President Donald Trump is facing a familiar problem: He’s trying to convince Americans the economy is better than they think it is.
It didn’t work for Joe Biden. And after last week’s electoral drubbing — driven in large part by voters’ concerns about the high cost of living — Republicans throughout the country are increasingly convinced it’s not working for Trump, either.
Among White House aides, the election results were accepted as a bracing dose of reality, prompting meetings on how to refocus the White House’s message on Americans’ economic anxieties. And there is mounting frustration among some in the administration who view Trump’s focus on international relations — and his public pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize — as a distraction from the economy-centric messaging that delivered him a second term.
“I predicted this,” one White House official told MSNBC, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the election results. “The president needs to focus on domestic issues versus his foreign policy legacy.”
Since last Tuesday, the White House has held meetings where talking points centered on affordability have been discussed.
“Tuesday’s election results definitely have heightened the desire to start talking about this more and talk about it now,” a second White House official told MSNBC. “The results highlighted what we’ve known to be true for a while, and a lot of people have been saying — behind the scenes — here and now, we’re taking that message more forcefully to the public.”
But there’s at least one primary factor complicating that messaging pivot: Trump himself.
While his staff works to refocus the White House message on affordability, Trump ended the week by dismissing economic concerns, blaming them on negative media coverage and insisting that prices are falling when data shows the opposite.
On Wednesday, the bruise of the election still fresh, Trump flew to and from Miami. Recapturing “cost of living” as a winning issue for Republicans was top of mind for the president while aboard Air Force One, the second White House official told MSNBC.
Within days, Trump seemed more focused on casting blame for “affordability” concerns while also trying to insist that they weren’t valid.
“The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under sleepy Joe Biden,” the president said on Friday during an open-to-press meeting with Hungarian President Viktor Orbán. He accused Democrats of “hijacking” the issue, and asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to interject and suggest that news outlets have failed to cover the issue accurately.
“Affordability is what the American people elected this president to do, and he is doing it — and you guys refuse to cover it,” Leavitt said.
Casting this as a media problem belies what a challenge this is for the administration, suggesting that the problem isn’t how Americans personally experience the economy, but simply what they hear about it.
For veterans of the Biden administration, this is all strangely familiar. A president pointing to growth in the stock market and long-term investments in the U.S. while Americans are concerned about the cost of living in the here and now; one who devoted much of his bandwidth to international relations and America’s role in the world; one whose polling numbers sag while they insist they’re being wronged by the press.
“People will attribute major events to the party that has the White House, but especially so if they also have Congress,” said Andrew Bates, a former White House senior deputy press secretary under President Biden and current adviser to the Cost Coalition. “And if you are going through a difficult economic period, it is always hard to thread that needle.”
For the Biden administration, a restive response from the public ended up propelling Republicans to retake the House majority in the midterms and the Senate and White House two years later.
Now, Republicans risk a similar fate.
Among those calling on Trump to refocus his efforts on domestic issues is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. “I would really like to see nonstop meetings at the WH on domestic policy not foreign policy,” Greene posted on X on Monday morning.
Asked later in the day about those comments, Trump suggested that he wasn’t going to change his approach. “I have to view the presidency as a worldwide situation, not locally,” he said. “I mean, we could have a world that’s on fire, where wars come to our shores very easily.”
