President Donald Trump’s attempts to show Americans he cares about their struggles with rising costs began in earnest last month, when he went to a casino in Pennsylvania to talk about affordability — but instead mocked Democrats who use the term and called it “a hoax.”
Next, he traveled to Detroit to tout his efforts to revive American manufacturing. But again, he called affordability “a fake word by Democrats.”
Then, on a trip to Davos last week, he unveiled a new domestic housing policy meant to help families struggling with rising costs. There, too, the president stepped on his own announcement by stoking a global crisis over his desire to wrest control of Greenland from NATO ally Denmark.
Again and again, Trump has tried to stay focused on domestic economic uncertainty, an issue that Republicans fear could hobble them in this year’s midterm elections. Again and again, the president’s attention has drifted elsewhere — and away from the concerns of his restive base. In the past month, he has ordered a strike on Venezuela, considered military action against Iran and threatened to use force to take Greenland. None of these actions have inspired broad support within his core America First constituency, which the GOP needs to hold Congress.
On Tuesday, Trump will give it another go. The planned afternoon speech in Des Moines — assuming winter weather doesn’t upend the trip — will focus on energy and the economy. It is part of what White House officials say will be an uptick in domestic travel to avert what even Trump has acknowledged could be a difficult election in November.
Although the economy has grown steadily in recent months, there are mounting signs of concern. Employers are hiring fewer people, wage growth is slowing and credit card delinquencies are rising. And while the wealthiest have benefited from rapid stock market gains and rising home values, that hasn’t been the case for most Americans, whose spending power has remained largely flat since the pandemic, according to Moody’s Analytics.
As a result, people say they feel worse about the economy than they did a year ago. Consumer sentiment ticked up between December and January, but remains well below year-ago levels, according to a closely watched survey from the University of Michigan released Friday. Notably, Americans expect inflation to worsen in the coming year, as Trump’s unpopular new tariffs and immigration policies work their way through the economy.
“It is definitely the issue that voters say is the most important to them,” longtime Democratic pollster Geoff Garin said of affordability. “And it is the issue that is driving Trump’s very high disapproval ratings.”
Garin said a particular challenge for the president is the effect of his tariff policies, which he remains committed to despite widespread concerns and the threat of still more rising costs.
“The polling is crystal clear that Americans do not want higher tariffs and understand tariffs are a tax on them that adds to their cost of living,” Garin said.
Some Republicans are cautiously optimistic that the president can reset his message.
“I think he’s woken up to where things are now,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who frequently conducts focus groups on the economy. “He believes he can change the perception by his tenacity. But affordability is a very stubborn issue.”
A White House official pointed to positive economic indicators, including cooling inflation and growing wages, and said Trump’s uptick in travel could help get those messages across.
“President Trump has always been most in his element when he’s interacting with everyday Americans,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations about the trip. “The President’s domestic travel will allow him to most effectively underscore how this administration has and continues to deliver economic prosperity for the American people, despite whatever contrived scandals the mainstream media and Democrats would rather focus on instead.”
Trump’s choice of Iowa for his next stop is noteworthy because he won the state, which has grown more reliably Republican over the last decade, in three consecutive presidential races. But Democrats have sensed opportunity there, and it is likely to be a major focus in 2026 with open races for governor and U.S. Senate and two competitive congressional seats. All are currently held by Republicans.
“I’m gonna do a lot of campaign traveling,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One while traveling back from Davos last week, acknowledging the historic headwinds the president’s party typically faces in off-year elections.
“Sitting presidents don’t seem to do well in the midterms,” he said. “I guess over a 50-year period, they won twice. So I don’t know what that is. That’s something down deep. You’d have to ask a psych — really a psychiatrist about that. But we should do great.”
Trump regularly blames his predecessor, Joe Biden, for many of the current economic conditions. But the two presidents actually have something in common now when it comes to public opinion: They have both struggled winning over Americans on their handling of the economy.
Biden repeatedly claimed that the economy was better than how average Americans said they felt about it. He believed he didn’t receive what he felt was well-deserved credit for improving economic conditions, but he also lamented his own shortcomings in selling his policies to the public.
Trump, who won the 2024 election by tapping into economic anxieties and Biden’s handling of them, now also says the economy is better than people think. And he, like Biden, has acknowledged that he needs to do more to promote his policies.
“People’s sense that he was good on the economy is what propped him up even when they disliked 100 other things about him,” Garin said. “But now to have him so deeply underwater on the economy means there’s really nothing propping him up among the 100 other things.”
Garin views the economy as a central issue in the November elections and does not see Trump suddenly succeeding at a message reset that he has been trying unsuccessfully now for weeks.
“I don’t think things are going to change between now and then because Trump’s not going to change,” he added. “He is who he is.”
Trump’s first major attempt came in December, when he traveled to a casino in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, and read from charts touting economic data. Behind him, signs read, “Lower Prices Bigger Paychecks.”
But he frequently veered off course, entertaining the crowd but stealing the focus from the economy.
Trump’s dismissal of the term affordability may itself becoming a liability, Luntz said, because it’s a word used not just by Democrats. The president risks sounding like he is telling Americans that their struggles with mortgage payments or groceries aren’t real.
Affordability is “part of the lexicon,” Luntz said. “And you know this if you talk to average voters. All these focus groups I’ve been doing, that’s what came up first. Immigration was important at one point. Russia-Ukraine was for a while. But affordability, and that’s the word Americans use: ‘I can’t afford fill in the blank.’”
Trump has also suggested that his policies will be effective in the long run even if there is short-term pain, returning to comments he made earlier in his presidency that Americans can do without.
“You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter,” he said last month. “Two or three is nice, but you don’t need 37 dolls. So, we’re doing things right. We’re running this country right.”
The president’s choice of an annual gathering of the world’s financial elite in Davos to formally tout new policies aimed at helping homeowners struck an odd note, too. The announcement got little attention amid his threats over Greenland and high-profile panels of tech billionaires and thought leaders.
“It’s not fun for him, and the public doesn’t applaud because it’s serious stuff,” Luntz said.
That may explain the tangents. In Detroit, Trump started talking about affordability, but quickly got in his own way. “No, that’s a word used by the Democrats,” he said. “They’re the ones that caused the problem.”
He then digressed into riffs about transgender athletes and criticism about lack of unity in his own party (“We got some real losers,” he said — ——including Mitt Romney, Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski). Five minutes later, he returned to economic matters.
“After real wages plummeted by $3,000 under sleepy Joe Biden, real wages are up by $1,300 in less than one year under President Trump,” he said.
As he launches a tour focused on the midterm elections, his overarching message is likely to focus on how he’s tried to turn things around. He has until around Labor Day to change public perception on the economy, a time when voter sentiment tends to solidify ahead of elections.
The task is made more challenging by the fact that some of those who voted for him in 2024 were not wholly behind him but were turned off by Democrats. Those voters largely oppose Trump’s handling of the economy — especially his tariff policies.
A new CNN-SSRS poll found that 3 in 10 Americans rate the economy positively, and 55 percent say that Trump’s policies have worsened conditions. Some 64 percent said that he hasn’t done enough to reduce the price of everyday goods and even about half of Republicans say he should be doing more.
“We’ve inherited a mess,” he said last week. “And we’ve made it a beautiful, beautiful picture.”
Abha Bhattarai contributed to this report.
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