By Audrey Fahlberg
Thursday, December 18, 2025
A year ago, Donald Trump and his political advisers were
riding high. After an unprecedented campaign cycle defined by criminal
indictments and a felony conviction against him, Trump swept all seven
battleground states and won the popular vote for the first time for a
Republican presidential candidate in 20 years. He then spent the first few
months of his second term governing through an expanded executive to slash
federal regulation, crack down on DEI, boost energy production, and stem the
flow of illegal immigration at the southern border. He succeeded in confirming
an ideologically diverse cabinet and muscling his signature legislative
achievement through a compliant GOP-controlled Congress — defying his
Democratic critics and journalistic skeptics at almost every turn.
Funny how quickly the political winds can shift.
Fast-forward to November 2025, when Democrats notched
blowout electoral wins in a series of off-year races in New Jersey, Virginia,
and Pennsylvania, followed by strong electoral performances for the minority
party in a Tennessee special election, a Georgia State House race, and Miami’s
mayoral contest. Seventy-six percent of survey respondents in a mid-November
Fox News poll said they view the economy negatively. All this as congressional
Republicans remain deeply divided on how, or whether, to address the enhanced
Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of 2025,
unnerving swing-district Republicans and Trump’s own pollsters, who have long
warned that letting them lapse will spell electoral doom for the GOP in the
midterms.
Despite these flashing red warning signs, Trump is still
partying like it’s November 2024. That may cost his party big in 2026.
Nearly a year into his second term, the president has
spent recent weeks alternating between dismissing voters’ concerns about the
cost of everyday goods and blaming his predecessor for Americans’ persistent
concerns about inflation. Asked during an early-December interview with Politico
to grade himself on the economy, Trump gave himself an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”
“They have a new word. You know they always have a hoax.
The new word is ‘affordability,’” Trump told a crowd of supporters on December
9 in Mount Pocono, Pa., his first stop in what’s expected to be a monthslong
campaign swing to address voters’ concerns about high prices ahead of the
midterms. “Democrats talking about affordability is like Bonnie and Clyde
preaching about public safety.” During the same event, he couldn’t help but
give himself a slap on the back for his 2024 victory. “By the way, last election
did we kick ass? We won.”
Trump’s right that his 2024 victory was a political
comeback for the ages. But nothing lasts forever in politics. And history,
polls, and a spate of recent off-year electoral wins for Democrats now suggest
that 2026 is shaping up to be a real doozy for the president’s party unless
Republicans can turn the tide on affordability.
And boy, do congressional Republicans know it.
“If you’re not concerned, then you’re living in a cave,”
GOP Senator Jim Justice of West Virginia told reporters in early December. “If
you’re not watching the elections that are happening all the time, then you’re
living in a cave. We’re not good at our messaging a lot of times as
Republicans. The Democrats are professionals at it. We’re not good at it.”
The only reason Republicans “even have a prayer of
getting to a positive message on the economy” ahead of the midterms is the
GOP’s success in this year’s reconciliation bill reauthorizing and expanding
the tax cuts that were set to expire at the end of 2025, retiring GOP Senator
Thom Tillis of North Carolina told reporters this month. He hopes the party
will get a lift from some of the new tax provisions that are about to go into
place because of this legislative success. “But can you imagine what we’d be talking
about if we had not been successful with that?”
Pressed recently by a reporter on congressional
Democrats’ continued focus on inflation and how Republicans might be able to
course correct on the messaging front, Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) said his
party must continue delivering economic relief to voters through legislation —
or face the consequences. “It’s not a messaging issue, it’s a substance issue,”
the populist Republican senator told reporters. “And I think that what you’re
going to see is either Republicans will do something on this and actually help,
or they won’t, and if they won’t, then voters are going to be very unhappy.”
Condescending to voters about what will or won’t
alleviate their economic woes is not the solution, Hawley says. “You don’t
change voters’ mind by telling them, ‘Well, this is actually good or bad.’ They
know. They’re paying the bills,” the Missouri senator continued. “Unless
Congress actually acts, I think we’re going to be in a world of hurt, because
voters are going to say, ‘You’re hurting me.’”
Trump allies have responded to questions about the
president’s “affordability hoax” comments by urging patience on the economy.
“It’s hard to turn the ship” because “the Democrats put us in such a deep
ditch, we’ve been digging out every day,” Republican National Committee
Chairman Joe Gruters told National Review in a recent interview. Slowly
but surely, voters will come to appreciate the president’s efforts to bring
down prices, he said. “And it’s not felt by every single person yet, but I
think in time, they will.”
