LEE CARTER: Trump can still get attention, can he distract voters from their bills?
President Donald Trump has never suffered from an attention deficit.
Ours, maybe. His, never.
For more than a decade, Trump has demonstrated an almost supernatural ability to decide what America will talk about. A nickname. A Truth Social post. A feud. A rally. A tariff. A threat. A late-night broadside against somebody who had the gall to criticize him.
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Trump throws the ball and Washington and the media chase it.
But something interesting is happening as we head toward the midterms.
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The country may be getting tired of chasing.
The latest Fox News poll contains a number that should be flashing in giant red letters inside the White House: Asked, without being given a list, to name the most important issue facing the country, 34% of registered voters said the cost of living. Another 14% said the economy and jobs.
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Nothing else came close. Immigration was at 8%. The war with Iran, 4%. AI and data centers, despite consuming approximately 94% of the oxygen in corporate America, registered at 1%.
Voters are not being subtle.
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They are saying: It's the prices. Stupid.
And yet much of the political conversation seems to be happening somewhere else.
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Trump is battling the media. He is talking about his predecessor. He is dealing with Iran, China, immigration and AI. Some of those issues are enormously consequential. Presidents do not get to spend their days staring at the price of eggs.
But voters don't experience the presidency as a policy seminar.
They experience it at the grocery store.
At the gas pump.
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When the utility bill arrives.
When they look at what it costs to buy a house, see a doctor or fill their grocery cart.
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And on those questions, the Fox numbers are difficult for the administration. Sixty-two percent say grocery prices are a major problem. Sixty-one percent say the same about gas prices. Fifty-four percent say it about housing. Fifty-two percent about health care. And 63% say the Trump administration has made the economy worse.
The administration can point to its own economic strength data. Employment has remained resilient, and the stock market has performed strongly. Fox's own analysis recently noted job growth and unemployment of 4.1%.
But this is where presidents (and politicians writ large) discover one of the more irritating rules of politics:
You don't get to tell voters how they feel about the economy.
They tell you.
That was true for President Joe Biden. It is true for Donald Trump.
Biden spent much of his presidency pointing to macroeconomic statistics that were considerably healthier than the public mood. Inflation was coming down. Jobs were being created. The economy had avoided the recession many economists predicted.
And voters kept saying some version of: That's lovely. Do you know how much a dozen eggs cost?
Trump understood that disconnect better than almost anyone. He turned economic frustration into political fuel. Now he owns the podium. Which means he also owns the problem.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found only 17% of U.S. adults approved of Trump's handling of the cost of living. His overall approval was 32% in that survey. Fox, polling registered voters with a different methodology, put his overall approval at 39% and his approval on inflation at 24%. Different polls, different populations, same warning light: affordability is a major vulnerability for the administration.
This is where Trump's greatest communications strength can become a weakness. He understands attention better than perhaps any political figure of the modern era. He knows how to interrupt. He knows how to provoke. He knows how to make himself the main character. But attention and persuasion are not the same thing.
Attention is getting everyone to look at you.
Persuasion is getting them to look at the problem differently.
And right now, voters appear to have a problem they don't particularly want changed. They want it solved.
There is another revealing number buried in the Fox poll. Democrats currently hold a 15-point advantage over Republicans when voters are asked which party they trust more on inflation. But the same poll offers an important qualification: voters who trust Democrats on inflation are slightly more likely to say it is because Republicans have failed than because they believe Democratic policies will lower prices. That isn't exactly a love letter to either party. It's an eviction notice to whoever voters think isn't listening. And that's why the midterm communications challenge may be simpler than Washington is making it.
Trump doesn't need another subject. He has one. Affordability. Every other argument can run through it.
China? What does competing with China mean for American jobs and prices?
AI? What does it mean for my paycheck and electric bill?
Iran? What does a prolonged conflict mean for gasoline and the cost of moving goods around the country?
Taxes and tariffs? What will I pay?
The communications opportunity isn't necessarily to talk less about the world. It's to translate the world into the lives people are actually living. Trump's political genius has always been his instinct for finding the thing people are feeling before the political establishment figures out how to talk about it.
In 2016, that was disruption.
In 2024, it was frustration with prices, immigration and the direction of the country.
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In 2026, voters are once again telling Washington exactly what's bothering them.
The question is whether Washington is listening. Trump can still make America look. The harder task now is convincing Americans that he's looking at what they're looking at.