To President Trump, the U.S. economy is as strong as ever. The only thing missing, he says, is “good public relations.”
In the waning days of a high-stakes, hard-fought midterm election, Mr. Trump has redoubled his efforts to try to convince voters that the nation is better off than they realize. As Americans tough out another month of high prices and slow job growth, the president has tried to make the case that the problem isn’t actually the state of the economy — but, rather, the messaging around it.
The president’s frustration was on display this week, as he returned to the campaign trail to stump for Republicans, with roughly one month until voters are set to decide whether to return the party to power.
In a series of appearances in Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas and the nation’s capital, Mr. Trump emphasized that the economy was growing, financial markets were booming and construction was on the upswing. His aides later touted a burst in construction hiring in September, which was evident in the latest jobs report released on Friday.
But that same report also evinced the source of Americans’ continued economic unease — and the political trouble that it may soon inflict on Mr. Trump and his fellow Republicans. Hiring overall cooled last month, while wages once again failed to keep pace with the rise in consumer prices.
As a result, the story told by Mr. Trump bore little resemblance to the lived experience of the economy for many Americans, who have grappled for months with surging costs at the gas pump and rising rates on their auto loans, credit cards and mortgages. That reality even seemed to weigh on the president himself, who lamented at one point this week that his sales pitch was not resonating.
“We have the greatest numbers of any president in the history of our country, and I can’t get the word out,” Mr. Trump proclaimed at one point Thursday during a speech in Texas.
“The only thing we’re doing badly at is public relations,” continued Mr. Trump, who later tried to absolve himself of one of Americans’ biggest concerns in the midterms. “Everyone thinks the prices are high because of me, but they’re not.”
For Mr. Trump, the fate of his second-term ambitions may well rest on the extent to which he can convince Americans over the next 31 days that his policies bolstered the economy and did not cause prices to rise. It is likely to be an uphill battle, given that surveys increasingly show that a majority of Americans feel gloomy about their finances and blame the president for the troubles they face.
To win control of the House, Senate and White House nearly two years ago, Republicans including Mr. Trump had promised to supercharge a nation left scarred from high prices after the coronavirus pandemic. Once in office, the president set about exacting an agenda to cut taxes, slash regulations and impose withering tariffs on global trade, all in the hopes of boosting domestic investment and growth.
As the 2026 election draws closer, the president and his top aides largely have proclaimed those efforts a success. Speaking on Monday at an event hosted by the Economic Club of New York, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, described the administration as “really, really bullish on the momentum that we have going forward.”
Mr. Hassett said the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of its total output, should be growing by 4 percent, excluding “disruptions from the outside world.” It appeared to be an oblique reference to the war with Iran and the rising cost of government borrowing, which could hamstring the U.S. economy.
Economists generally expect growth above 2 percent by the end of the year. To that end, the White House received good news this week, after its official measure of output in the second quarter came in higher than originally estimated, reflecting the surge of U.S. investment recently in artificial intelligence.
Surveying the economic data released this week, Michael Pugliese, a senior economist at Wells Fargo, said that from a “zoomed-out view,” the data “looks pretty healthy.”
That included the jobs report released on Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which carried mixed news. On one hand, Mr. Pugliese said, there were “bright spots” in the fact that more Americans were participating in the labor force and industries including construction were growing.
Still, the nation’s unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2 percent last month. Among Black workers, in particular, the rate of joblessness jumped to 7 percent.
Appearing later Friday on Fox Business, Mr. Hassett boasted that he was “not even a little bit” disappointed in the data, singling out what he described as a surge in hiring around factory construction. But the administration left unsaid the other strains showcased by the same hiring figures.
“The labor market isn’t necessarily a strong labor market, but it isn’t a labor market that has fallen off a cliff, either,” said Cory Stahle, a senior economist at Indeed.
For one thing, Mr. Stahle pointed to the “fragile” and uncomfortable dynamic in which hiring and firing are both low, suggesting little mobility for workers. On top of that is the sting of inflation, with a key gauge released earlier this week showing prices in August were up 3.4 percent compared with the same time last year.
Mr. Stahle said that “colors” the jobs report, which once again showed workers’ wages falling behind inflation. To these Americans, he said, it “doesn’t necessarily matter” how many people were hired in September, because it “doesn’t necessarily change that reality for people when they’re on their way to work, putting gas in their car and buying groceries for their families.”
By Friday, gas prices averaged about $4.40 per gallon nationally, according to AAA. That marked a slight reprieve from a week earlier, but prices remain much higher than they were a year ago. And, for home buyers, the conditions grew only more dire, with rates on 30-year mortgages now averaging about 7.28 percent. That marked the highest rate in almost three years.
Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who has advised Mr. Trump, said the problems at the pump cut into the president’s election-year message. “People’s first barometer of the economy is the gas price,” he said, which also happens to be one of the things that Mr. Trump cannot control directly.
“Take that out of the equation, most other indicators are pretty strong,” Mr. Moore added.
The surge in energy costs did not appear to faze Mr. Trump, who instead spent much of the week insisting that he had defeated inflation and that the war with Iran — once promised to last only weeks — would soon end. The president also promised a more vigorous effort in the final weeks of the 2026 campaign to assuage voters’ economic doubts.
That push began Monday, with the first in a series of White House announcements meant to highlight new investments in states where Republicans are facing close re-election contests. Unveiling plans for a new steel mill in Iowa, Mr. Trump portrayed the forthcoming plant as an outgrowth of his policies and a harbinger of thousands of new jobs soon.
Two days later, the president revealed that South Korea would invest billions in U.S. energy projects, including a new, long-sought gas facility in Alaska, though South Korean officials later disputed some of the president’s claims.
“There’s no economy like this economy,” Mr. Trump stressed during the event held in the Oval Office. “The only thing we don’t have is good public relations.”
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