Donald Trump was apparently so rattled by Elizabeth Warren calling him a “wannabe dictator” that he picked up the phone and called her—something he’d never done before in their decade-long political feud.
The unprecedented call came Monday after Warren delivered a blistering speech at the National Press Club, ripping into Trump’s economic record and accusing him of “doing not one damn thing” to lower housing costs. According to The Daily Beast, it was the first time Trump had ever dialed Warren directly.
WHAT’S GOING ON: Warren used her speech to hammer Trump on affordability issues that are expected to dominate the 2026 midterms. She pointed to the ROAD to Housing Act—bipartisan legislation to boost housing construction that passed the Senate last year but has been collecting dust in Mike Johnson’s House.
“Where is Donald Trump? Has he lifted a finger to move that bill forward in the House of Representatives?” Warren asked. “He sure knows how to get on the phone when he doesn’t like what they’re doing over the Epstein files.”
She also called him out for going “missing in action” on his own proposal to cap credit card interest rates at 10 percent—a populist promise that apparently evaporated the moment cameras stopped rolling.
THE DETAILS: When Trump called, Warren didn’t soften her message. She told him Congress could pass credit card rate caps “if he will actually fight for it” and urged him to push House Republicans on the housing bill. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to spin the whole thing as totally normal, saying Trump “heard about the speech and said, ‘Let me call her.'” She called it “a good call.”
Of course, this is the same Trump who has spent years calling Warren “Pocahontas,” labeled her “a mean, horrible human being” at an Oval Office event in August, and rage-posted about her in real-time while she criticized him on TV. “Elizabeth Warren is a LOSER! She lies about everything, including the fact that she is an Indian. She’s NOT. She’s no Pocahontas!!!” he wrote in one characteristic social media meltdown.
WHY IT MATTERS: The call signals that Trump is nervous about affordability becoming his Achilles’ heel heading into the midterms. Warren’s framing was brutal: “He’s just shooting out one idea after another and doing not one damn thing to actually lower the cost of housing for the American people.”
She argued Trump has “a credibility problem”—he talks big about helping working families, but when it comes to actually pushing legislation through his own party’s House, he’s nowhere to be found. The fact that a single speech prompted an unprecedented phone call suggests that critique landed exactly where it was intended.