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To watch President Donald Trump’s prime-time address on Wednesday night was akin to being blasted by an ailing foghorn furious it’s not being credited with successfully alerting ships to maritime hazards. In his brief speech, filmed in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, and aired across major networks (to the displeasure of some viewers, CBS interrupted Survivor for the spectacle), Trump began: “Good evening, America. I inherited a mess.”
What followed was a blizzard of claims about the supposed success of his economic policies and a rehash of familiar grievances from his campaign rallies, delivered loudly and breathlessly, as if he were racing to get through the speech in record time. If White House officials wanted Trump to assuage Americans—to assure them that he understands their anxieties about the rising cost of living—they must have been sorely disappointed. What the speech lacked in empathy it made up for in decibels. “It’s their fault!” Trump shouted at one point. “It’s not the Republicans’ fault! It’s the Democrats’ fault!”
Trump vacillated between insisting that his administration had created a historically strong economy and blaming the prior administration for plunging the country into economic misery. He roared at the camera. Had he whispered, he might have sounded a little like Joe Biden, who also spent much of his presidency trying to convince the American people that their concerns about the economy were incorrect. Denying reality didn’t work for Biden; it’s hard to imagine Trump’s teleprompter rant Wednesday night will have a better chance of success. As Karl Rove wrote for The Wall Street Journal, comparing Trump to his predecessor: “Telling voters not to believe their own lying checkbooks was politically insane. Mr. Trump is doing the same thing.”
The event caps a rough stretch for the president. His approval ratings continue to plummet, particularly when it comes to his handling of the economy. The chaotic rollout of his tariff policy exacerbated those concerns; consumer sentiment is nearing historic lows as the labor market slows. The Republican Party suffered a series of losses in November’s off-year elections—to Democrats who fixated on affordability—and looks poised to lose the House in next year’s midterms. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once Trump’s most loyal ally in the House, has emerged as a relentless critic over his apparent disregard for working Americans in favor of splashy foreign trips.
White House staffers have worked behind the scenes to get Trump on message and signal to the American people that he understands their fears about the state of the economy. His chief of staff Susie Wiles, in her remarkably candid conversations with Vanity Fair that were published this week, revealed that the White House is acutely aware that Trump has strayed from the anxieties of his voters: “More talks about the domestic economy and less about Saudi Arabia is probably called for,” she said. “They like peace in the world. But that’s not why he was elected.”
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Aidan McLaughlin
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