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Facing Political Peril, Trump Tries To Reclaim His Populist Edge

President Donald Trump has rolled out a series of populist policy proposals in recent weeks, but Congressional Republicans don't seem likely to run on them in November.

Steve Bannon, once a top advisor to President Donald Trump, then a hated exile from his inner circle, now a reliable podcast-hosting ally, was hearing what he wanted to hear.

“He’s dealing with the mortgage issues. He’s dealing with the affordability of the housing issue,” Bannon said on Wednesday’s edition of his podcast, “War Room,” after talking to a Treasury Department official about what they presented as unambiguously strong economic news. “He’s getting into the big banks about capping interest rates at 10%. He’s all over full-spectrum energy dominance, and particularly dealing with these data centers to make sure they can’t come back on the grid and torch folks.”

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“President Trump is on a populist tear right now for economics,” Bannon declared. “And we love it!”

The White House is hoping voters react the way Bannon does, which could turn around Trump’s poor political standing, revive the GOP’s faltering hopes for a midterm in which they are at risk of losing control of both houses of Congress, and reinforce the flickering aura of inevitability Trump tries to project as he moves to centralize power.

Unfortunately for the administration, this populist push may be both too little, too late for voters and too much, too soon for Congressional Republicans. Trump’s recent wave of policy rollouts — including a proposal to ban large corporations from buying single-family homes, a call to cap credit card interest rates at 10% and a ban on defense contractors issuing stock dividends — are clear attempts to convince voters the populist businessman they trusted to fix the economy in 2024 is still on their side.

But a year into a presidency often defined by how close Trump is to the big donors and powerful industries willing to donate to his campaigns and causes, it’s clear voters have a deep skepticism that the president’s heart is in the right place. And the Republicans the administration would need to enact much of Trump’s agenda — and who are willing to bend to Trump’s will on countless other issues — aren’t planning to pass or actively campaign on Trump’s populist pushes, preferring to stick to selling the more traditionally conservative “big, beautiful bill” they passed last summer.

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“[The White House] is throwing a lot of stuff at the wall right now to see if anything sticks,” said one veteran Republican strategist, requesting anonymity to speak frankly about intra-party divides and strategy. “Is it possible some members run on this stuff? Sure. But most are going to be a lot more comfortable selling tax cuts and lower immigration numbers.”

It’s enough to leave the agenda to Make America Affordable Again, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on social media this week, stuck in the mud.

“He’s not going to reap any benefits from just saying the words,” said Alex Jacquez, the director of policy and advocacy at the progressive Groundwork Collective, citing Democrats’ experience during President Joe Biden’s administration. “People’s costs will actually need to go down. You don’t get any credit for giving it the ol’ college try.”

The White House did not respond to an email seeking comment.

A CNN/SSRS poll released Friday highlights nearly every element of Trump’s poor political standing. Just 39% of the country approves of his job performance, with precisely the same chunk approving of how he’s handling the economy. Just one-third say Trump cares about people like them. A 58% majority say his first year back in office has been a failure, 64% say he has not done enough to try to reduce the price of everyday goods and 55% say his policies have made economic conditions in the country worse.

It’s a major erosion in Trump’s political standing, which has long been propped up by voters’ memories of the relatively strong economy during his first term in office — even in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks, when Trump was at his weakest, 53% of the public approved his handling of the economy in CNN’s polling.

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His weakness on economic and cost-of-living issues, which voters say they prioritize over everything else, is poisoning other areas where Trump and his allies think they should be more popular, including immigration and foreign policy, since the electorate thinks Trump is too focused on those concerns compared to the cost of living.

Public skepticism has its roots in a number of Trump policies: his tariffs, which remain wildly unpopular, and the GOP budget law, which slashed Medicaid funding and funneled most of the cash to increased immigration enforcement and tax cuts for the wealthy. He gutted agencies charged with protecting consumers like the CFPB and handed AI and crypto policymaking over to close allies of the big tech companies whose CEOs attended his inauguration. His purported desire for “peace” has instead meant military strikes on Iran and a takeover of Venezuela.

“He’s pursued almost an anti-populism,” said Sean Vitka, the executive director of Demand Progress, which often works with conservative groups on foreign policy, tech and privacy issues. “These things haven’t started popular and they haven’t ended popular.”

Trump’s pivot back to populism in the new year — including phone calls with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) about his credit card proposal — has him embracing issues that poll well. Voter concern about data centers is great, credit card debt has spiked, and the public is deeply skeptical of corporate purchases of single-family homes. A strong push on any one front could divide Democrats, who have supported all of these ideas to some extent in the past.

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“We should not sneer at some of these proposals,” Jacquez said. “The worst thing is to have a reflexive anti-Trump reaction that could put us on the wrong side of some very popular issues.”

But GOP leaders in Congress are meeting the president’s proposals with a cold shoulder. House Speaker Mike Johnson, for instance, used a question about Trump’s credit card interest rate proposal on Tuesday to diplomatically shove the idea into a locker.

“What I love about this president is he’s willing to think outside the box and propose ideas for us to work through to see if it will actually achieve the desired objective, and that’s what we’re in the process of doing every day around here,” Johnson said. “So again, I wouldn’t get too spun up about, you know, ideas that are out of the box that are proposed or suggested.”

Instead, both Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have been focused on selling the aforementioned GOP budget law, which still performs poorly in public polling. Both are still hopeful the public will warm to the law once they see lighter tax bills in the coming months.

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“Americans will start filing their tax returns after Jan. 26 and they’ll begin to see immediately the real effects of legislation that we brought and all the great things that have been done,” Johnson said.

Igor Bobic and Arthur Delaney contributed reporting.