We watched it. We watched all of it. It had been a minute since a Trump rally, and while we expected all the highs and lows, tropes and tripe, Renee and I came away from last week’s utterly deranged Mt. Airy rally in awe of how utterly deranged and counterproductive it was.
And that one, as I’ll discuss below, was the best rally he’ll have on this effort to spin terrible economic news into fool’s gold.
There’s a story every White House tells itself when the numbers go bad, the headlines go worse, and the boss is hellbent on pretending that pain at the kitchen table is just something made up by the haters on cable news.
“We’ll do an issue tour,” some bright young comms staffer says. “We’ll reset the narrative.” The political shop likes it. The Chief of Staff, desperate to breathe, knows that if POTUS is on the road, she can do the real work. The boss, ever convinced of his special bond with the public, wants a little of that road magic; the crowds, the arena, the cheers.
It rarely works for Presidents of either party.
It definitely doesn’t work if you’re the worst President in American history, sporting cripplingly bad poll numbers, the wretched stink of political failure rolling off you like the stink of the town dump on an August afternoon, and a diminished capacity to perform the old whamma-jamma narrative reset that once upon a time was your stock-in-trade.
It doesn’t work if the first year of your second term saw you put a maximum effort into tossing America’s struggling billionaires a multi-trillion dollar tax cut and slamming economy-killing tariffs on farms, small businesses, and consumers.
Tuesday night at Mount Airy Casino in Pennsylvania, America got a fresh reminder of one of the iron laws of politics in the Year of Our Lord 2025. The signs said, “Lower Prices Bigger Paychecks,” but the message was, “You poors don’t know how good you’ve got it.”
Donald Trump can’t reset the narrative.
Donald Trump is the narrative.
And the narrative is a hot mess, and this rally was the start of the Fyre Festival of Affordability.
This was supposed to be Night One of the big comeback on the economy: bold assertions to sell a desperate public a story of economic glory splashed on the banners, the chyron, and whatever’s left of the frontal lobes of Trump’s sycophantic comms team.
Instead, we got the classic Trump triple feature: rambling, profanity-laced rants, racially loaded attacks (it is, after all, the Nick Fuentes party now), and a spray of economic BS that collapses on contact with reality.
The premise was simple enough: reassure Americans that he “fixed” prices, that inflation is over, that you’re all doing great, and if you don’t feel that way, it’s because the media lies and the Fed is mean to him personally.
The signs said, “Lower Prices Bigger Paychecks,” but the message was, “You poors don’t know how good you’ve got it.”
What you actually saw was a freshly botoxed and be-Spanxed Trump, his greasy umber makeup applied with the subtlety of a 1970s hooker, his shellacked, lemur-pelt wig swooping back from his porcine eyes like an Art Deco-era car’s fenders stalking on stage and leaning on the podium for 90 minutes of madness.
Trump played the greatest hits, a former star now stuck in a regional dinner theater in the Catskills, a man with the same show as ever, but the audience stopped feeling the same heat and passion that once shaped it. Whoever in the White House advance team that picked a casino for a speech about affordability is clearly a Lincoln Project sleeper agent, because the gamble Trump took has implications for the rest of his term and the future of the MAGA GOP.
Even among the faithful, he couldn’t convincingly sustain the Big Lie of 2025. Standing in front of a lot of people who aren’t OK, insisting that everything is fine and that if your grocery bill hurts, it’s basically a hoax is not an approach from a rational human.
That’s not a reset. That’s a gaslighting goon with a piddle bag strapped to its draggy leg.
If you squinted really hard, you could see the scaffolding of a traditional economic message. There were prepared lines in there somewhere, fighting for air.
But Trump can’t stay on script because Trump doesn’t have a script. He has grievances, appetites, and a crowd to feed.
So instead of a coherent argument along the lines of “Here’s how we make your life less expensive,” you got wandering digressions about races and places he doesn’t like, weird tangents about personal enemies, a slurry of half-remembered talking points: “prices are down,” “best economy,” “everybody’s saying it,” “the Fed is killing us,” and “we had it perfect before the election was stolen.”
This is the same shtick he’s done a thousand times. It thrills the base. It flops in the living room of anyone who actually wants to hear how they’re going to afford rent in January.
A narrative reset requires discipline. Trump’s whole brand is the absence of discipline, dressed up as authenticity.
And because it’s Trump, the “economic” message very quickly became the old, ugly standby: if you’re struggling, blame immigrants, Black Democrats, and whoever Fox had on blast in the A-block for Frau Ingraham’s White Power Hour Tuesday night. (“Immigrants are taking 100% of jobs!” “Shitholes!”)
So he went back to attacking Ilhan Omar and other non-white targets, leaning into the same racialized language and sneering asides he always deploys when he’s flailing. The crowd loves it. The base clips it and shares it.
But if you’re a Republican running in a Biden-won district in 2026, you watched that performance and felt the icy hand of doom on your shoulder. Your chief of staff is speed-dialing Susie Wiles and begging her not to send him to your district.
Trump’s comfort zone is racial grievance, not economic policy. Every minute he spends there might juice engagement on Truth Social, but it kills your chances with suburban voters who are tired of feeling like they’ve tuned into a 1980s talk radio show with worse production values.
Every president gets mad at the Federal Reserve at some point. The grown-ups gripe in private, maybe lob a carefully worded shot in public, and then move on.
Trump does not move on.
He ranted again about how the Fed has it out for him, how they’re sabotaging his greatness, how interest rates are a personal insult rather than a blunt tool in a complicated economy. It was standard Trumpian monetary theory: if he feels bad, the Fed is wrong.
