GOP operative Karl Rove says President Donald Trump is making a big mistake by boasting about the U.S. economy while everyday Americans continue to struggle.
Rove, a former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that Trump needs to ditch his “triumphal tone” on the economy unless he wants Americans to sour on him as many did with the so-called “Bidenomics.”
“The president should stop bragging,” Rove wrote in an opinion piece for the Murdoch-owned paper. “Many Americans, especially swing voters, feel things aren’t good.”
Trump’s own advisers seem to be aware of this, too. They flew the 79-year-old president to Iowa last month to deliver a speech about the administration’s work to bring prices down.
The affordability event turned into a rally full of boasts and misinformation—one of which, about gas prices, was called out by an attendee. Rove wrote that the self-congratulatory nature of Trump’s speech clashed with Americans who are feeling “things aren’t good.”
“Mr. Trump made two mistakes” in Iowa, Rove wrote. “The first was straying from the subject for almost half his speech. Victories and stolen elections. Immigration. Introducing politicians on the stage. Attacking his predecessor for multiple sins. Lots of different foreign issues. He went everywhere—and therefore nowhere.”
Rove continued, “The second problem was Mr. Trump’s triumphal tone. He congratulated himself on ‘the greatest first year of any administration in American history.‘ The ‘economy is booming,’ he said. It’s been ‘the best first year of any president ever, maybe.’”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s brags about fixing the economy, paired with prices remaining sky high at the grocery store, will eventually cause the president’s own voters to sour on him, Rove argues.
“Trump’s declaring that ‘under my leadership, economic growth is exploding to numbers unheard of’ isn’t just exaggerated,” he writes. “It makes people who are suffering feel unseen and abandoned.”
Rove provided evidence to back up his point.
The column notes that the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment shows that the confidence in the economy among Americans without a college degree—which makes up the base of MAGA—is the lowest since the question was first asked in 1976.
Also hitting the MAGA base especially hard, Rove noted, was that blue-collar jobs declined by more than 145,000 last year.
Rove implored Republicans to address the economy’s issues themself—not wait for the White House to figure out its messaging.
“The president’s voice can be powerful,” Rove writes. “More potent would be hundreds of candidates selling a conservative reform agenda like the one the House Republican Study Committee developed.”
He concluded, referencing the midterms, “For GOP success this fall, Republicans need a better economic message than what Americans heard from the president in Iowa.”
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