Politics

Trump is terrible at town halls. He should keep doing them.

Published

2 years ago

November 11, 2024

Trump is terrible at town halls. He should keep doing them.

Town hall-style events offer presidential campaigns a counterpoint to the one-way discourse of massive rallies. Candidates typically use these events as a way to humanize themselves, and voters are more than happy to directly question the candidates trying to earn their votes. But because dialogue is the last thing that former President Donald Trump wants, the town hall is a uniquely horrible format for him.

From cutting off questions so he could “do a music” (his words), to rambling far beyond the original point of the questions asked of him, each of Trump’s town halls over the last week has been uniquely disastrous. There were a few moments between his meandering diatribes in which he mustered up the pretense of caring about his supporters’ concerns, but by continuously pulling the spotlight back to himself, again and again Trump missed opportunities to show empathy with struggling Americans.

By continuously pulling the spotlight back to himself, again and again Trump missed opportunities to show empathy with struggling Americans

“Based on the inflation and weak job market, it seems like a big stretch that I’ll ever be able to own a home,” a college student who’ll be voting for the first time told Trump at a town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on Sunday. “What is your plan to help bring down inflation and make life more affordable for Americans like me who are just starting off?”Most candidates would love to get that kind of opportunity to offer up specific plans to appeal to the youth vote and talk about housing. Trump instead thanked the young woman for using the term “American dream,” which she didn’t use, and then he ranted about zoning laws and interest rates:

The biggest thing, two things. Make the economy good, so you get a lot of money, right? Make the economy good. And the other thing is interest rates. We’re going to get interest rates. Right now, you can’t get money. Even if you had a good job, you’re paying 10%, you’re paying 11%, 12%, and you can’t get it. When I was president, it was 2.2% interest, and now, and the money was all over the place, and now you can’t get the money. So we’re going to make sure that you can get the money.

That’s not how any politician who cares about a voter and her concerns would answer that question, and the reductive wonder that is “make the economy good” couldn’t have been very inspiring. Most candidates would spend these final days working on being more responsive to what voters are asking. What stands out about Trump’s town halls then is his utter disdain for audience members in favor of pivoting back to his poorly thought-out talking points.

While the impromptu music-listening session at last week’s town hall in Oakes, Pennsylvania, drew more attention, it’s worth clocking how far afield he went while responding to one of the few questions that he took. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted, Trump’s answer to a question about how he would lower grocery prices included accusations that immigrants are taking “Black population jobs and Hispanic population [jobs],” a boast that the Border Patrol endorsed him and the lie that he won’t let go about Haitian migrants in Ohio. His answer also encouraged everyone to go out and vote on “January 5th.” You may notice that none of those remarks addresses grocery prices. In fact, Trump’s mass deportation plan, if carried out, is a surefire way to cause food prices to skyrocket.During his women-only Fox News town hall on Wednesday, an audience member told Trump that during the previous year she’d broken her neck, was denied assistance, and couldn’t pay for daycare. She asked what he was going to do to help parents afford children. This was his full response:

It’s not fair. You never heard of Ivanka, right? Ivanka. My daughter drove me crazy on this. We had the simplest, most beautiful tax — you know, I gave you the largest tax cuts in the history of our country, OK, larger than the Reagan cuts, larger — but my daughter Ivanka, she said, “Dad, we have to do tax credits for women,” you know, for the child tax credits. She was driving me crazy. Then I did it and I got it just about done. “Dad, you’ve got to double it up.” I said, “Ivanka!” It was actually more complicated than the entire bill, but I got it done, and what we’re going to do and I’m going to — because I understand exactly what you’re saying. We’re going to readjust things so that it’s fair to everybody, ‘cause it’s really not fair to everybody. But we have a lot, and we’re going up higher, but we’re also going to readjust because you have to make some readjustments. It’s unfair to some people and we’re not going to have that. But she was the one that got it started. You know, those were our credits, those were not the Democrat credits. A lot of Republicans said rightfully, “Don’t do it because we’ll never get credit for that.” You know, we’re not known for that. But the truth is, I wanted to put it all in the form of the tax cuts. So I got the maximum tax cut, but we’re also bringing down the taxes for companies and for people. We’re bringing it down to 15% and for companies, only if you make your product, build your product in the USA. Otherwise you don’t get it.

