Trump’s admission of a ‘public relations’ problem tests claim

President Donald Trump has spent much of his political career blaming the media when voters sour on him. But with Republicans facing a difficult final month before the midterm elections, Trump is increasingly acknowledging a problem inside his own operation: He and his administration have failed to sell their record, even as the White House maintains that Trump remains its most effective messenger.

Trump has repeatedly conceded this week that the White House has done a “bad public relations job,” at times putting the responsibility squarely on himself and at others faulting the administration more broadly for failing to communicate what he considers a successful first two years of his second term.

Trump risks GOP backlash with ‘movement’ to ban mail-in voting After Jeffries-Kushner meeting, here’s where Trump could work with Democrats Trump highlights healthcare plan amid Democrats’ shutdown narrative “I’m very proud [of] the job we’ve done,” Trump said during the White House’s Hispanic Heritage Month event on Wednesday. “But I’ve done a very bad job of explaining.” Hours later, Trump broadened the criticism beyond himself, telling reporters that the administration’s chief shortcoming was its inability to communicate its accomplishments. “The only thing we don’t have is good public relations,” Trump said while announcing an Alaska LNG project in the Oval Office. “We don’t seem to be able to get the word across.” Trump hit the same note during a campaign swing through Texas and Oklahoma on Thursday, arguing the economy was better than its public perception. “In other words, we’re doing a phenomenal job, but maybe by a combination of things, maybe we’re doing a bad job in selling it,” Trump told a crowd at a factory in Texas.

The repeated admissions come at a particularly sensitive moment for the White House communications operation, with former press secretary Karoline Leavitt gone from the West Wing and Trump reportedly complaining that too few allies are defending him and his record in the media.

Former White House Communications Director Stephanie Grisham , who worked for the first Trump administration, predicted the president “will want a bunch of new comms people after the midterms.” “His blaming the fact that they’ve done a ‘terrible job of promoting things’ and he has to ‘do it himself’ tracks,” Grisham told the Washington Examiner. “It is always someone else’s fault.

He said it during the first campaign, he said it throughout the first term, and he’s doing it now. You would think after all the different comms and press people he’s burned through, he’d look within and consider that perhaps his policies and erratic behavior are the problem.” Trump’s repeated acknowledgment that the administration has struggled to sell its record, however, creates an awkward tension with the White House’s long-standing contention that the president himself is its most effective messenger. “President Trump is the best messenger, unequivocal leader, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party,” said White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales. “In just under two years, the President has made our country greater than ever before with the most secure border in American history, the largest middle-class tax cuts ever, and the lowest level of violent crime in nearly a century – yet the Fake News Media refuses to cover it.” Wales added that Trump and “his administration will continue to tout his wins for the American people, drawing a sharp contrast with his commonsense agenda and the radical Democrats in Congress who allowed millions of illegal aliens to flow through the border, unanimously opposed the Working Families Tax Cuts, and are soft-on-crime.” Trump, meanwhile, appears to be trying to make that case himself.

The president was in Alabama, Texas, and Oklahoma this week and is set to appear in Ohio over the weekend. Trump is leaning into transactional politics by tying his administration directly to economic benefits in states that could determine control of Congress.

This week alone, Trump has promoted billions of dollars in proposed investments in Alaska and Iowa , redirected $20 million in Department of Homeland Security funding toward government-paid television advertising, and begun sending $500 checks to roughly 1 million people the administration says were overcharged for Affordable Care Act coverage under former President Joe Biden.

Yet, it remains to be seen if the flurry of action will help Republicans overcome negative headwinds in November. The president’s net approval rating reached the lowest point of his second term this week, averaging net negative 22 percentage points as of Friday, according to RealClearPolitics.

Polls and prediction markets indicated that the GOP is likely to lose unilateral control of Congress for Trump’s last two years in office. The Cook Political Report announced last week that more competitive races appear to be trending toward Democrats.

Former Republican National Committee Communications Director Doug Heye said that Trump and the GOP not only have a messaging problem but a policy one as well. “It’s both,” Heye told the Washington Examiner. “Prices are way too high – with Iran playing a role [in] gas prices – and the communicating about it, telling voters they’ve never been richer or spending time on, at best, ancillary things like arches and polls instead of what voters are very clear is [important] to them, only compounds the problem.” TRUMP BETS BIG ON ‘TRANSACTIONAL POLITICS’ IN LAST MONTH OF MIDTERM SPRINT Another Republican strategist, who was granted anonymity, was more critical of Trump, arguing that “That is what anyone who is experiencing a terminal decline in popularity would say because it makes them feel better. “He is the one who got us into a war with Iran with kind of no strategy or exit plan, which has dramatically changed the environment for the worse for Republicans,” the strategist told the Washington Examiner. “So of course, it’s easier to say, ‘Oh, we just need to do a better job of telling voters how much good we’ve done than like, ‘Oh, we massively fucked up and now we’re gonna pay the consequences.’”