White House weighs stepped up domestic travel and speeches to improve Trump’s standing on the economy

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President Donald Trump’s advisers have had conversations about him traveling the country to give economy-focused speeches as they privately weigh a number of strategies to improve his standing on the issue, administration officials told CNN.

Trump’s advisers acknowledge that they have an affordability problem that the president has bristled at in public: Americans’ outlook on the economy is dour, and the administration’s efforts to ease their financial anxieties aren’t resonating.

“You can’t convince people that their experience, what they’re feeling at home, isn’t reality,” one of the officials said.

White House officials have advised the president not to brush away or outright dismiss that Americans are feeling squeezed by rising prices, they said. They have been actively putting “policy time” — as one of the officials characterized it — on Trump’s schedule with the goal of accelerating the administration’s efforts to tackle inflation.

While Trump has talked extensively about affordability in recent days, he has often downplayed the strain Americans are feeling, suggesting in a Fox News interview on Monday that polls capturing Americans’ economic anxiety are “fake.”

One of the strategies being discussed in the West Wing is for Trump to turn much of his attention to his domestic agenda. That includes ramping up his domestic travel, the officials said, and pulling back on his international trips. As the holidays draw near, there’s also a push to coordinate new messaging on what the administration is doing to help lower costs.

Two key factors last week — Democratic victories in Tuesday’s elections and the mounting pain of the record-long government shutdown — initially set off alarm bells, not only in the White House but in the Oval Office directly, about the magnitude of the issue, the officials said.

The discussions also come as Trump has been criticized, including by GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of focusing more on his foreign policy and less on domestic concerns, though the president dismissed that notion on Monday.

“I have to view the presidency as a worldwide situation, not locally,” Trump said, responding to the criticism that he was too busy meeting with foreign leaders. “But with all of that, I passed a great big beautiful bill, which is the biggest tax cuts in the history of our country.”

The president, meanwhile, has been personally frustrated with Americans’ perception of his administration’s handling of the economy and the media’s coverage of it.

“The president gets it. He knows this is an issue,” a senior White House official said. “But he’s frustrated he’s not getting credit for what he’s doing,” pointing to energy deregulations and the extension of his 2017 tax cuts.

Trump acknowledged that frustration last week, just hours after Democrats walked away with major wins in New Jersey, Virginia, New York City and California.

“I tell Republicans, you want to win elections, you got to talk about these facts,” he told a financial conference in Miami, concluding that his party has been too quiet about the economic accomplishments of his term so far. “You know, it’s really easy to win elections when you talk about the facts.”

Earlier in the day, Trump castigated Senate Republicans, arguing they were getting “killed” politically by the government shutdown, which public polling showed Americans blaming more on the GOP and Trump than on Democrats.

It appears the shutdown could be over by week’s end, but officials argue that it has contributed to burgeoning concerns about the cost of living in the US. (The shutdown also exposed another potential political liability for the GOP in the form of rising health care premiums, which the party will be forced to grapple with after this week’s votes to reopen the government.)

‘We have the greatest economy ever’

Trump’s public comments on the economy have at times been reminiscent of his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, who was widely seen as out of touch for initially downplaying the threat of inflation.

Pressed during Monday’s Fox News interview about why Americans say they’re down on the economy if he’s accomplished as much as he says he has to lower prices, Trump questioned the premise.

“I don’t know that they are saying that. I think polls are fake,” Trump said. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.” He used the opportunity to point to the revenue being generated from his tariff policies. (In a CNN poll released last week, 61% of Americans said Trump’s policies have “worsened economic conditions in this country.” That number topped out at 58% under Biden in CNN polling.)

Some of the president’s defensive messaging has come from what he’s being told by his advisers, who have argued that his financial policies are working but need time to settle in, two of the officials said. They’ve also cautioned that while his tariffs have caused a temporary ripple in the economy, those hurdles will be smoothed out by the 2026 midterms.

“President Trump inherited the worst affordability crisis in modern American history, and in less than ten months, he stopped inflation in its tracks,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN in a statement. “The President’s pro-growth policies of deregulation and energy independence are bringing down gas prices, food prices, and inflation — and Americans will continue to benefit. Trust in Trump — he created the greatest economy in his first term and he is doing it again in his second term.”

Yet despite Trump’s grandiose claims about ushering in the best economy in history and knocking Democrats’ affordability message as a “con job,” he’s also taken steps in recent days to try to make his mark on the issue. He’s floated $2,000 tariff rebate checks to lower- and middle-income Americans, gone after meatpacking companies he’s accused of jacking up prices, and even raised the idea of a 50-year mortgage (a proposal that stemmed from Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte and one that many White House officials are not on board with).

All of those moves appear to be an indication of how the president is seeing the affordability issue resonate, even as he attempts to brush it off in another breath.

And while some in the White House see the new fixation on affordability as an overreaction to last week’s elections and shutdown anxiety, administration officials also want to avoid Biden’s mistakes, which means taking Americans’ perceptions about the economy seriously — and doing something about it.

With critical midterms that will shape the rest of Trump’s term now less than a year away, they don’t see time to waste.

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