The national average for a gallon of gas is $4.48. Diesel is $6.47. The Iran war is raging on. And President Donald Trump is fixated on personal grievances, a media ban and Washington renovations.
With just five weeks to go before the midterm elections, Republicans on Capitol Hill know that voters are focused on the economy.
But as Republicans try to protect their majorities, GOP lawmakers also acknowledge that President Donald Trump’s attention is… elsewhere.
Sen. John Cornyn — who lost his bid for re-election when Trump backed his primary challenger — suggested the president is not helping his party’s chances in what could be a rough midterm.
When MS NOW asked Cornyn last week whether Trump was focused on the right issues six weeks out from Election Day, the Texas Republican had a one-word answer: “No.”
“Right now,” he said, “we’re flying into some serious headwinds on the issues, because the president does not believe that we should address affordability issues, which are top of mind for most voters.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told MS NOW that she doesn’t know “how many Alaskans are thinking about the Kennedy Center and whether it should be demolished.”
Even Republicans who normally go out of their way to defend the president acknowledged that Trump could do more to demonstrate that he is focused on the issues they believe matter most to voters.
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said he’d like to see the president speak to the American people about a number of things: why the U.S. is in Iran, what the plan is to get out, why the country is experiencing inflation and what the GOP plan is to reduce it.
If Trump would do those things, Kennedy said, “it would go a long way to helping us in the midterms, because that’s what’s on people’s minds.”
What’s actually on Trump’s mind is a different story.
The president has spent considerable time in recent weeks talking about his plans for a Triumphal Arch. He continues to fight to get his name on the Kennedy Center — or to demolish it if he can’t. And in between socializing with golfers like Bryson DeChambeau and Gary Player — or showing off his picture of an autopen to swipe at former President Joe Biden — he has continued to fill his public commentary with a grab bag of personal feuds, cultural battles and vanity projects.
Trump’s Truth Social feed — arguably one of the best chronicles of what he’s thinking about at any given moment — illustrates his divided attention.
An MS NOW analysis of his social posts since Labor Day — the typical kick off for the big push to Election Day — found that Trump has posted roughly 30 times about his moves to renovate D.C. and the White House. He’s posted approximately 10 times about renaming Lake Ontario and New Mexico. And he’s posted more than 20 times about press coverage, including railing against MS NOW and CNN.
Trump has also devoted a significant amount of attention to more obscure topics, like former baseball player Johnny Damon, Gracie Mansion and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, his Greenland deal, and a series of polls asking if we should change the name of artificial intelligence to “superior,” “supreme” or “super” intelligence.
While he posted about the economy and fuel prices some 40 times in the past few weeks, it has almost always been to brag, insisting that he has outperformed the Biden administration rather than explaining how he will improve things for Americans who are feeling the economic squeeze.
His chief legislative accomplishment of the term — the sweeping tax cuts package that Republicans had hoped to make a central part of their re-election pitch — receives only an occasional mention.
Republicans are well aware that Trump’s attention could be better spent on more substantive issues. And even GOP lawmakers who tried to avoid criticizing the president had difficulty answering a simple question: is he focused on the right things this close to Election Day?
Pressed repeatedly on that question, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., declined to answer.
“The American people want affordability,” Cassidy told MS NOW.
And when asked if Trump has been focused on that topic, Cassidy only offered that, “I’ve been focused on healthcare.”
Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., told MS NOW that Republicans need to be talking about “how we brought taxes and regulations down in the One Big Beautiful Bill.”
“We secured the border,” Hoeven said.
But asked if the president was adequately focused on those topics, Hoeven wouldn’t answer directly.
“Well, I’m going to stay focused on them, and you know the president, he’s pretty good at getting elected,” he said.
“You can pick on his message on any given day,” Hoeven added, “but overall, I think he will be on the pocketbook issues, and he’s going to work hard for our candidates.”
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. — who has been calling for lawmakers to act on high costs — tried to reframe a question about whether Trump was focused on the right things as one about Congress’s priorities and actions.
“I think Congress is, you know, always giving the president advice and never doing anything,” Hawley told MS NOW. “I’d like to see us actually do something.”
And when pressed on whether it would help his own party’s electoral chances in a few weeks if the president focused less on the arch and ballroom and more on the cost of living, Hawley declined to take the bait.
“He’s not on the ballot,” Hawley said of Trump. “I think what matters in these races is what the candidates do.”
Of course, there were Republicans who defended the president, claiming that he has a superhuman ability to take on every issue imaginable at the same time.
“You can’t fathom the bandwidth that President Trump has,” Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., told MS NOW.
“To think, ‘Well, he’s just locked into the ballroom or whatever it may be, or this and that.’ Don’t think that. He’s too smart for that,” Justice said. “He’s focusing on everything all the time.”
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., similarly defended Trump’s ability to simultaneously focus on the arch, the Kennedy Center and the economy.
“The guy’s an energizer bunny,” Scott told MS NOW. “He’s focused on a lot of stuff, and as we all know, he’s a builder. He likes to build things, but yeah, he’s focused on affordability.”
And Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., invoked the Chinese president’s visit to Washington.
“He’s attending to this summit with Xi Jinping,” Young said. “That strikes me as an issue of grave consequence.”
But Trump’s fledgling but growing group of GOP critics was clear-eyed about the president’s divided and disordered attention.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., argued that fixating on, as one example, banning the press is not a winning strategy for November.
“Focus on the economy,” Tillis told MS NOW. “It’s always about the economy, and then maybe one or two other things.”
Tillis warned there would be “negative consequences for Republicans” on election night if polls continue to indicate voters are dissatisfied with the economy. Feuding with journalists are “not the sorts of issues we need to focus on,” Tillis said.
“We’ve got a lot of headwinds,” Tillis said. “I mean, we’ve got to focus.”
Democrats, meanwhile, view the president’s public musings about topics like the arch and the East Wing ballroom as a gift to their election efforts.
Democrats have sought to make “affordability” the central tenet of their campaign message, while casting the president as out of touch and unconcerned. The president’s focus on multi-billion dollar renovations of D.C. has all but written the script for them.
Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., told MS NOW that Trump “is doing everything he can to sabotage the electoral prospects of Senate Republicans.” He pointed to the president calling affordability a “hoax” while tariffs and the Iran war fuel higher costs for American consumers.
“It’s a mystery to me why the president is so dismissive of the needs of the Republican majority who have stood by him for so long,” Welch said.
Lillie Boudreaux and Selena Kuznikov contributed reporting.
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