GOP strategist reveals 'recipe' for Trump’s tanking polls: 'Maybe he doesn’t know what he’s doing'

Bulwark Editor Sarah Longwell says President Donald Trump’s reputation has long been inoculated against failure by voters’ unshaking faith, but this appears to be shifting in his second term thanks to a stubbornly slumpy economy and market chaos.

“The main thing that has sunk in is that maybe Donald Trump doesn't know exactly what he's doing,” said Longwell on MSNBC’s ‘Deadline: White House.’

“He's never been here before, but part of the reason he's never been here before is that with the exception of COVID — where people recognized a major exogenous event occurring — Donald Trump's strength, his central mythology, was this idea that he was a businessman.”

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Longwell acknowledged that “hardcore MAGA” voters will not easily be swayed, but a major slice of the president's coalition involved people who “just wanted things to cost less.”

“You'll get some who are still fans … but then you get other people, especially people who are cost constrained, who are at the lower end of the income spectrum. Those people notice every dollar and any price that goes up,” Longwell told host Nicole Wallace. “Those voters who heard the promise that Trump was going to lower costs, who thought he was a businessman who knew what he was doing. They are now watching this chaos and not seeing their prices go down. They are starting to lose faith that he's going to be able to keep the promises that he made to them.”

Polling suggested the economy was Trump’s champion strength leading into the 2024 election, and the economy was the most important issue in 2024. But now Trump “keeps crashing the stock market,” Longwell said.

“He made promises he couldn't keep, and that is a recipe for Trump to get into really negative territory really fast,” she said. “We have never seen somebody in the first 100 days [fall] like this. Presidents enjoy a honeymoon period. The bottom usually starts to fall out sometime in the summer, but Trump has managed to crater every advantage he had before the first 100 days are up.”

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It was important, she said, to “go on offense, to help the American people understand why this is happening and whose fault it is.”

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