'Poetic Justice': Mona Charen Sees Leaked Trump Midterm Strategy Backfiring on GOP
Key Takeaways
- •Trump’s advisers reportedly believe his poor poll numbers reflect voters not fully recognizing his accomplishments.
- •The reported accomplishments include stock market highs, a closed southern border, and rising manufacturing output.
- •Critics said manufacturing output gains have not been matched by factory employment growth.
- •Trump is reportedly considering a midterm advertising campaign focused on his own record.
- •The discussion said Republicans are trying to move away from Trump as his approval ratings fall to record lows.
Donald Trump's advisers believe they have cracked the code behind his underwater approval ratings: in their telling, voters simply do not grasp how well the president has performed. That theory was dismantled on The New Republic's Daily Blast podcast (transcript), which took up a new Atlantic report on the president's midterm strategy.
"So these new leaks to The Atlantic are really something," host Greg Sargent said, unpacking the claim that Trump's team privately blames his poll numbers on voters not knowing his "accomplishments" — among them, according to the leaks, new stock market highs, a closed southern border, and rising manufacturing output. Sargent is a New Republic columnist who previously covered national politics at The Washington Post.
Bulwark writer Mona Charen, a longtime conservative columnist who served as a White House speechwriter during the Reagan administration, unraveled that argument. Her outlet was founded by conservatives who broke with the party over Trump. She likened Trump to a "mad king" surrounded by courtiers too frightened to tell him the truth, and flagged the "sleight of hand" in the talking points: while manufacturing output may be up, factory employment has lagged.
Charen also pointed to Trump's reported plan to flood the midterms with television advertising about his own record. That plan, she noted, is precisely what vulnerable Republicans dread as they scramble to make November about anything other than the president. The stakes are congressional — every House seat and roughly a third of the Senate are on the ballot in a midterm — and the party holding the White House has lost ground in nearly every such election since the Second World War.
Polls show Trump cratering to all-time lows, and Republicans are sprinting from him with "no end in sight."
Charen argued that voters cannot pin this economy on a virus or on former President Joe Biden, because the tariffs, the Iran war, and the price spikes belong to him.
"He did this. He's doing this," she said.
If the strategy backfires on the party that enabled him, Charen added, there would be a certain symmetry in it: the GOP grudgingly swallowed a midterm message built entirely around a president who is dragging the party down.
"And poetic justice is the best justice," she told Sargent.
