Prices are high, Americans are feeling the pain around the kitchen table and in their empty pockets — and President Donald Trump is hitting the road to convince skeptical voters that the U.S. economy is “A+++++”, as he told Politico.
If this all sounds familiar, well, that’s because it is nearly the same game plan, executed to extreme imperfection, by the man Trump now constantly reviles as “maybe the worst ever” at his job, Joe Biden, in the year leading up to his abrupt withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race. (And then again, by former Vice President Kamala Harris as she took the baton and mounted what would become a losing campaign for the presidency.)
Now, more than a year after voters returned Trump to the White House despite his multiple criminal indictments and the shambolic ending of his first term — including that riot at the U.S. Capitol in a doomed attempt to stop certification of his 2020 election loss — Trump is hitting the road to convince voters weary from high prices and economic anxiety that things aren’t nearly as bad as they think they are.
The president is embarking on what White House aides are calling a multi-month series of rallies and public appearances intended to boost his and his party’s flagging political fortunes ahead of midterm elections in which they could lose control of one or both chambers of Congress.
Starting with an appearance in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night, his first major domestic event after months of overseas trips filled with glad-handing of wealthy foreign monarchs and other leaders, Trump will double down on economic policies that most voters say haven’t done much of anything to address the concerns that led them to pull the lever for him 13 months ago.
According to a talking points memorandum sent out to surrogates by the Republican National Committee and first reported by NOTUS, Trump and his compatriots are looking to deflect blame for current economic conditions by arguing that the administration is “repairing the mess” left by Biden and Harris nearly 11 months ago and “fighting every day to bring down prices and reverse the damage that Joe Biden and the Democrats did to the economy.”
Trump previewed this message during an event to unveil a $12 billion farmer bailout package on Monday, telling reporters that Democrats “caused the affordability problem and we are the ones that are fixing it,” seemingly back away from statements he’d made days earlier when he dismissed affordability concerns as a “hoax” and a “con-job.”
Unfortunately for the president, Americans seem primed to give his party the same treatment they gave Biden, Harris and the Democrats in last year’s election.
According to a recent Gallup poll, only 36 percent of voters approve of his performance as president, giving him the lowest rating of his second term. A Politico poll released this week showed 46 percent of respondents saying the cost of living in America is worse than they can remember at any point, including 37 percent of voters who pulled levers for Trump last year.
Nearly half of respondents also said they blame Trump — not Biden or Harris — for the economy’s current condition.
But at the same time, Trump continues to tout his own record, such as it is. In an interview with Politico this week, he told correspondent Dasha Burns that he gives himself an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus” when she asked him to grade his own record on the economy thus far.
For veterans of the Biden White House and the Biden, later Harris, presidential campaign, Trump’s pivot to the economy looks eerily familiar, and they don’t think Trump will have any more luck than Biden or Harris did in trying to convince voters that everything is fine.
One former official who spent three years in the White House before shifting over to the campaign told The Independent that seeing Trump hit the road to tout the economy is instilling them with a profound sense of deja vu because he and his administration are trying to fight feelings with raw economic indicators that don’t necessarily do much to sway anxious voters.
Invoking Maya Angelou’s observation that people “might forget your name” but will “always remember how you made them feel,” the ex-official said Trump was falling into the same trap that Biden did — but with worse numbers to boast about.
“You can tell people as much as you want that the economy is great and the economy is doing all the right things. But if people don’t feel that way, it’s really hard to make them change their mind,” the official said.
“If they think these kinds of road shows and statements are enough on their own, and just telling people the economy is good, that is not enough.”
Another former Biden adviser who also worked on the Harris campaign pointed to Trump’s tariff policies as a driver of high prices and suggested that his obsession with import taxes and his oft-repeated false claim that they are paid by foreign countries is making an impact on Americans, because they no longer believe it.
“Trump had a chance to let prices come down naturally by doing nothing and taking credit for the result we left him on the road to getting. But instead he decided to pour gasoline on them in the form of tariffs for no good reason except because he could,” they said.
“At this point, he’s the arsonist cosplaying as a firefighter. People see through that.”
Former Biden White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told The Independent that Trump’s decision to start touting his economic record now at a time when health care costs are about to skyrocket from the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies shows he’s not reading the room at all.
“Democrats and the Biden-Harris Administration warned Trump against making the biggest health care cuts in history so billionaires could have tax breaks; just like they warned against the tariffs that are a record-level tax hike on working people,” Bates said. “Maybe Donald Trump can’t remember prices were lower last year. I wondered about that when he started building himself an assisted living ballroom.”
He added that the contrast between Biden’s and Harris’ doomed effort to sell their record and what Trump is doing now is the former president and vice president acknowledged there was more to do because they knew people were still hurting, while Trump is dismissing affordability concerns entirely.
“Trump is attacking his own supporters when they raise his broken promise to lower prices ‘immediately,’ then going back to his corrupt payoffs and ballroom planning,” he said.
A third ex-Biden aide, who like the others asked for anonymity because his current employer would not let him speak publicly about the current administration, responded to a query from The Independent with a cryptic phrase often used by his former boss when asked about Trump’s effort to boost voters’ impression of his economy.
“Lots of luck in your senior year,” he said.
