‘Tone-deaf’: Trump’s GOP loses ground to Democrats on the economy

Mar. 26, 2026, 2:28 PM EDT

Republicans have spent a decade telling Americans they’re the party that knows how to run an economy. Fewer and fewer voters believe them.

As the U.S. war with Iran drives up gas prices and snarls supply chainsRepublicans face a growing disconnect between their promises of an economic “feast” and the reality at the pump and grocery store. Their response so far: Ask Americans to sacrifice.

In recent months, Trump and his allies have bluntly asked Americans to sacrifice their personal purchases, advising people to simply shop smarter, buy less and accept short-term pain in exchange for long-term national security gains that administration officials struggle to define consistently.

The messaging has drawn sharp criticism even from within the GOP.

It’s “more than tone-deaf,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump appointee during his first term. “Some of the rhetoric has just been shameful.”

Michele Tafoya, the National Republican Senatorial Committee-endorsed Senate candidate in Minnesota, told conservative talk radio listeners last week that if they’re worried about the cost of fuel, maybe they should “take one less trip to Starbucks” until the Iran war ends and gas prices drop. “Let’s just be patriots about it,” she added.

Similar remarks have been made by President Donald Trump and top administration officials. In December, as tariffs squeezed up costs, Trump told supporters ahead of the Christmas holiday that they could “give up certain products.” “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice,” he said. In January, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins floated a bizarre $3 dinner consisting of a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla and “one other thing.” In February, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recommended that cash-strapped Americans buy “cheap cuts of meat,” suggesting they purchase liver instead of “a porterhouse steak.” And earlier this month, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett suggested that an extended war in Iran “wouldn’t really disrupt the U.S. economy very much at all; it would hurt consumers, and we’d have to think about what we’d have to do about that, but that’s really the last of our concerns right now.”

“This is not an ‘I feel your pain’ party,” Bartlett told MS NOW. “This is just a preposterous notion of either telling the American public that we’ve reached the golden age, or dismissing the very legitimate economic concerns.”

The real-world stakes are immediate for many Americans.

Hunter Luther, a 21-year-old North Carolina voter who describes himself as a MAGA Republican, said premium gas in his area now tops $5 a gallon — almost $85 to fill his tank. At the grocery store, “everything seems to be going up and nothing’s going down,” he said. “It’s getting hard.”

Luther said he wants Republicans to acknowledge that “what they’re doing is hurting us.” He also questioned the strategic logic of the war itself: With the administration open to negotiating with a successor with ties to the regime of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in strikes on Feb. 28, he wondered what the conflict had achieved.

“If you’re just going to negotiate with the new one, then what’s the point of getting rid of the last one?” Luther said. “This was all for nothing, and now our prices are going through the roof for no reason.”

“They should have thought that out before they even went over there,” he said.

Repetition as strategy

The White House’s response to economic anxiety is deliberate, according to Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, the authors of an upcoming book, “Trump’s Ten Commandments.”

“Having each of the Cabinet members say the exact same thing about how affordability is a hoax, how prices are coming down, how soon the Iran conflict ends, all prices are going to be lower than they’ve ever been before, and how everything in the grocery stores is cheaper than it’s ever been,” Tian told MS NOW. “He wants everyone repeating these messages, because by repeating those messages over and over again, he thinks people actually start believing it.”

Trump says that when the war in Iran ends, gas prices will “go lower than they were before.” Vice President JD Vance, for his part, recently described high gas prices as a “temporary blip.”

“Once the Iranian terror threat is neutralized, Americans will again see gas prices plummet, real wages grow, inflation cool, and trillions in investments pour in,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement to MS NOW. “President Trump was resoundingly re-elected to the White House precisely because he understood how Americans were left behind by Joe Biden’s economic disaster.”

But even if the war in Iran ends this week, Sonnenfeld — who, as founder of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, regularly speaks with CEOs — predicts that supply chains and gas prices won’t return to normal for a year.

The White House has taken some steps to ease the pressure — temporarily suspending rules to allow non-U.S. ships to travel domestic routes and releasing more than 170 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Neither measure has stopped the rise in prices, which have climbed more than $1 per gallon over the past month, according to AAA.

And that’s contributing to a dynamic that’s eroding the Republican Party’s longtime edge among voters on economic issues. For more than a decade, Americans have viewed the GOP as more responsible stewards of the nation’s economy compared with their political rivals.

But there are signs that advantage is slipping. An October Gallup study found Republicans with their lowest marks since 2013 on which party is “better to keep the country prosperous” — a result before gas prices soared and inflation meaningfully escalated. Trump’s approval rating on the economy hit an all-time low this month in Reuters/Ipsos pollingwhich has tracked the metric since his first term. The 29% mark is lower than at any point during Joe Biden’s presidency, including when inflation peaked at 9.1% in 2022. A similar trend is found in polling from Fox Newswhich found this week that Trump’s overall job disapproval rating is 59% — his worst marks of either of his terms in office.

Trump loyalty holds — for now

Despite those numbers, Republican elected officials have remained publicly loyal to Trump, including those facing competitive primaries or difficult midterm races.

A GOP strategist, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to speak publicly, told MS NOW internal research shows voters respond more favorably to policies explicitly tied to the president.

Bartlett said the political calculus is also different: Biden “clearly showed his age, and it made it all the more difficult to campaign or even appear with him,” whereas Trump projects an energy that Republican candidates can still leverage. He “continues to be the largest, strongest driving force in the Republican Party,” Bartlett said.

November’s results will offer the first real test of whether the GOP’s economic brand can survive the war — and whether the working-class voters who powered Trump’s last two victories are still willing to pay the price.

“The same issue set that got the GOP a trifecta in 2024 threatens to undermine its power in 2026,” said Eli Yokley, a political analyst with Morning Consult, a nonpartisan pollster. “Even at a similar point ahead of the midterms in Trump’s 2018 term, Republicans weren’t facing a similar confidence problem.”

Akayla Gardner is a White House correspondent for MS NOW.