Donald Trump reacts next to Melania Trump during a rally at Madison Square Garden, in New York, U.S., October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
President Donald Trump's 2024 victory was largely due to voters trusting him more on the economy. But one longtime Republican strategist is now arguing that becayse prices for basic needs are continuing to rise, the president effectively has nothing to stand on.
During a Friday interview on The Bulwark Podcast, Republican strategist Mike Murphy – who advised the campaigns of Republicans John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, among others — argued that that the lone reason President Donald Trump secured a second term has been effectively debunked. Murphy told host Tim Miller (a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee) that Trump's 2024 electoral coalition has mostly soured on his administration just a year into his second presidency.
"On every level, it's so juvenile and transparent. Yet somehow this wonderful country – at least temporarily — bought into it, or at least enough hated Biden and Harris to decide, well, he's a clown and a bozo and a right-wing orangutan, but he can run the economy," Murphy said. "And of course, the big thing is, as a political hack, he's lost that franchise now, the thing that was propping him up."
Murphy further theorized that Trump's recent appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland – in which he asserted that the president was perceived as a "crackpot egomaniac child" — was his way to "wag the dog" to distract Americans from his unpopular domestic policies.
"He's going to try more foreign policy stuff to wag the dog, because otherwise we're talking about what the grocery bill looks like every week," he said.
Miller then segued into asking Murphy about the recent New York Times-Siena College Poll finding that Trump was deeply underwater with virtually every voter demographic as he entered year two of his second term. Miller specifically noted that the traditionally Democratic-friendly groups responsible for Trump's 2024 victory — like Black men, Hispanic and Latino men and young voters under 35 — were particularly cold toward Trump.
"Basically what happened is that there was a group of people that thought Biden was a mummy and that they didn't like their grocery store bill, and that was basically it. All of the other stuff is just kind of window dressing," Miller said. "And now that Biden's out of the picture and now that the economy isn't getting any better, those new people who came to Trump have basically snapped back."
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