It’s the season of jingle bells and sleigh bells for most of us, but for the White House, alarm bells should be clanging. The administration is making mistakes that could result in a nasty 2026 midterm defeat for President Trump’s party.
His approval rating in the RealClearPolitics average is 43.6%. His handling of the No. 1 issue for voters, the economy, has 40.7% approval, while his approval on inflation is 35%.
Seeing these significant hurdles to the GOP’s midterm prospects, the president’s advisers have reverted to campaign mode. They dispatched Mr. Trump to a rally at a casino in Northeastern Pennsylvania last Tuesday.
Mr. Trump likes the energy and adoration of his rallies. They’re packed with hard-core supporters, eager to hear his every word and participate in the spectacle and energy. Last week in Mount Pocono was no exception.
For nearly 100 minutes, the crowd got the whole Trump experience. He was brought on to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” and walked off to “YMCA” by the Village People. In between were red hats, presidential dancing, and “the weave.”
That’s how Mr. Trump describes his speaking style. He goes from reading carefully prepared text on a teleprompter to impromptu asides, spicy attacks on enemies, meandering anecdotes, personal observations often about nothing much, then back to the teleprompter. It’s sometimes disjointed, often confusing and always entertaining. He and the audience love it.
Therein lies the problem.
With his approval numbers, Mr. Trump should be focused on building Americans’ trust in his administration. But the fun of bouncing from topic to topic and joke to joke in a rally is too much for him to resist.
The president did say he has “no higher priority than making America affordable again,” but seemed uninterested in offering further changes. Democrats “caused the high prices, and we’re bringing them down,” he asserted. After congratulating himself that “in my first term, we built the greatest economy in the history of the world,” he mocked the affordability issue as a “hoax” before admitting his staff told him not to say that.
Mr. Trump despises Joe Biden, yet he’s making the same mistake his predecessor made. Mr. Biden and his allies looked disconnected from reality when they proclaimed “Bidenomics is working” even as ordinary Americans struggled with inflation. Telling voters not to believe their own lying checkbooks was politically insane. Mr. Trump is doing the same thing.
Perhaps if during the rally the president had stayed on the issue at hand, he would have eventually offered something genuinely reassuring to voters. Instead, he spent most of his time on how he’s ended eight wars, deployed the military to destroy drug runners, and cracked down on illegal immigration. He defended his trips to the Middle East, trashed ObamaCare, attacked the Federal Reserve, complimented his own energy policies, denounced Somali immigrants, and shared that his “favorite word is tariff.”
Some in the White House must have realized how badly the Mount Pocono rally went. The administration sent Vice President JD Vance to Allentown, Pa., a week later to clean up. “I know that there is so much more progress to be made,” Mr. Vance told the audience, displaying his empathy by saying he knows “what it’s like when you have to choose between putting food on the table or getting the prescription that you need to stay healthy.” Deploying the vice president to tidy up after his boss is a bad sign. Team Trump needs an alternative to rallies.
