（President Trump is seen during a roundtable discussion on American mining at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on Friday, August 7, 2026.）
In any normal campaign season, now would be the time President Trump and his embattled Republican colleagues would be trying to expand their base. Given a generic congressional ballot that has consistently favored Democrats by between 6 and 11 points, one would think appealing to the nation’s wary centrists and independents would be a matter of basic political survival for the Republican Party.
But this is not a normal campaign season, and Republicans aren’t led by a president with normal political concerns.
Almost one-fourth of Republicans now say they are financially worse off under Trump than they were under Joe Biden. Rather than connect with voters’ anxieties, Trump has raged against their ingratitude while dismissing their economic woes as hoaxes and delusions. It is certainly a novel approach to electioneering.
Trump’s continually cratering approval rating reflects just how well his campaign strategy is working with voters: a Reuters poll released this week found Trump’s favorability rating at just 33 percent, a new low for his presidency and down 2 points in less than a month. If Republicans have a secret plan to fix the country, they are running out of time for the big reveal.
Instead of calming voters’ growing reservations about their fitness to run things, the Republicans’ most recent campaign push makes them look even more out of touch and self-obsessed than usual. On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth barnstormed Iowa to build enthusiasm for embattled Rep. Zach Nunn (R), one of the state’s most at-risk Republicans. But far from exciting voters, Hegseth’s appearance left them wondering why he wasn’t instead focusing his energies on the growing number of sailors trying to throw themselves off the USS Abraham Lincoln.
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Hegseth’s Iowa appearance is yet another reminder that for Trump’s GOP, political theater always comes before public service. If the Defense Department were thriving, Hegseth’s stop in Iowa might not have generated so much criticism. But his Pentagon is running out of both missiles and money, while his decision to recall the USS George Washington from Asia in order to support Trump’s Iran War leaves the United States without an aircraft carrier in the Pacific for the first time in years.
In that light, Hegseth’s stump speeches look like a man trying to escape a job that has totally overwhelmed him.
Vice President Vance isn’t faring much better. Having given up any hope of ending the Iran War, Vance has instead embarked on the much easier work of promoting his new book, “Communion.” The book has been a flop even among his fellow Republicans, with the conservative Cato Institute lambasting Vance’s abandonment of the free market economic policies that once served as a cornerstone of Republican politics.
Vance’s sidestep out of the limelight in recent weeks coincides with new polling that shows his popularity plummeting among the Republicans who will decide their party’s 2028 presidential nominee. Voters across the political spectrum are tiring of Vance, Trump and the entire failed MAGA experiment, and it seems less than endearing when the vice president meets their concerns about rising grocery and gas prices with a halfhearted pitch to buy his book.
Meanwhile, Democrats are finally learning how to channel the populist anger that propelled Trump to the presidency in 2016 and 2024. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) has made headlines and spurred chatter about his own presidential hopes following a scorching rally in which he derided Trump as “despicable” and laid the blame for Georgians’ economic pain squarely at Republicans’ feet.
“Under Donald Trump, it costs more than ever to stock your fridge, to power your home, to make a cup of coffee, to buy school supplies for your kid or a tractor for your farm,” Ossoff said. The outrage has vaulted him to a 9-point lead in the polls over his Trump-endorsed opponent Rep. Mike Collins — and provided Democrats with a roadmap for how to use the language of righteous anger as effectively as Trump once did.
By comparison, Republicans feel like the out-of-touch establishment elitists they once railed against. It may make Trump feel better to spend his evenings penning Truth Social posts about his close friendship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, but voters can see he has nothing to offer as far as lowering consumer prices or fixing a job market so brutal that desperate job seekers are paying Etsy witches to cast “career spells” that promise to boost their chances of landing a gig.
Here’s a free word of advice for the president: consider hiring some Etsy witches to turn around those tanking poll numbers. It could hardly be worse than your current campaign strategy.
