U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he arrives to deliver remarks on the U.S. economy and affordability at the Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, U.S. December 9, 2025. REUTERS Jonathan Ernst
Politico reports Republicans are privately fuming that President Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech didn’t provide them with much comfort about the GOP's prospects in next year's elections.
Trump’s usual defenders “gushed about the speech … on the airwaves and across the internet,” writes Politico. “But offline and away from the cameras, many Republicans on Wednesday were far less ebullient about the president’s attempt to improve his dismal numbers on the economy — and increasingly downbeat about what that may mean for their party’s chances in next November’s midterm election.”
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster in Washington told Politico that “I don’t think it will go down in the pantheon of greatest presidential addresses. I don’t know if it will persuade anyone who wasn’t already persuaded.”
“The execution was abysmal,” said an anonymous Republican operative who served in the first Trump administration. “He’s a very effective salesman when his heart is in it or when he’s on the attack. But the ‘I feel your pain’ speech — he just doesn’t have that club in his bag.”
The White House knows it is losing the “messaging war on affordability,” reports Politico, and critics say Trump’s attempt to blame the Biden administration is also falling flat.
“Voters will always provide more breathing room if you establish credibility by acknowledging the challenge, and the challenge right now that they’re feeling from higher prices is real,” said GOP communications strategist Kevin Madden. “You have to acknowledge that, first, if you’re ever going to gain their support for the policy plan to address it and make it better in the future.”
A former senior Republican National Committee official told Politico, “it’s hard to imagine any [RNC] members waking up today and saying, ‘Oh, now I feel better.’”
Instead, he pointed to a legion of House Republican retirements in the months before an upcoming mid-term election predicted to deliver huge losses to the GOP.
Democrats, meanwhile, seem pleased to see Trump “falling into the same trap and effectively downplaying Americans’ anxieties about the cost of living” as Biden did, Politico reports.
Read the full Politico report at this link.