Trump blames the GOP’s problems on messaging. He’s right — but not how he thinks

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President Donald Trump has locked on to a new excuse for the GOP’s impending 2026 midterm losses: It’s the messaging, not the results.

And the thing is, there is some truth in there — just not in the way Trump intends.

Trump has rolled out this purported explanation repeatedly over the last two days.

“We’re doing an extremely poor job of promotion and an extremely great job of running the country,” he said Wednesday at the White House.

“So I say we’ve done a bad public relations job, but a great management job – and that’s more important,” he added Thursday upon landing in Dallas.

Then at an event in Denton, Texas: “The only thing we’re doing badly at is public relations. In other words, we’re doing a phenomenal job, but … maybe we’re doing a bad job in selling it.”

The first thing to note is that this is well-trodden territory. Politicians often maintain their problem is not how great they are, but failing to make people understand that.

Kamala Harris said during the 2024 campaign that she and Joe Biden hadn’t “taken adequate credit” for what they did. Barack Obama after the 2014 midterms called his team’s messaging problems a “ failure of politics .” GOP vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan argued much the same after his ticket’s loss in 2012.

And often, there is some truth in there.

But for Trump, this is more of a convenient excuse than anything else. He clearly has not only a messaging problem, but also a results problem — including on the issues voters indicate are most important to them.

And to the extent the messaging is the problem, it’s largely because his messaging — especially on the economy — is bad, counterproductive and hasn’t really changed.

There are credible arguments that the economy isn’t quite as bad as Americans think it is. But they fall flat for a simple reason, and it’s not that Trump and his party haven’t talked about it enough: Persistent inflation and high gas prices are constantly staring Americans in the face.

Trump got a boost in the 2024 election due to a spike in inflation during the Biden administration and amid the Covid-19 pandemic. But rather than drive down prices, like he promised to do instantly, he pursued unpopular policies that risked exacerbating the problem — especially his global tariffs and the Iran war.

With those policies, Trump took full ownership — more or less — of whatever happened next with the economy.

Inflation today (3.4%) is higher than it was when he took over (3%). And gas prices over $4 per gallon are a daily reminder of the direct costs to regular Americans of a war in Iran that Trump launched on his own but that few Americans see the point of .

The result: While just 44% of Americans blamed high prices mostly on Biden ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, according to AP-NORC polling , today 65% blame them mostly on Trump.

And a recent Marquette Law School poll showed Americans said 64%-18% that Trump’s policy proposals would continue to increase inflation. Only 41% of Republicans thought they would decrease inflation.

And Trump has compounded these problems by how he talks about these issues.

First off, Trump made the grave mistake of over-promising .

He promised gas under $2 per gallon ; it’s over $4. He promised to bring down mortgage rates as low as under 3%; they’re over 7% and at their highest level since 2023 . He promised to “cut your energy prices in half within 12 months”; energy prices have continued to climb .

He also pledged to end the Russia-Ukraine war on Day One and said he was “not going to start a war” — both promises he’s broken.

Trump has always made lots of big promises, and people might overlook some of them. But not when it comes to their pocketbooks. Trump dropped the ball on the one thing he really needed to deliver on.

The second reason is his utter neglect and dismissal of inflation.

Rather than feeling Americans’ pain on price increases and putting forward plans to deal with the problem, he’s instead falsely claimed — ad nauseam — that prices have actually been falling . (This despite Americans being able to see the truth in their everyday lives.) He’s bizarrely called affordability a “hoax.” He’s also made it abundantly clear he’s more interested in unpopular renovation projects in Washington — like ballrooms and reflecting pools and triumphal arches — than he is in addressing inflation.

Even as Trump has spoken dismissively of these issues, Vice President JD Vance has tried a different tack , arguing publicly and privately that Americans’ economic concerns should be taken seriously and dealt with. But Trump hasn’t echoed that.

And again, the polling bears out what a colossal problem this has become for his party.

CBS News polling has shown 78% of Americans said the Trump administration hasn’t focused enough on lowering prices. And CNN polling has shown 73% said Trump “hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.”