This isn’t a strategy. It’s therapy for a dementia patient still mad at Mary Jane Jones for not going to the junior prom with him and Jerome Powell for not cutting interest rates to 0%.
The more he attacks the Fed like it’s some guy who stiffed him on a golf course bet, the more it screams to markets and voters alike, “I don’t understand any of this, and I don’t care to.”
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If you were hoping for a serious, confidence-building economic reset, watching him swing wildly at Jerome Powell in absentia didn’t exactly communicate “steady hand at the wheel.”
Here’s the part that really matters: reality exists.
Are prices still high? Yes. Are people furious about housing, insurance, groceries, and interest rates? Absolutely. Is Trump correct when he declares that inflation is “over” and that things are “better than ever”? No, and everyone with a credit card, a mortgage, or a student loan knows it.
When your political strategy is, “I will simply assert that the pain you feel is fake,” you’d better have a lot more credibility than Donald Trump.
No one is buying his line. The polling is now nearly universal that Trump is taking the blame for the economy he created. He can’t even muster a majority of Republicans in recent economic polls to buy his “Biden’s fault” narrative.
Of course, the speech was the usual catalog of lies, and I don’t have the bandwidth to debunk them individually, but almost every assertion about an economic statistic was President Munchausen at his reckless worst.
He insists wages are soaring, costs are collapsing, and that his Deep State enemies cook up any numbers to the contrary. He rants that tariffs are a miraculous free-money machine that never hits consumers. He waves away the damage done to global supply chains and domestic costs as if the economy is just another episode of The Apprentice, where he gets the final cut.
The problem is that the economy isn’t a TV show, and voters aren’t the studio audience. They live in the spreadsheet of the family budget, the checking account balance, the monthly bills, not the spin of Trump’s “everything is awesome” liekakke.
There’s another iron rule in politics: when the White House launches an “issue tour,” the first event is always the most prepared, most polished, most tightly stage-managed version of the story.
That was Tuesday night.
From here, it gets worse.
Staff attention drifts. The message wanders. The venues get smaller. The advance work gets lazier. The candidate gets bored and tired and leans even harder into his favorite toys, in Trump’s case, ludicrous lies, rage-baiting, racial animus, and revenge fantasies.
If this was the peak of the Affordability Fyre Festival, imagine the decline phase: half-empty arenas, weirder tangents, darker racial bile, and less and less connection to the actual subject matter. Please, Donald, I’m begging you to take this show to swing districts and states in 2026. Please.
You could tell this went over like a wet shart in a hot car with even the conservative apparatus; Fox and Newsmax did the usual “declare victory for Trump and move on” coverage. Breitbart buried it way, way down on its home page. National Review barely touched it. Even Trump’s usual Hallelujah chorus on Twitter was strangely restrained.
The idea that this man has the physical or mental stamina to run a sustained, disciplined message campaign on something as granular and emotionally loaded as the day-to-day cost of living is a fantasy. The best day of the tour still looked like a bad open-mic night at meth den the end of the world.
Here’s the part that should haunt every endangered Republican in a swing district or a purple state.
Trump loves this.
He loves the crowd, the lights, the chants, the long walks to the podium, the teleprompter he barely reads, the ritualized applause, the familiar hits. He loves yelling about the Fed, immigrants, the media, and anyone who ever crossed him.
He loves - apparently a lot - being President Pottymouth. Look, I’m familiar and too comfortable with the uses of English cursing and expletives, but Tuesday night was chock-full of shits, shitholes, bitches, and so on. (I am, famously, also not the President.) It’s almost as if the dementia patient is suffering from a bit more emotional dysregulation than before.
But none of that solves the political problem the GOP actually has: a party tied at the neck to a man who can’t talk about affordability without calling it a hoax, a lie, or a scam…or making it about himself.
Every time you hope he’ll sell a positive, reality-based economic story, he chooses the dopamine hit of grievance and racism.
Every time you want him to reassure swing voters, he does a three-minute bit about Ilhan Omar and the “filthy” countries he hates.
Every time you need him to help you in your district, he reminds your voters that you belong to him. You’re chattel. You’re slaves. You’re locked into his party, his brand, his psychodrama. Good luck!
Issue tours are supposed to bridge the president’s message to the lives of real people.
This one just reminded America that Donald Trump’s favorite issue, his only real issue now and for eternity, is Donald Trump.
And if that was the high point of this little affordability roadshow, Republicans better buckle up for the downhill run … because it’s coming fast.
Trump Won on the Economy. Now Voters Have Buyer's Remorse.
The latest Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday contains a truly shocking figure: 61% of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Because I agree with Rick's description of Trump's state of mind, I also believe that's what makes him so dangerous. The election is still over 10 months away, and it's more than a year before a new Democrat-controlled Congress could assume power. That's not nearly soon enough to stem the damage that Trump, his gang of authoritarian creeps, and a spineless Republican Congress can inflict on American democracy. The way I see it, the BEST possible outcome of the next election is that Trump starts ranting on election night about how the Democrats have stolen the election blah blah blah. And even though I'm aware that I sound like Chicken Little, I'm going to keep repeating this until I'm proven wrong: we had better prepare ourselves for the convicted felon in the Oval Office--along with the Stephen Millers and Pam Bondis who surround him--to do everything they can to prevent an election from even taking place. Just keep reminding yourself: there is no bottom with these people.
Rick, I:always appreciated your perfect description of Trump’s ludicrous coif of hair on his empty cranium. I recall your description in the “Daily Beast” describing Trump’s nair as a combination of lemur hair and 1970s orange shag carpet shavings.