Unlike the other events he’s participated in lately, Thursday’s Univision town hall with Hispanic voters featured questioners who were skeptical of Trump but looking for a reason to back him. In what was a disaster from start to finish, Trump did not deliver on that opportunity. Viral reactions from audience members help illustrate how poorly Trump responded to a former supporter who was looking for a reason to support him again.

But such empathy comes rarely, if at all, from Trump.

These failures to connect are striking when you compare Trump to his predecessors. Former President Bill Clinton was the master of the town hall, adept at connecting with voters, answering their questions and acknowledging their struggles. It was his performance in the second presidential debate in 1992, the first to be held in a town hall format, that likely clinched the election for candidate Clinton. Even former President Barack Obama, who could come across as too cerebral and lecturing at times, at least was able to empathize with the problems Americans were facing.But such empathy comes rarely, if at all, from Trump. Voters bring him problems he could potentially solve if he were elected president, and many seem to quickly realize they’ve wasted their time. The town hall is supposed to foster conversations or at the very least give voters the impression that they’re being heard, rather than just listening to another stump speech. But in pitching their concerns to Trump, they may as well be talking to the wall he’s still promising to build.

Hayes Brown

Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for BLN Daily, where he helps frame the news of the day for readers. He was previously at BuzzFeed News and holds a degree in international relations from Michigan State University.

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Poll: Voter cynicism remains a potent threat to incumbents across the globe

Published

2 hours ago

June 11, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Voters punished ruling parties across the globe in 2024. They are doing it again now.

The same voters who rejected their rulers without mercy on both sides of the Atlantic — throwing out Britain’s Conservatives after 14 years in power and humbling Democrats in the United States — are now poised to deliver resounding defeats to the very leaders they elected two years ago.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces the prospect of being ousted later this year if a key rival in Manchester can pull off a win in a special parliamentary vote next week. President Donald Trump, while locked into power until January 2029, appears to be barreling toward lame duck status with Democrats growing increasingly bullish about their midterm prospects in November — particularly in winning back the U.S. House.

And The POLITICO Poll suggests Western voters’ desire for political bloodletting hasn’t abated.

Building on previous work by Public First, the London-based firm that conducts the survey, a new analysis of May Blue Light News Poll results show large shares of voters in both the United Kingdom and United States express deep cynicism about politics and a constant desire for radical change — suggesting the forces behind the backlash may still be potent, and that power switching hands this year may not be enough to quell them.

In America, 71 percent of adults say politicians only look out for themselves, including 79 percent of those who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 and 71 percent who voted for Trump. In the U.K., voters are similarly angry at politicians, who they blame for being unable to address a variety of issues, including cost of living and immigration. New results from The POLITICO Poll, conducted over the weekend, show a 56 percent majority of U.K. adults said the bigger problem with politics in the U.K. is the politicians who do not do the right thing, while just 15 percent blame the system itself.

That deep dissatisfaction has metastasized into a perpetual anti-incumbent frustration in recent years. In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party had its worst result in a national election in several decades, and Canada’s Justin Trudeau stepped down amid growing voter frustration. Just since February of last year, the rulers of Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic have all been ejected at key elections.

Now the U.K. is watching the vote in Makerfield next week, which may determine whether Starmer gets to keep his job amid public outrage at his handling of fallout from the Epstein scandal, and voter concerns about immigration, the economy and law enforcement. If Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, succeeds in being elected back to Parliament next week, it will almost certainly trigger a series of events that could end in the removal of the deeply unpopular Starmer as the head of the Labour Party — and prime minister.

The result could ripple across the Atlantic as Republicans face their own political headwinds ahead of the crucial November midterms in the United States.

“What we’re seeing is a cross-Atlantic disconnect between voters and electeds,” said Kevin Madden, a longtime GOP communications strategist in Washington and senior partner at Penta, a consulting firm.

“Voters in the U.S. are squarely focused on at-home domestic priorities and kitchen-table concerns like food, health care and housing costs. So when the headlines are focused on foreign conflict and disruptions to global markets, those will reinforce the disconnect.”

