Allies of President Donald Trump are worried he has become out of touch with the public since he has scaled back the campaign-style rallies that clinched him the White House, according to a report.
Insiders are concerned the president is “isolating himself,” surrounded by those who wouldn’t dare criticize him, and watching supportive news coverage in “an echo chamber” on the pro-Trump Fox News, Newsmax and One America News, The Atlantic reports.
Trump campaigned on the economy, pledging to bring down the cost of groceries and other essentials as he greeted supporters in towns across the country with his signature dance moves and long-winded speeches.
But since his second term, The Atlantic noted that the president’s focus appears to have been on “business titans and billionaires who want something from him and tell him what he wants to hear.”
“People voted for him to lower prices, to bring manufacturing back, to stand up to those taking advantage of them,” a close Trump ally told The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire. “They didn’t vote for him to build a damn gilded ballroom. He’s not hearing them,” the ally added, who was not named “so as not to antagonize” the president.
“He’s not hearing them, perhaps, because he’s not seeing them,” Lemire wrote.
In the fall of 2017, during the president’s first term, he traveled across the country more than a dozen times, including when he met with energy workers in North Dakota and campaigned at a rally in Alabama for a Senate candidate, according to the outlet. By contrast, this fall Trump has scaled back his U.S. travel significantly.
When he has traveled within the U.S., he has more often visited his golf clubs in Bedminster, New Jersey, and Mar-a-Lago.
The president has had a handful of events in New York and in July, he visited Kerville, Texas, with the first lady Melania Trump to meet with first responders after deadly floods.
Still, it has been a few months since Trump held a campaign-style rally. He held one in April in Michigan to mark 100 days in office and another in Des Moines, Iowa, on July 3 to celebrate the passing of his “One Big Beautiful Bill” and to share plans about the country’s 250th anniversary next year.
There had been tentative plans to take it further and get the president out on the road to communicate how the bill would benefit voters, “but it never happened, because Trump got distracted,” according to The Atlantic. Instead, Vice President JD Vance stepped in and made stops in Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania to tout the bill during the summer months.
Trump’s signature legislation was quickly overshadowed, however, by outrage over the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
As the controversy refused to die down, the president turned his attention to foreign diplomacy, including a summit in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin over ending the war in Ukraine.
The president has racked up more international travel in his second term than he did during the first year of his first term. In 2017, he took four international trips, while this year he has been on eight, including a one-day trip to Israel and Egypt in October.
In response, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that even when the president is traveling overseas, his “focus has been on securing deals for Americans back home.”
Leavitt added that Trump plans to travel the country ahead of the 2026 midterms where he will be “actively campaigning” for Republican candidates.
Republican leaders have reportedly urged Trump to “publicly and privately to reconnect with his supporters,” according to The Atlantic.
They have “quietly complained to one another” about the president’s focus on seeking retribution against his political enemies, a potential war with Venezuela, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on migrants and demolishing the historic East Wing to make way for a $350 million ballroom.
“None of those issues was high on voters’ minds,” Republicans reportedly told the outlet.
