As soon as President Donald Trump finished delivering his primetime address to the nation Wednesday night, he asked his senior aides how he did.
“They all responded with some version of ‘great’,” a journalist inside the White House Diplomatic Room for Trump’s speech later shared in a pool report. And on the airwaves and across the internet, Trump’s usual defenders gushed about the speech.
But offline and away from the cameras, many Republicans on Wednesday were far less ebullient about the president’s attempt to improve his dismal numbers on the economy — and increasingly downbeat about what that may mean for their party’s chances in next November’s midterm election.
“It’s the right idea to talk about the economy more, but the execution was abysmal,” said one Republican operative who served in the first Trump administration and, like others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly without fear of retribution. “He’s a very effective salesman when his heart is in it or when he’s on the attack. But the ‘I feel your pain’ speech — he just doesn’t have that club in his bag.”
Trump's speech instead focused on the border and men playing in women’s sports, issues that played well in 2024 but have seemed less salient in elections this year. White House deputy chief of staff James Blair told POLITICO last month that Lt. Gov Winsome Earle-Sears, who lost her race for Virginia governor, talked too much about transgender issues. “It’s not even in the top five issues, according to voters,” he said at the time.
Few Republicans will criticize Trump directly. But his schedule over the last few weeks — with several speeches ostensibly focused on the economy — indicate that the White House understands that they are losing the messaging war on affordability. And Trump's decision to lay it all at the feet of former President Joe Biden could, according to critics, reinforce the belief that the administration is stuck in 2024 rather than planning for 2026.
“In politics, the 'look-back' is never as effective as the 'look-forward',” said Kevin Madden, a veteran GOP communications strategist who worked on Mitt Romney’s and George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns. “Voters will always provide more breathing room if you establish credibility by acknowledging the challenge, and the challenge right now that they're feeling from higher prices is real. You have to acknowledge that, first, if you're ever going to gain their support for the policy plan to address it and make it better in the future.”
A former senior RNC official, pointing to a string of House Republican retirement, mused that for those on the fence, “it’s hard to imagine any members waking up today and saying, ‘Oh, now I feel better.’”
Historically, the president’s party typically loses seats in their first midterm election, but how many usually depends on the president’s approval rating, said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster in Washington.
“Getting the president’s job approval up, from the perspective of Republican candidates, is job number one,” said Ayres, who doesn’t think Trump’s primetime address moved the needle much.
“I don’t think it will go down in the pantheon of greatest presidential addresses,” he continued. “I don’t know if it will persuade anyone who wasn’t already persuaded."
Democrats still have plenty of recent scar tissue themselves from the 2024 election cycle over former President Joe Biden’s stubborn insistence throughout much of his term that the economy was stronger than public sentiment suggested. Many of them were downright giddy to see Trump, in their view, falling into the same trap and effectively downplaying Americans’ anxieties about the cost of living.
“While we were talking about [gross domestic product] and unemployment and jobs growth rates, people were worried about the rent and the price of gas and the price of eggs,” said Javier Palomarez, the president and CEO of the U.S. Hispanic Business Council. “And we've got kind of the same thing here."
Palomarez, a self-identified Democrat who nonetheless endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) reelection last year as well as Trump’s nomination of former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer to serve as Labor secretary, said that the president’s remarks missed the mark.
They “didn't really appear to offer empathy to the American family that's struggling through a lot of this uncertainty, and certainly to the American small business community that's having to deal with the, you know, supply chain challenges due to the trade policies and the tariffs,” Palomarez said.
Pointing to steady job growth, low unemployment and an inflation rate that’s ticking down isn’t enough as long as families are struggling, Palomarez continued. "The macro numbers look good, but what may play on Wall Street isn't playing on Main Street,” he said.
Trump made clear from his opening line — “I inherited a mess,” he declared — that he didn’t intend to shoulder any blame, despite the recent Reuters/Ipsos poll that showed Trump’s approval rating on the economy dropping to 33 percent, a new low for his second term.
Trump’s rushed delivery and combative tone made the 20-minute address, which the major broadcast networks all opted to carry live in primetime, “seem like he’d been forced to do it,” said a second person who served in the first Trump administration. “It felt like they were checking a box. There wasn’t a lot of strategic messaging beyond: ‘it’s not my fault.’”
“President Trump was resoundingly re-elected one year ago precisely because he, unlike Democrats, understood and acknowledged Joe Biden’s economic disaster,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said in a statement to POLITICO. “Turning the page on the Biden inflation and affordability crisis has been a Day One priority for the President — while much work remains, today’s expectation-beating inflation report is the latest proof that the Administration’s robust economic agenda will continue to pay off for everyday Americans.”
Inside the White House, the message has shifted from Trump’s declarations upon taking office that “a golden age” was underway to promises that the economy is set up for a stronger 2026. One senior White House official said that’s based on an expectation that interest rates will come down and that a number of GOP tax cuts enacted this year will start to take effect.
"You’ve got to look at what's going to happen in the new year. The tax cuts from the One Big, Beautiful Bill are going to kick in. So I think people will start to feel it,” the official said.
In his remarks on Wednesday night, Trump did mention that gasoline and food costs were going down on his watch. He touted the passage of the GOP megabill that he noted “includes no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.” And he unveiled a new “warrior dividend,” announcing that all military service members would be receiving checks in the amount of $1,776. The payment was already approved by Congress as part of the megabill.
But that was enough for some of the president’s most ardent supporters, who believe Trump is doing all the right things on the economy. The poll numbers, some believe, simply reflect that the administration’s messaging isn’t yet taking hold.
“What he's been accomplishing should speak for itself. But that doesn't work in politics,” said Joe Vachot, the chairman of the Lehigh County Republican Party in Pennsylvania, of Trump’s pushes on tariffs and tax cut legislation. Lehigh County was the site of Vice President JD Vance’s affordability-focused speech earlier this week.
“I think the White House was focused on just getting things in place, and we weren't focused on the messaging,” he added. “That's one of our flaws on the Republican side is that we think it would just push and do good works that people will see. But apparently you have to really toot your own horn.”
Samuel Benson and Alec Hernandez contributed to this report.
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