Trump needs to focus on the economy amid setbacks and challenges in Congress.
Time is short for the Trump administration.
Last week’s elections were a setback, but not a devastating one:
New Jersey is still a blue state, and while Virginia went red four years ago, it’s been trending Democratic for more than a decade.
Republicans also fared poorly in Pennsylvania, however, an all-important presidential battleground.
Democrats even made inroads deep into the South, taking two state senate seats in Mississippi — ending a GOP supermajority — and picking up city council spots in South Carolina and Florida.
With results like these, the Republicans’ razor-thin majority in Congress won’t survive the midterm elections a year from now.
And that means the Trump administration, which came roaring back to power in January, will face implacable legislative opposition in its final two years.
Decisions the president makes now will determine not only the Republican Congress’s fate and how his own last years in office play out, but also whether the GOP goes into 2028 prepared to hold onto the White House.
With the stakes the highest they will ever be, Trump has to focus on voters’ most basic measure of happiness: the state of the economy.
Is 3% annual inflation satisfactory, or does that make Americans feel like Joe Biden never left?
Beef prices are well above the inflation rate, and while home prices are rising more slowly than inflation, the elevated interest rates needed to keep inflation under control make taking on the debt to buy a house more burdensome.
To address the latter, the administration has floated the idea of creating 50-year mortgages, as if what Americans really want is to spend an extra two decades paying off a home with lower payments month by month.
