Decorations at the Oval Office, during meeting of U.S. President Donald Trump with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 21, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
MS NOW anchor Katy Tur and panelists tried to puzzle through President Donald Trump’s tone-deaf reaction to voters’ economic suffering, but the conclusion they reached was that Trump doesn’t care to please voters. Instead, he has other plans.
New Yorker writer Susan Glasser pointed out that Trump appears criminally unaware of polls and incapable of adjusting his behavior on expensive tariffs or the inflationary results of his Iran war to help either himself or his party in November.
“… Trump's policies are extremely unpopular,” said Glasser on a Friday’s “Moment with Katy Tur,” explaining that his historic lows are worse going into the midterm elections than in 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. 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 includes more than Democrats and Republican leaning independents, Glasser added. Even Republicans are softening on the president on the crucial question 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,” said Tur. “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 played video of Trump’s gilded Oval Office, taken by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino.
“It's like Louis XIV vomited all over the Oval Office,” said Tur. “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 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,” demanded Tur. “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?
To this, Glasser said Trump has no cause to win votes of popularity among American voters because he plans to snatch power through other means.
“Trump has become very expert over his decade in power in the Republican Party, at repeating lies over and over again. 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,” said Glasser.