perpetuity. To this day, he still brags about being “the king of debt”.

No matter how anyone assesses the situation, there exists no instance or method whereby subsidizing or artificially supporting demand without increasing supply makes a home more affordable (depending on one’s definition of “affordable”, I suppose). Trump’s proposal is simply economic illiteracy, the sort of which will simply and quickly drive the unsuspecting deeper into debt than anyone should ever reasonably wish to be or accept.

On a $500k 6.5% loan, if you take it out today at the age of 30, by the time you reach 50-years-old, you will still owe $447,253 after paying $632,749 in usury. Aside from representing a deeply corrupt mechanism that actually approaches the level of theft without a gun, this literally amounts to indentured servitude.

The average age for those who had bought and fully paid for their homes was forty-two in 1965. Today, the average age for those who own their homes is sixty-two. But should this debacle of 50-year mortgages proceed, if you buy a home after completing college [if you can afford to attend some college or university], you just might actually own it by the time you die.

Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA) has been completely wrong on several key issues lately, but her recent assessment of the 50-year mortgage is spot on accurate, noting:

“I don’t like the 50-year mortgages as the solution to the housing affordability crisis. It will ultimately reward the banks, mortgage lenders and homebuilders while people pay far more in interest over time and die before they ever pay off their home. In debt forever, in debt for life!“

On November 9th 2025, Thomas Massie, a Republican Congressman from Kentucky, nailed it when he stated:

“How is ‘here, enjoy this 50-year mortgage’ different from ‘you will own nothing and you will like it‘”

A person would be much better off and better equipped to save their earnings when and where they could to simply build their own home over time, a little at a time. I cannot begin to tell you the number of people I have witnessed who did this very thing very well and came away with a fantastic home at a significantly lower cost, even if it did initially seem to be a bit of a harder struggle along the way.

But anything of any real worth comes by way of real and significant, meaningful efforts.

Otherwise, until and unless something meaningful is implemented and homes are made truly affordable for those who are willing to put in the work to own one, the banks win and the American people lose.

“Great American Presidents” my ass …..

America doesn’t need longer mortgages – we don’t need or want 50-year mortgages, because that’s not relief. America doesn’t need or want debt in perpetuity dressed up as affordability. America needs more homes built along the horizon and lower house prices, however we as a people and a nation can make this happen.

November 12, 2025

~ the Author ~
Justin O. Smith Has Lived in Tennessee Off and on Most of His Adult Life, and Graduated From Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, With a B.S. And a Double Major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – Minors in Military Science and English, for What Its Worth. His Real Education Started From That Point on. Smith Is a Frequent Contributor to the Family of Kettle Moraine Publications.