Further complicating Republicans’ affordability struggles
are deep intraparty divisions over how to address health care — one of the few
issues where Democrats have long had an advantage with voters. For all their
internal disagreements leading up to and following this year’s record-long
federal government shutdown, congressional Democrats succeeded in elevating
health care as an end-of-year political cudgel against Republicans. And even
though Democrats created the Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to
expire at the end of 2025, polls continue to suggest that Republicans will
likely be blamed for letting them be phased out.
Meantime, Republicans should spend every single day
reminding voters that in opposing last summer’s reconciliation bill, Democrats
voted against major tax cuts for the middle class, advises longtime Trump
pollster John McLaughlin. “Any smart Republican who’s up for election this year
needs to run on that contrast,” he told NR. It’s safe to say the GOP hasn’t
been doing that. “The Republicans, by not stressing that issue, have made a big
campaign mistake so far this year.”
“Bottom line is, we need to play offense again,”
McLaughlin said.
But how? Trump has some ideas. He talks often about lower
gas prices and price reform for prescription drugs under his leadership. White
House officials have rebranded the reconciliation bill — formerly dubbed by
Trump the “Big, Beautiful Bill” — as the “Working Families Tax Cuts” to better
advertise the legislation’s tax perks, including new breaks for tips and
overtime wages. Trump announced a $12 billion farm bailout, lifted tariffs on
some grocery goods such as coffee and oranges, and tasked the Justice
Department and Federal Trade Commission with examining whether anticompetitive
behavior, including among meatpacking companies, is causing soaring food
prices. He’s flirted with $2,000 rebate checks to alleviate the economic pain
of his own tariffs.
Given the GOP’s electoral struggles with low-propensity
GOP voters when Trump isn’t on the ballot, White House Chief of Staff Susie
Wiles has pledged to get the president on the campaign trail as if he is.
“He’s willing to barnstorm the country,” Gruters, the RNC
chairman, told NR. “He knows what’s at stake.”
The stakes are high indeed. The president and his
advisers are anxious that if Democrats flip the House in 2026, they’ll
investigate him, impeach him for the third time, and spend the final two years
of his term hauling high-profile administration officials before Congress to
testify on alleged misconduct.
***
On top of the White House’s economic vulnerabilities,
there are early indicators that Trump’s decade-long iron grip on his party is
gradually slipping, if ever so slightly, as congressional Republicans begin to
contemplate what a post-Trump GOP might look like. Take, for example, Trump’s
eventual endorsement of a House vote on the “Epstein files” after he spent
months vehemently opposing their release. Or Senate Republicans’ refusal to
heed Trump’s renewed call to nuke the filibuster.
Or even Indiana Republicans’ end-of-year rebuke to a
Trump-preferred congressional map that would eliminate every Democratic
district in the state — a political failure for Trump that has prompted many
Republicans to privately question whether the White House’s mid-decade
redistricting push is backfiring on the GOP. The president’s allies have
pledged to primary every GOP state legislator who voted against the new map to
remind every elected Republican that, a year into his second term, Trump is
still the boss, and there are still consequences to crossing him.
In addition, there are emerging GOP frustrations that the
president spent the weeks following the government shutdown largely delegating
the health care fight to Congress, leaving Republicans to duke it out among
themselves over the best legislative path forward. And there are bubbling
disagreements within MAGA pundit circles about the party’s loyalty to Israel
and whether the president is prioritizing overseas conflicts over domestic
issues that are important to working-class voters.
“Fix health insurance. Not regime change in Venezuela,”
retiring firebrand Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), who
recently broke with the president, wrote in a December 1 social media post.
President Trump is still by far the most powerful member
of his party. And yet, even though not every Republican will admit it publicly,
almost everyone in Washington can feel it: The tide is turning against
Republicans ahead of 2026, and it’s a trend that won’t be easy to reverse.
Meantime, Trump continues to signal that he’s losing
patience with voters’ impatience on the economy.
“When will I get credit for having created, with No
Inflation, perhaps the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country?” he
asked in a December 11 social media post, in which he touted lower gas prices
and a strong stock market as proof that the country is on the right economic
track. “When will people understand what is happening? When will Polls reflect
the Greatness of America at this point in time, and how bad it was just one
year ago?”
Give it until November 2026, and Republicans will get an
answer.
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