And the third reason is Trump’s and his team’s fixation on blaming Biden. But this argument went out the window long ago.

Trump has been in office now for 20 months and promised to deal with these problems quickly and easily. That’s already going to prompt less voter sympathy for the “I inherited this problem” argument. And then the president added to it with his economy-rocking policies.

I wrote about this back in April 2025 — shortly after Trump’s “Liberation Day” global tariffs announcement. Even then, an NPR-PBS-Marist College poll showed 60% of Americans said the current economic conditions were mostly due to Trump’s policies, versus just 39% who said they were mostly “inherited.”

That was simply not the case with other recent presidents, including Trump in his first term. And that reinforced how he had anchored himself to whatever happened with the economy.

By the following month, a Reuters-Ipsos poll showed Americans said 59%-37% that if the country fell into a recession, it would be Trump’s fault rather than Biden’s.

If Americans reached these conclusions 17 or 18 months ago, are they really going to be suddenly convinced of the opposite? Of course not.

And that’s what makes the last few days telling.

Even as Trump has suddenly started complaining about the GOP’s messaging problems, he has doubled down on the same messages that got him into this mess. He spent much of an interview with Time magazine obsessing over the White House renovations that Americans hate. In Texas, he falsely claimed inflation was down and that his foes had suddenly invented the concept of affordability. And he and Vance have only ramped up their blame-Biden strategy.

None of it makes sense, and it hasn’t for some time. But rather than fix his political problem, Trump would rather blame the messenger — even if he is both the poor messenger and the problem.

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唐纳德·特朗普总统为共和党即将到来的 2026 年中期选举失利找到了一个新的借口：问题出在信息传递上，而不是结果上。

问题是，这里面确实包含一些事实——只是并非特朗普所想的那样。

过去两天，特朗普反复抛出这一所谓的解释。

“我们在宣传方面做得非常糟糕，但在治理国家方面做得非常出色，”他周三在白宫说。

“所以我觉得我们在公关方面做得不好，但在管理方面做得非常好——而管理才是最重要的，”他在周四抵达达拉斯后补充道。

随后在德克萨斯州丹顿市的一次活动上，他说道：“我们唯一做得不好的就是公共关系。换句话说，我们的工作做得非常出色，但是……也许我们在推销方面做得不好。”

首先需要指出的是，这其实是一个老生常谈的话题。政客们常常辩称，他们的问题不在于自己有多优秀，而在于如何让人们理解这一点。

卡玛拉·哈里斯在2024年竞选期间表示，她和乔·拜登没有“充分肯定”他们的政绩。巴拉克·奥巴马在2014年中期选举后称其团队的信息传递问题是“政治的失败”。共和党副总统候选人保罗·瑞安在2012年竞选失败后也表达了类似的观点。

而且，其中往往包含一些真理。

但对特朗普来说，这更像是一个方便的借口。他显然不仅存在信息传递问题，也存在结果问题——包括在选民认为最重要的问题上。

如果说信息传递是问题所在，那很大程度上是因为他的信息传递——尤其是在经济方面——很糟糕，适得其反，而且并没有真正改变。

确实有一些看似合理的论点认为，美国经济状况并没有美国人想象的那么糟糕。但这些论点站不住脚，原因很简单，并非特朗普及其政党对此谈论得不够：持续的通货膨胀和高油价始终摆在美国民众的眼前。

由于拜登执政期间以及新冠疫情期间通货膨胀飙升，特朗普在2024年大选中获得了支持。但他并没有像承诺的那样立即降低物价，而是推行了一些不得人心的政策，这些政策有可能加剧通货膨胀问题——尤其是他的全球关税政策和伊朗战争。

通过这些政策，特朗普或多或少地完全掌控了接下来经济的一切走向。

如今的通货膨胀率（3.4%）高于他上任时的水平（3%）。每加仑超过4美元的汽油价格每天都在提醒普通美国民众，特朗普一手发动的伊朗战争给普通美国民众带来了直接的经济负担，而这场战争很少有美国人理解其意义。

