We can message our way out of this!
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With Trump’s approval ratings south of 40 and sinking, his strategy for the midterms is to send out a bunch of non-entities and leather-faced nepo cranks to tout the administration’s non-existent achievements:
President Donald Trump is fanning out his Cabinet across the country to sell his accomplishments and shore up key constituencies ahead of the midterms.
It isn’t quite working out that way.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited New Hampshire last week to tout natural gas pipelines and got hit with questions about $4 gasoline prices. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was in Iowa over the weekend ostensibly to rally farmers and instead had to defend Trump’s decision to import foreign beef, which sparked outcry among cattle ranchers.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in Florida to talk about school nutrition, faced questions about a Pennsylvania measles outbreak and ended up in a protracted fight with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro over whether the virus is responsible for two deaths.
Even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a veteran of Wall Street, is struggling to win over some of his former colleagues, who are skeptical of his “economic D-Day” plan to end the Iran war and downright hostile to his attempt to lower the interest rate the federal government pays on long-term debt.
The Cabinet kerfuffle comes at a time when the president’s envoys are needed most. The midterms are less than three months away, the president’s approval rating is near record-lows and the White House is on a mission to remind voters of all it believes it has accomplished in the last two years, including a spate of tax cuts, improved border security and reductions in violent crime.
The Cabinet barnstorming is key to the administration’s midterms messaging strategy. Secretaries have used visits to promote administration policy and gin up local news coverage.
But Rollins’ recent visit to Iowa is emblematic of the broad discontent the administration is contending with, and the ways its surrogates are being knocked off message by an electorate that is deeply skeptical of some of its policies. That includes some historically loyal constituencies: Ranchers and farmers are furious over Trump’s recent decision to import 300,000 metric tons of beef and sell them at discounted prices. Rollins did not disown the decision — defending Trump’s focus on lowering prices for consumers — but didn’t exactly embrace it either, telling reporters earlier this week that she hadn’t discussed the specific policy with the president.
“If you just look at how it’s animating people here, if you just look at the breadth of the headlines coming out from it, it’s a challenge. It has legs, to be honest,” said one Republican operative in Iowa, granted anonymity to address the fallout from the beef announcement. “You don’t have to go further than to look at how [Democratic gubernatorial candidate] Rob Sand and them are using it. They clearly think it’s an issue.”
I’m not sure the transcendent charisma of Chris Wright is going to convince marginal voters that $4/gallon gas and $10/lb ground beef are cool, but the alternative is doing stuff like “ending our stupid military and trade wars that nobody was asking for in the first place” and evidently that’s not an option.