As noted in yesterday’s Morning Jolt, the Trump team clearly wants the president to go out across the country, talk about what he has gotten done in terms of the economy, emphasize that he understands that Americans are grappling with a high cost of living, and that there’s more to be done. Trump is at best half-committed to this, and he keeps insisting that the Democrats are spreading an “affordability hoax” and “prices are coming down very substantially.”
He’s also repeating an argument from earlier in the year: “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice, but you don’t need 37 dolls.”
Unsurprisingly, polling indicates that the president’s instinctive insistence that everything economically is going great is not a winning message. “Only 31 percent of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy,” the poll from the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds. That is down from 40 percent in March and marks the lowest approval rating on the economy that Trump has registered in an AP–NORC poll in his first or second term.”
It will be just about impossible for Republicans to have an effective message in the midterms if the president continues to insist that the economy is the best it has ever been and that we’re living in a golden age.