结果：根据美联社-NORC民调显示，在2022年中期选举前，只有44%的美国人将高物价主要归咎于拜登，而如今，65%的人将高物价主要归咎于特朗普。

马凯特大学法学院最近的一项民调显示，64%的美国人认为特朗普的政策提案会继续推高通货膨胀，而持相反意见的仅占18%。只有41%的共和党人认为这些提案会降低通货膨胀。

而特朗普谈论这些问题的方式，更是加剧了这些问题。

首先，特朗普犯了一个严重的错误，那就是承诺过多。

他承诺汽油价格低于每加仑2美元；现在却超过4美元。他承诺将抵押贷款利率降至3%以下；现在却超过7%，达到2023年以来的最高水平。他承诺“在12个月内将能源价格减半”；但能源价格却持续上涨。

他还承诺在就职第一天就结束俄乌战争，并表示“不会发动战争”——但这两项承诺他都违背了。

特朗普总是做出很多夸大其词的承诺，人们或许会忽略其中一些。但事关他们的钱包，他们可不会轻易放弃。特朗普在他真正需要兑现的一件事上彻底失败了。

第二个原因是他对通货膨胀的完全忽视和漠视。

他非但没有体会美国民众因物价上涨而承受的痛苦，也没有提出应对方案，反而反复散布谣言，声称物价实际上一直在下降。（尽管美国民众在日常生活中就能亲眼目睹真相。）他甚至荒谬地称“物价可负担性”是“骗局”。他还明确表示，比起解决通货膨胀问题，他更热衷于在华盛顿推行一些不受欢迎的翻新工程——比如建造宴会厅、倒影池和凯旋门。

尽管特朗普对这些问题不屑一顾，但副总统万斯却采取了不同的策略，他公开和私下都强调，应该认真对待并解决美国民众的经济担忧。但特朗普并未对此表示赞同。

民调再次证实，这对他的政党来说已经变成了一个巨大的问题。

哥伦比亚广播公司新闻频道（CBS News）的民调显示，78%的美国人认为特朗普政府在降低物价方面投入不足。而美国有线电视新闻网（CNN）的民调显示，73%的受访者认为特朗普“对国家最重要的几个问题关注不够”。

第三个原因是特朗普及其团队执着于指责拜登。但这种说法早就站不住脚了。

特朗普上任已有20个月，他曾承诺迅速轻松地解决这些问题。这已经让选民对“我继承了这些问题”的说法不再抱有同情。而总统随后推出的那些动摇经济的政策更是雪上加霜。

我早在2025年4月就写过这篇文章——就在特朗普宣布“解放日”全球关税政策之后不久。即便如此，NPR、PBS和马里斯特学院联合进行的一项民意调查显示，60%的美国人认为当前的经济状况主要是特朗普政策造成的，而只有39%的人认为主要是“继承而来”。

但其他几任总统，包括特朗普的第一任期，情况并非如此。这也进一步印证了他将自己的政治命运与经济走势紧密挂钩。

次月，路透社-益普索民调显示，59% 的美国人认为，如果美国陷入衰退，那将是特朗普的错，而不是拜登的错，而持相反观点的人仅占 37%。

如果美国人在17或18个月前就得出这些结论，他们真的会突然改变主意吗？当然不会。

而这正是过去几天发生的事情引人注目之处。

尽管特朗普突然开始抱怨共和党的宣传策略存在问题，但他却变本加厉地重复那些让他陷入困境的论调。在接受《时代》杂志采访时，他花了相当长的时间纠缠于美国民众深恶痛绝的白宫翻修工程。在德克萨斯州，他错误地声称通货膨胀已经下降，并指责他的对手突然发明了“负担能力”的概念。而且，他和万斯还加大了对拜登的指责力度。

这一切都毫无道理，而且这种情况已经持续一段时间了。但特朗普非但没有解决自己的政治问题，反而把责任推卸给传达信息的人——即便他自己既是糟糕的传达者，也是问题的根源。