Republican pollster Frank Luntz says President Donald Trump has finally seen the light on the economic woes of the American public.
Speaking to the Washington Post, Luntz commented, "I think he’s woken up to where things are now. He believes he can change the perception by his tenacity. But affordability is a very stubborn issue.”
Trump is headed to Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday, where he'll deliver a speech on the affordability crisis, an issue where the Post reporter said he's struggled in the past.
"Again and again, Trump has tried to stay focused on domestic economic uncertainty ... Again and again, the president’s attention has drifted elsewhere," wrote Matt Viser, White House bureau chief.
When Trump began his economic tour in December at a casino in Pennsylvania, he pivoted away from talk about the economy to attack Democrats for calling out a limping economy.
He then spoke to a crowd in Detroit, where he said the term affordability was “a fake word" created by Democrats.
Trump's speech last week at the World Economic Forum was meant to focus on his "new domestic housing policy meant to help families struggling with rising costs," per the Post. In that case, the launch ignited a global crisis over whether Trump would continue his demand that Greenland be part of the United States.
"People say they feel worse about the economy than they did a year ago," the report continued. "Consumer sentiment ticked up between December and January but remains well below year-ago levels, according to a closely watched survey from the University of Michigan."
“People’s sense that he was good on the economy is what propped him up even when they disliked 100 other things about him,” said longtime Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. “But now to have him so deeply underwater on the economy means there’s really nothing propping him up among the 100 other things.”
Luntz thinks that Trump's dismissal of the term "affordability" could become his greater liability because it isn't a word exclusively used by Democrats. The pollster said that Trump risks sounding as if he's dismissing the real struggles Americans have.
Affordability is “part of the lexicon,” Luntz told the Post. “And you know this if you talk to average voters. All these focus groups I’ve been doing, that’s what came up first. Immigration was important at one point. Russia-Ukraine was for a while. But affordability, and that’s the word Americans use: ‘I can’t afford fill-in-the-blank.'"
The report recalled a Trump tangent from the Detroit speech in which the president began talking about affordability, "but quickly got in his own way."
"No, that’s a word used by the Democrats,” he snapped. “They’re the ones that caused the problem."
Trump then went off on a rant about transgender athletes and a lack of unity in the GOP.
Luntz explained that such events like this are "not fun for him" because "the public doesn’t applaud because it’s serious stuff."