Deep cynicism in the UK spells trouble for Starmer

In 2024, the rejection of incumbents came amid a growing frustration over the cost of living and broader economic anxieties. Whether that backlash was a temporary response — or reflects an engrained dissatisfaction with political institutions — is a question now confronting leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, as affordability concerns continue to spiral.

In the U.K., the analysis from Public First finds a deep sense of political disillusionment. The firm developed a series of measures to understand that feeling of “anti-politics”, and cynicism stood out: Voters who believe politicians are self-serving, that political talk rarely leads to real action and that the public has little influence over what politicians actually do.

Nearly half of British adults — 45 percent — scored high on Public First’s cynicism scale; so did 37 percent of U.S. adults.

The findings underscore the challenge facing Starmer. New results from The Blue Light News Poll conducted last weekend show nearly two-thirds of U.K. adults — 64 percent — said they don’t think Starmer will remain as prime minister until the next general election.

The center-left U.K. leader has suffered the most dramatic plunge in popularity of any prime minister in British history. Since winning a landslide victory just under two years ago, Starmer has seen his Labour Party fall to historic lows in opinion polls, while the nationalist right-wing Reform U.K. of Nigel Farage has stormed into the lead in polls and local elections, mirroring the success of insurgent populists across Europe.

Three-quarters of highly cynical voters in the U.K. hold an unfavorable view of Starmer, the Public First analysis of a May Blue Light News Poll found — far higher than the national average.

The Makerfield by-election on June 18 will determine whether Burnham, Starmer’s chief internal rival, is elected as Labour’s representative, giving him the chance to challenge Starmer for the party leadership and potentially replace him as prime minister. Burnham’s main rival in the by-election is the Reform U.K. candidate — whose victory would likely end Burnham’s leadership ambitions, plunge Labour into unprecedented turmoil and send the national government into fresh disarray.

But Makerfield looks likely to be terrible for Starmer, whoever wins. Either it will be Burnham, who will then go to London to try to oust the prime minister, or it will be Reform U.K. — fuelling claims that Starmer has toxified his own party beyond repair.

Why Trump should be watching closely

It’s a cautionary tale for Trump, the Public First research found.

As Starmer confronts dropping favorability ratings, Trump’s own numbers have also plummeted — and the segment of cynical Americans may be as dangerous for the president as their British cohort is for the prime minister.

Among this group, 57 percent hold an unfavorable view of Trump and his agenda, compared with 48 percent nationally.

That could pose a challenge for Republicans heading into the midterms. Elections in the U.S. historically punish the party in power, and many Republicans are bracing for an even more difficult than anticipated midterm landscape, fueled by the mounting economic concerns and an unpopular war in Iran.

“The biggest mood shift is taking place among voters in the big middle,” Madden said. “These are the same voters that migrated toward Trump and the GOP in 2024 because they were nostalgic for a Trump economy and they rallied around a message focused on tackling inflation.”.

Sizable shares of cynical Americans hold negative views about the economy. Among these respondents, 52 percent say their financial situation has worsened since Trump took office in 2025 and 59 percent say Trump has spent too much time focused on international affairs rather than domestic issues.

Trump, who rode to power in 2024 in large part over voter dissatisfaction to the economy during the Biden administration, is now confronting a similar challenge. Recent polling finds voters increasingly blaming Trump for their financial pressures, even as he continues to cast blame to his predecessor.

Part of the problem for incumbents is that many people blame politicians — not the broader system — for their dissatisfaction, underscoring the challenge for the leaders as voters begin to turn on them. Nearly half of British adults, 45 percent, say the country keeps changing prime ministers “because none of them are any good,” while just 26 percent blame “big problems that not even a good PM could solve.”

As soon as leaders are elected by a frustrated, dissatisfied electorate to turn things around — as both Starmer and Trump were in 2024 — the clock begins to tick.

“Elections are so often now about which candidate can channel the frustrations of a cynical electorate,” said Seb Wride, head of polling at Public First, Blue Light News’s polling partner.

“Republicans and Democratic candidates alike should pay attention to what is happening in the U.K.,” he said. “It is far harder to win over an antipolitical voter base when you represent the ‘politics,’ and given how fast Britain is working through Prime Ministers cynical voters seem to be getting more common and less patient.”