Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, according to Axios, told Republican donors last year he had warned President Donald Trump that his tariffs and economic policies were steering the GOP toward a midterm election disaster next fall.
According to recordings from two meetings with donors obtained by Axios, Cruz said he told Trump, “Mr. President, if we get to November” of 2026 “and people’s 401(k)s are down 30 percent and prices are up 10 to 20 percent at the supermarket, we’re going to go into Election Day, face a bloodbath.” And: “You’re going to lose the House, you’re going to lose the Senate, you’re going to spend the next two years being impeached every single week.”
As you might imagine, our mercurial president did not warmly welcome this warning. According to Cruz, Trump responded, “F— you, Ted.” Somewhere, Beto O’Rourke and Jimmy Kimmel are reading that comment and conceding that they don’t always disagree with the president.
If you tell donors a juicy tale about the president, sooner or later, that tale is going to leak. And while Trump no doubt enjoyed cursing out his 2016 GOP presidential primary rival, he’d be a fool if he’s still ignoring the warnings about the economy.
The good news for the president and congressional Republicans facing reelection this year is that a lot of people’s 401(k)s had a terrific 2025. The S&P 500 posted a robust 16.4 percent finish for the year, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq climbed 19 percent, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed out 2025 up 13 percent.
The numbers for grocery prices under Trump don’t tell quite as happy a story. The good news is that egg prices are down from the start of this administration, a short-lived but intense spike in prices driven primarily by the culling of chicken flocks amid a bird flu outbreak. According to grocery price data, provided by the global marketing research firm NIQ, as of Dec. 27, egg prices were down $1.05 compared with a year earlier.
The bad news is that, from a year earlier, a pound of bacon is up 10 cents, a loaf of bread is up 16 cents, a pound of chicken breast is up 17 cents, a pound of ground beef is up 94 cents and 32 ounces of orange juice is up $1.38.
Unsurprisingly, Americans aren’t feeling all that great about the economy. The CNN poll in mid-January found 55 percent “say that Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country.” The new AP-NORC survey found that just 16 percent of Republicans say Trump has helped “a lot” in addressing the cost of living; among the electorate as a whole, it’s just 6 percent. A New York Times-Siena poll published this week found “two-thirds of voters said they now think a middle-class lifestyle is out of reach for most people, and 77 percent say it has gotten harder to achieve than a generation ago.”
Retaining a thin House GOP majority in an atmosphere of economic gloom is going to be a wee bit challenging. Somebody get Speaker Mike Johnson some Maalox.
Trump’s job approval rating in the RealClearPolitics average is 42.8 percent. Despite the tumultuous headlines of the past few months, that’s about where it has been since October, with anywhere from 52 percent to 55 percent disapproving. In the most recent AP pool, half the respondents rated Trump a “poor” or “terrible” president. Not great!
In November, Trump announced he was scrapping U.S. tariffs on beef, coffee, tea, fruit juice, cocoa, spices, bananas, oranges and tomatoes, in an effort to address high prices. This was a welcome concession on a point that Trump has disputed for decades, the notion that higher tariffs mean higher prices for consumers. But it raises a question: Why doesn’t Trump do that for all the other tariffs he has levied? If the biggest problem is that Americans feel like everything is unaffordable … why not pull the lever on the quickest and easiest way to make prices come down?
Instead, we’re going to get more presidential pep rallies, where Trump insists that inflation has stopped (it hasn’t), that prices are coming down (only on a handful of goods) and that America is enjoying a golden age (maybe if you’re Seattle Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold). But you can’t spin people on their perception of their own finances. Either they feel like they’re prospering, or they don’t. They can’t be cajoled into feeling like they can afford more than they do.
There’s still a lot of time between now and the midterms. But as the first month of 2026 comes to a close, Ted Cruz is looking clairvoyant.
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