MSNBC anchor Katy Tur, joined by panelists, attempted to make sense of President Donald Trump's widely criticized response to voters' economic struggles. Their conclusion: Trump is not particularly interested in winning over voters — and may have other plans for maintaining power.

New Yorker writer Susan Glasser observed that Trump seems strikingly detached from polling data and unwilling to adjust course on costly tariffs or the inflationary fallout from his Iran war, even as both threaten to damage his party's prospects in November. The president's party historically loses ground in midterm elections, a pattern that makes economic approval ratings especially consequential for incumbents.

"Trump's policies are extremely unpopular," Glasser said during a Friday broadcast of "Moment with Katy Tur," noting that the president's approval ratings heading into the midterms are worse than during his first term. "Even in Trump's first term, he was personally polarizing and unpopular. But a lot of people had the view that this former businessman was somehow going to be good for the economy. And consistently people would say, 'well, maybe I don't like him, or I'm not sure, but he's been good for the economy,' and that helped to float him through … a politically problematic moment of his first presidency."

Glasser continued: "This time, what you have is a situation where, again, he's very unpopular. Over 60 percent of voters in many polls right now are saying they don't approve of his job as president, but even more of them don't approve of the job he's doing on the economy."

This dissatisfaction extends beyond Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, Glasser noted. Even Republican voters are softening in their support of the president on the critical issue of the economy.

"And Trump is giving them almost nothing," Glasser said. "Not only is he raising prices, in effect, with his policies, he has taken to saying affordability is a made-up hoax. He says the Democrats invented this word and it's not even true. It doesn't mean anything. And, you know, it's not a very good way to get the voters' empathy if you're saying basically 'stop whining.'"

"I get you on that," Tur responded. "It's not just that … he doesn't want to admit that affordability is a problem or is something that Americans have been concerned about for a long time. It's the optics of what he's focused on and what he's doing physically in some spaces as well."

Tur then aired footage of Trump's gold-adorned Oval Office, originally recorded by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino (X post).

"It's like Louis XIV vomited all over the Oval Office," Tur remarked. "I mean, I honestly think … Louis the 14th would look at this and say, 'this is too much.' There is so much gold in this room that I don't know who he thinks he's impressing by this, because the American public — if they're telling everybody that their top concern is affordability, if they're being asked to pay more for Donald Trump's war, they're being asked to pay more for his … tariffs, etc. Everything is going up. And they look at the White House and this man is obsessed with pasting gold medallions to everything. Optically, I don't understand that."

"Why do it?" Tur demanded. "If you say he believes he just has this faith in tariffs, fine. But then why add to all of that by turning the Oval Office into a gilded mausoleum, and then also telling everybody that affordability is a hoax?"

In response, Glasser suggested that Trump sees little reason to court voter popularity because he intends to secure power through alternative means. Trump has a well-documented history of preemptively contesting election results, dating to his 2016 campaign and intensifying after his 2020 loss, when he spent months promoting unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud that were rejected by dozens of courts.

"Trump has become very expert over his decade in power in the Republican Party at repeating lies over and over again," Glasser said. "And the fact that he's ceding the ground now so far in advance of the election this fall and already saying 'it's rigged' before anyone's ever cast any vote, I think that's what we need to pay attention to, frankly."

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