When it comes to home mortgages, President Donald Trump has a plan. And it’s a very stupid plan, one where he destabilizes the housing market by turning mortgage behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into publicly traded stocks. He’s already got the vulgar branding lined up and everything.
Trump’s plan is to launch an initial public offering for both Fannie and Freddie, which theoretically could raise around $30 billion. For reference, that’s only slightly more than Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s budget for next year alone. So, not exactly a windfall.
Even the people pushing this idea don’t really understand how this would work. Fannie and Freddie don’t make loans. Instead, they package loans and sell them to investors. Those loans come with an implicit guarantee that Freddie and Fannie will cover payments if the mortgage holder defaults. Removing that guarantee could raise mortgage rates because the investments become riskier to hold.
Billionaire investor and Trump supporter Bill Ackman
The head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte, suggested the government could retain control over Fannie and Freddie and continue the payment guarantee—yet somehow, they would also be publicly traded companies. No one has any idea how this would be accomplished, including Pulte, who didn’t offer any details on his grand plan.
While regular folks would find buying a house more expensive, the people who matter to Trump—meaning billionaire investors—would see a windfall if Fannie and Freddie were privatized. One person who is sure to benefit is Bill Ackman, who has leveraged his support for Trump into a role as a sort of de facto economic adviser, tweeting out his thoughts and feels for an audience of one. He already got Trump to put a 90-day pause on some of the worst tariffs.
Ackman has been banging the drum about privatizing the mortgage giants for months, even though they have been under government conservatorship since 2008’s financial crisis. Surely that’s not because his hedge fund holds the largest amount of existing Fannie Mae shares, worth about $1.2 billion. Ackman has held on to those shares for a decade, betting on eventual privatization—and a giant payday.
Now that Trump has sunk his teeth into the idea, it’s somehow even worse. On Saturday, Trump posted some AI slop illustrating his dream: that Fannie and Freddie be combined and renamed as “The Great American Mortgage Corporation” and listed on the New York Stock Exchange under “MAGA.” Of course, in this AI fever dream, Trump rings the NYSE bell when the market opens that day.
Trump loves to slap his name on everything, which is how we got COVID relief checks with his name on them during his first term. Of course, Trump pretended he didn’t want to sign the checks and had no idea how his signature got on them.
Related | GOP renames kids’ savings plan to honor Dear Leader
Earlier this year, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem dutifully spent $200 million in taxpayer dollars to cut ads thanking Trump for closing the border, a thing she was so on board with that she told a little story about it at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.
According to Noem, Trump told her, “I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads … but I want the first ad, I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.” Noem wanted to make sure everyone noticed she obeyed.
“I said, ‘Yes, sir, I will thank you for closing the border.’ So if you notice, in that ad, we thanked him for closing the border,” she blabbered.
The United States brokered a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan on Friday, and the deal came with a new transit corridor to be called “The Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.” An anonymous administration official said the Armenians suggested the name, but let’s face it—that only happens in a world where everyone already knows the best way to suck up to Trump is to name something after him.
See also Congressional Republicans. The GOP knows what’s good for them, and that’s helping Trump with these branding efforts. So, the baby savings account program included in the Big Beautiful Bill, once called “Money Account for Growth and Advancement” (MAGA, sigh), had to be renamed as “Trump Accounts.”
Trump sees the whole of the federal government as one giant opportunity for self-promotion, as if it were just another tacky hotel to which he licensed his name. If he has his way, everyone will be buying MAGA mortgage shares—well, whatever shares billionaire Trump-whisperer Ackman deigns to leave for the rest of us.
