US President Donald Trump speaks to reporters next to a Doordash delivery worker outside the Oval Office at the White House, in Washington, DC, April 13, 2026.
Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images
Over the span of four days earlier this month, President Donald Trump posted to his Truth Social account about his proposed triumphal arch, ballroom construction, the Iran war, a UFC fight at the White House and Bruce Springsteen’s alleged plastic surgery.
He also posted (and later deleted) an AI-generated photo of himself as Jesus, on the heels of a screed aimed at Pope Leo XIV, who Trump said “should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”
What’s absent for long stretches in the president’s social media presence and from his discourse more generally of late is the economy — an issue Trump rode to the White House in 2016 and 2024.
“Trump’s original deal with the American people was ‘I’m a boorish lout and kind of embarrassing, but I know how to run the economy.’ And they believed that because they remember the economy being good in 2016,” said Mike Murphy, an anti-Trump former Republican strategist and co-host of the “Hacks on Tap” podcast with David Axelrod.
Critics and concerned Republicans say Trump isn’t making the economy enough of a priority with this year’s election just over six months away, though he has attempted to shift the focus back to cost-of-living issues in the last week.
But even when Trump does bring up the economy, his words often don’t reflect the reality many Americans are feeling. He recently said gas prices — which are 27% higher than a year earlier according to AAA — are “not very high,” and he has called affordability a “Democratic hoax.”
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It’s a tone deafness that has led to flagging polling. Sixty percent of respondents in CNBC’s All-America Economic Survey, released Thursday for the first quarter of 2026 disapproved of his handling of the economy. The shift reminds some political advisors of missteps made by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election cycle.
Saying inflation is “transitory,” as Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen did in June 2021, sounds a lot like Trump officials proclaiming gas prices will drop in “a few more weeks,” as they have amid the Iran war, said Adam Bozzi, a Democratic strategist and former congressional aide.
Republicans hope to hold onto narrow majorities in the House and Senate, but some worry the party could be squandering a long-held GOP advantage on the economy and repeating mistakes Democrats made a cycle earlier.
“He lost his franchise of the economy, and the Democrats realized that is his vulnerability,” Murphy said.
Democratic campaigns flip the economy script
White House spokesperson Kush Desai batted down the idea that Trump and Republicans have lost ground on the economy.
“President Trump can walk and chew gum at the same time,” he said. “Since the start of Operation Epic Fury, President Trump has signed multiple executive orders on housing affordability, TrumpRx has added new tranches of discounted drugs, and tens of millions of Americans received historic tax refund checks thanks to the President’s Working Families Tax Cuts.” The Working Families Tax Cut Act is the 2025 GOP tax and spending package more commonly known at the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
But Democrats see an opening and are seizing the moment to flip the script and use economic messaging to their advantage in this year’s elections as Trump’s attention gets diverted by election conspiracies, personal vendettas and foreign policy.
Casey Burgat, legislative affairs program director at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management, said he is seeing that flip as Democrats take more ownership of the economy.
“I think maybe [Democrats’] post-mortem told them they were out of touch and that they couldn’t explain away how people were feeling at their kitchen tables,” Burgat said. “But now the shoe is on the other foot in that Trump owns this now. And what used to be his best attack on the [Biden] administration, is now his biggest vulnerability.”
Despite pressure, the Democratic National Committee has not released its official autopsy for the 2024 election, in which Republicans cruised to the White House and control of both chambers of Congress. But there is some consensus on what went wrong.
“Hindsight is always 2020, but I think we’ve got a bevy of evidence that suggests the economy and cost of living was top of mind for most voters, especially most double haters of both candidates,” said Tré Easton, vice president for public policy at the Searchlight Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, and a former aide to Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa.
Economy out of focus
To Trump critics like Murphy, as Americans’ economic angst grows — and Trump’s approval on the issue dips to new lows — the president has seemed unable to sustain focus on cost-of-living issues.
“The president, who is supposed to be this ardent businessman, is prioritizing things elsewhere. I think that’s going to be a problem for Republicans during midterms for sure,” said Brittany Martinez, executive director at Principles First — an organization that positions itself as an alternative to the Conservative Political Action Conference — and a former aide to Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
At an impromptu press conference meant to tout Trump’s “no tax on tips” policy that was implemented as part of the 2025 tax and spending bill, a Doordash deliverywoman had to keep the president on task when he veered into talking about transgender men in women’s sports.
Some of these are “own-goals,” Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican who has sparred with Trump over tariffs and is retiring at the end of this term, said in an interview. “There’s some self-inflicted wounds that were so unnecessary.”
And Democrats are pouncing whenever they can, particularly since the Iran war sent gas prices soaring.
“Americans cannot afford Trump’s America. In contrast, Democrats are focused on lowering costs and reining in political corruption, and our candidates are centered on the issues voters care about most,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said in a statement.
Democrats face their own election hurdles
Trump’s lack of focus has left Democrats optimistic, but the party is not without problems heading into the midterms.
Even as Trump’s approval tanks, recent polling finds that Democrats are roughly as unpopular as their Republican colleagues, and CNBC’s latest survey released Thursday confirmed that sentiment.
But at Democrats seek to rehab a broken brand, congressional Republicans are heading for the exits.
Thirty-eight members of the House GOP have announced they won’t seek reelection, compared to just 23 Democrats. Bacon said some of the departures might have to do with an ominous feeling within the ranks. And he worries about the effects of hammering home things like voter ID and picking on international allies.
“Some of those things, like the SAVE Act, speak a lot to the base, but the independent swing voter, who we have to have in November, they’re not too into that,” Bacon said, referring to a voter-ID bill Trump is pushing. “Threatening Canada, threatening Greenland. Going after NATO. I think a lot of folks who voted for us look at that and they’re not impressed.”
One Republican operative, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said much of how voters are thinking about the GOP’s handling of the economy will hinge on if, and when, the Iran war ends and gas prices go back down. He said Republican’s are “hyper-aware” of avoiding the same mistakes Democrats made in the past, but expressed cautious optimism.
“Maybe [the economy] is an issue where we slipped a little bit … But Democrats still haven’t overtaken us,” the operative said.
“Right now, we’re not really slamming the panic button from the campaign side of things. We’ll give it a little bit of time. There’s going to be a gazillion news cycles from now until Election Day, where I don’t think gas prices are going to be much of a point of concern anymore,” he said.
“Hopefully.”