President Donald Trump’s high-profile economic speech on Tuesday night was meant to alleviate Americans’ concerns about the cost of living.
Instead, it mainly appeared to deepen fears within the GOP that he’s not quite getting it.
Trump made little effort to reboot his economic message across 90 minutes of winding remarks in Pennsylvania, alarming Republicans already worried that the party is headed for a wipeout in next year’s midterm elections.
Faced with sagging approval ratings and rising voter anxiety, Trump insisted that the economy was booming and that prices were plummeting. He lamented the public’s focus on affordability, while encouraging people to accept living with less.
And with Republicans desperately seeking effective new ways to brighten voters’ mood, Trump offered few signs that a solution would be coming from the top.
“Telling people they don’t know what’s going on in their lives is a mistake, and that won’t work,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the right-leaning American Action Forum and a longtime Republican economic adviser. “But he’s not going to change his tune, and his tune is not helpful at the moment.”
Trump’s persistently rosy outlook on the economy — including again declaring affordability a “hoax” advanced by Democrats — has dented hopes that the president will be willing to substantially shift his messaging, despite clear warning signs and a concerted push by various aides and allies.
Within Trump’s orbit, even the more optimistic advisers described it only as a much-needed start, arguing that just getting the president back on the stump to tout his agenda represented a victory after months of focusing largely on matters abroad.
“We need to get back on offense,” said one Trump adviser.
The reviews in other corners of the GOP were more troubling, with lawmakers and strategists lamenting what they described as a widening disconnect between Trump and the rest of the party on a midterm defining challenge.
“The first thing in terms of recovery is acknowledging there’s a problem,” said Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and first-term Trump official. “Being an ostrich in politics and putting your head in the sand is never a good strategy, much less a winning strategy.”
Trump allies and GOP lawmakers had pressed officials to ramp up the president’s travel headed into 2026, arguing that he needed to refocus his efforts on domestic issues and more actively promote an agenda that’s unfamiliar to many Americans.
GOP scrambles to rewrite its affordability message
The president’s speech on Tuesday represented the first of several the White House has billed as focused on affordability, as well as aimed at juicing enthusiasm among Trump voters that the GOP will need to hold control of Congress in November.
Yet Trump’s return to campaign-style rallies comes as Republicans grapple with deteriorating support — and a growing belief among voters that on the economy, the president has fallen out of touch.
In polling, Trump’s standing on the economy has sharply declined, driven by frustration with high prices, a slowing labor market and the perception that conditions are getting worse. Republicans have also suffered a series of defeats in state and city-level races, in a sign that economically frustrated voters are rebelling against the party.
Those developments have prompted a scramble within the administration and on Capitol Hill to revamp the GOP’s affordability message, with lawmakers newly focused on developing plans to address health care costs and other key pain points, while Trump aides try to amplify the few areas where prices have eased.
White House officials in recent weeks have altered their rhetoric as well, more explicitly acknowledging the economic stressors still weighing on Americans while arguing that their agenda is slowly fixing it — and that people’s financial stability is only going to improve in 2026.
“President Trump is stamping out Biden inflation for good, and we fully expect it to roll down next year,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said ahead of Trump’s speech on Tuesday. “Where Biden created scarcity, President Trump is creating abundance.”
Trump’s ‘A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus’ economic vision
Yet for all the activity going on around him, Trump himself has yet to fully embrace that pivot, advisers said, bristling at the suggestion that his economy is not already a total success and expressing confidence that voters’ spirits are bound to improve.
“He has a bigger story that he hopes will, in a sense, overshadow and drown out affordability,” said former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who remains close to the White House and congressional GOP leadership. He added that Trump believes “you’re going to see a boom economy by next summer.”
In Pennsylvania on Tuesday, Trump made brief allusions to his administration’s new affordability script, acknowledging that prices “were” high at one point and declaring that he had a simple message: “They caused the high prices and we’re bringing them down.”
But that stint was short-lived. Trump insisted repeatedly that he’d revived the economy, at one point asserting it was already “unbelievable.” Earlier in the week, he deemed his performance on the economy an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” And at a White House roundtable on Wednesday, he declared that “the economy is roaring.”
Across much of the rest of the party, though, few share Trump’s adamant optimism — and worry that it’s increasingly unhelpful to the GOP’s chances next year.
Asked about Trump’s message on affordability, GOP Sen. Shelley Moore Capito countered that in her state of West Virginia, “a lot of people are still having trouble making ends meet.”
Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, a staunch White House ally, downplayed the president’s remarks as a reaction to the intensifying focus on affordability among the press, “and so he’s pushing back the other way.” Still, he declined to endorse Trump’s outlook.
In a statement, White House spokesman Kush Desai said that “Trump’s agenda is indeed delivering the booming economy that Americans enjoyed during his first term,” pointing to private-sector investment commitments and lower inflation rates. “Both he and the Administration will continue to underscore the work we are doing to make this happen.”
‘They know what their checkbook says’
But within the GOP, there’s little expectation that the path toward the midterms is getting easier any time soon.
Trump advisers and lawmakers have privately fretted over the party’s plan for what some describe as the “two H’s”: Health care and housing costs, which they believe are driving much of voters’ unhappiness.
Republicans, who are set to take a doomed health care vote on Thursday, have struggled to coalesce behind a plan for averting the expiration of key enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies at the end of the year.
That expiration would further drive up health insurance premiums, heightening cost-of-living concerns without any consensus remedy for the GOP lawmakers to run on. As for housing, Republicans have few easy levers available that might make homes more affordable in just a matter of months.
And while Trump on Tuesday touted a drop in gas prices and the easing price of eggs, Republicans cautioned that voters aren’t going to buy into the president’s success story until they feel it themselves.
“The president’s a great salesman, so he will sell what he’s done,” said Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has been among the most vocal Republican lawmakers in warning about the risk of an affordability backlash. “But at the end of the day, I come back to the fact that you can tell people until you’re blue in the face that the facts are this, that or the other thing; they know what their checkbook says.”
