Back on Jan. 9, Mad King Donald Trump promised credit card interest rates would be slashed by Tuesday, Jan. 20.
“Please be informed that we will no longer let the American Public be ‘ripped off’ by Credit Card Companies that are charging Interest Rates of 20 to 30%, and even more, which festered unimpeded during the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration,” the addled president wrote on Truth Social. “AFFORDABILITY! Effective January 20, 2026, I, as President of the United States, am calling for a one year cap on Credit Card Interest Rates of 10%.”
That Trumpian promise, like so many others, immediately ran into reality. As expected, the banking industry ignored him, either expecting a TACO moment—because Trump Always Chickens Out—or assuming his attention would drift elsewhere, as it so often does (Greenland!).
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Mixed signals from the administration reinforced that initial instinct.
“It seems like they’re not only ignoring it, but they’re being told to ignore it by the most senior economic policy makers in the Trump administration,” Mike Pierce, executive director of the consumer debt nonprofit Protect Borrowers, told USA Today.
That disconnect raises an obvious question: Was this cap ever meant to actually happen?
When writing about this last week, I argued this would go nowhere, as I didn’t think Trump had the power to govern by tweet. But Substacker Malcolm Little King outlined four different legal mechanisms Trump could theoretically use to impose a credit card interest rate cap.
None would be immune from legal challenge, but Malcolm argued that this would almost be beside the point. The mere risk that such a challenge might fail could be enough to freeze the credit card industry, as banks would pull back from issuing or even maintaining credit rather than gamble on years of legal uncertainty.
Malcolm also argued there was no way Trump could back down. But there are, in fact, lots of ways.
Trump could simply pretend he never posted the tweet in the first place. Who is going to punish him for it, especially as the world braces for his attempts to dismantle the postwar security order and his obsession with realigning the United States with rogue states like Russia and Belarus?
Instead of following through on his promise,Trump used his Jan, 20 deadline date to hold a press conference touting his first year’s greatest hits—and there was not a single mention of 10% credit card rates. Of course, there’s always the possibility that he wakes up tomorrow and decides to rage about credit card interest all over again. With Trump, nothing is ever settled.
What is clear is that the substance was never the point. Trump doesn’t care about affordability, or about people he would dismiss as losers for carrying debt. He slipped up and showed his hand when he called affordability a “hoax.”
Some of his advisers may be urging him to strike a more populist pose to blunt Democratic advantages heading into the midterm elections that his party is widely expected to lose. But Trump is too unfocused, and too consumed by his own impulses, to stick with any such strategy. His megalomania demands conquest, whether it’s Greenland or Venezuela, and submission, whether it’s Minneapolis or any other city or group who resists him.
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Which brings us back to that stupid tweet. If Trump was serious, he could work through Congress, potentially even with Democratic support, to turn that demand to cut credit card interest rates into reality. Instead, this latest instance of Trump’s random ramblings appears, at least for now, to have been discarded.
It joins the pile of Trump’s other forgotten populist promises, including $5,000 DOGE checks, $2,000 tariff checks, and the vow to eliminate taxes on tips, Social Security benefits, and overtime pay.
