Opinion: Trump’s Everything Crisis Has Republicans in Panic Mode

Thomas Levinson / Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty With just three weeks to go until voters head to the polls for the 2026 midterms, Republican candidates across the nation are racing to distance themselves from an unpopular president whose political shadow seems to grow longer by the day.

Even MAGA loyalists are losing faith: a survey conducted by Pew Research Center and published last week found a record-high 31 percent of voters who supported Donald Trump in 2024 now disapprove of his job performance.

Republicans’ month-out meltdown is driven by what should be called their “everything crisis,” an all-consuming perfect storm of bad news and a broader malaise of Trump’s own creation: Mortgage and car loan rates are skyrocketing , gas prices are settling near record highs , Big Tech’s sprawling data centers are driving up energy costs for families and job creation is drying up .

Any one of those misfortunes could be enough to jeopardize Republicans’ control of Congress.

What’s so catastrophic is that all of those crises are worsening at the exact same time, while Trump flip-flops between dismissing voters’ affordability concerns as a media-created “ hoax ” and scolding them for complaining.

“You have a little higher [gas prices].

It’s a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done,” Trump told voters at a rally in Texas last month in an attempt to reframe his 2024 campaign pledge of “no foreign wars” in light of his escalating war in Iran.

“Remember that.

It’s a little more.

Frankly, even if it was a lot more.” Trump’s lecturing might go over better if most voters didn’t see him as disconnected from struggles and distracted by vanity projects like his East Wing ballroom and a newfound fixation on artificial intelligence.

As Republicans stare down a historic electoral wipeout, the one man who promised to fix the economy (and everything else) “ on day one ” is busy sharing AI slop on Truth Social and gilding triumphal arches.

As I spoke to voters and advised candidates during the 2024 campaign, I saw firsthand the disconnect between regular people hurt by inflation and Democratic politicians who tried in vain to convince them that their concerns were overblown.

President Biden’s bungled attempts to downplay the pain Americans were feeling by emphasizing other positives left the impression that Democrats simply didn’t understand what millions of voters were feeling.

Republicans now find themselves caught in the same trap.