The one thing Trump 'won’t do' to save the GOP from voters’ wrath

The midterms are widely predicted to be a major beating for the Republican Party, and as one pundit argued for MS NOW, there is one thing President Donald Trump could try that might spare the party some of the wrath of voters, but it is unfortunately one thing he absolutely "won't do."

David Drucker is a longtime political commentator who currently works as a contributing writer for The Dispatch and as a contributor for MS NOW. On Friday, he was among the guests on a panel for the latter network discussing the uninspiring new jobs report and whether or not Republicans have enough time to change voters' minds about them. When pressed about what Republicans might be able to do, Drucker did not see many possibilities available.

"I don't know, make a wish and a fountain?" he said. "I mean, there's just not much you can do a month out from the elections. I mean, look, even 34 years ago we could at least talk about election day being a month out. But really, October is election month because you have so much mail-in voting and absentee voting... And whenever the party in the White House is under fire because of the economy, they're going to make the case that they simply need more time, and that the last thing voters want to do is put [those] people back in charge..."

He added: "But you know what we're seeing with these numbers, and I think this is key here, is that if you look at polling over the course of the last 18 months, voters did give President Trump some time to get the economy in order the way they wanted him to, to arrest inflation, bring down the cost of living, broadly speaking, and everything that goes along with that. And they simply are done giving him time. And so I don't know what republicans do to deal with this."

Later on in the conversation, host Erielle Reshef suggested to the panel that Trump is facing a similar dynamic to the one that was widely credited with helping sink Joe Biden's presidency, in which he continues to tout certain numbers as indicators that his economy is strong, while voters continue to feel poorly about their own finances. Drucker suggested that this is actually a fairly common tactic for presidents, but with Trump, he lacks the ability to do one key thing that might help the message land.

"It's the same thing that hurts every president in every election where he's under fire, where his party's under fire," Drucker explained. "But it's hurting President Trump, more so because of his particular stubbornness. And I think we need to, like, separate out two things here. So any president is going to try and make the case that things may not appear as good as you'd like them to be, but they're actually a lot better than you think, and 'let me explain to you everything that's happening either beneath the surface or above the surface that I'm not sure you're aware of,' so that they can make a positive case for their agenda. What separates Trump is that he won't do what presidents usually do, which is give a little hat tip to the fact that voters aren't happy and they're not feeling it enough, or they're not feeling it at all."

He added: "What this president has done is simply say that people aren't feeling what they're actually feeling, and it's all fake. And we've seen in polling and data and in my conversations with voters going back a year, that one of the problems the president has, one of the big problems, is not just that they don't think his agenda is working, that the cost of living isn't going down, because they don't think he's focused on it. They don't think he cares about it."