What did Donald Trump do today?

He said what Americans struggling to buy a house needed was for him to make more money.

Trump was asked today about his decision to hold a popular bipartisan housing bill hostage to a quixotic attempt to get his so-called "SAVE Act" elections bill passed. But rather than answer in terms of his strategy to force Republicans to take a poison-pill vote on a bill that would make it more difficult for their own constituents to cast legal votes, Trump pivoted to the idea that affordable housing is a bad thing.

TRUMP: I said I'm not signing that housing bill, I wanna see what happens with SAVE. Look, the housing bill is — housing — I, I made billions of dollars with housing, I know housing better than anybody, maybe, anywhere. It's all about the interest rate. Lower the interest rates, you can have all the housing you want.

But you to understand, I don't wanna have — I don't wanna hurt people that own houses, too. These people for the first time in their lives have valuable houses. They've become rich. I don't wanna hurt them either. What you wanna do, what — good for everyone, get the interest rates down.  

In other words, Trump's theory is that it's better for housing prices to go up, rather than down, because it's more important for people who already own houses to be "rich" on paper than it is for houses to be affordable for more Americans.

It's hard to overstate how divorced from the financial reality of most Americans this is. Houses aren't precious collectibles that people hoard to profit from their scarcity. The vast majority of Americans who own a house own only one, and don't really benefit much from rising market prices, since the prices of houses they'd move into go up at similar rates.

What's more, lowering interest rates will raise inflation which would be a disaster for Americans already struggling to buy basic necessities, much less houses. That's why, in all likelihood, the Federal Reserve's next move will be to raise rates.

But there is one kind of person who would benefit from lowering interest rates: someone like Donald Trump, who has bought hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds since returning to office, and whose businesses own properties that are heavily mortgaged. Bond prices go up as rates go down, so a sudden drop in interest rates would create an instant windfall profit for Trump. 

Trump campaigned specifically on the issue of making housing more affordable—not less—for first-time buyers. 

Why does this matter?

• "It's bad for houses to be affordable" is a frankly insane thing for a president to believe.    

• Making government policy based on what's good for a politician's personal bottom line is corruption.