Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson said President Donald Trump is squandering the very issue that returned him to the White House in historic fashion.
Carlson made the remarks on Saturday on a CNN panel hosted by Kasie Hunt that also featured TV host Cari Champion, former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin, and former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien. Carlson argued Trump has lost the trust he once commanded with voters on the economy and inflation.
"We all know that the economy is the number one thing followed closely by inflation," Carlson said. "And ironically, those two things that Trump used to poll the highest at. And that's why he won reelection."
However, "he's now in the tank," Carlson said, as "25 percent of people agree with him on inflation, 26 percent on the economy. It's just dismal."
Farah Griffin opened the discussion by pointing to an issue she said is breaking through ahead of the midterms more than she expected: the idea of the president profiting off his time in office while many Americans feel they are hurting and not getting what they need.
Stepien agreed that Trump has a problem, pointing to a gap between what voters care about, like affordability and gas prices, and what they believe the president cares about.
"To me, that's the biggest gap that exists, and the biggest problem to fix," Stepien said, adding that he was encouraged when Trump began to acknowledge some of those problems at the convention a few weeks ago.
Carlson was less forgiving.
"But the continuation of calling this all a hoax and, you know, not really feeling the pain of the average American, I think is really resonating with voters," she said.
Champion said the polling shows voters don't believe Trump is honest or that he puts them first.
"It always sounds like he's thinking about himself first because he quite frankly is," Champion said. "And then everyone else second, third, fourth, and fifth. And that's not what he ran on."
When the panel agreed Trump's troubles were all unforced errors, Carlson went further.
"All of them," she said. "I mean this will go down in history as like the most incredible effort to sabotage yourself."
Farah Griffin called it "one of the biggest fumbles, I would argue, in American political history," noting that Trump won the popular vote with a coalition that rivaled Barack Obama's in diversity, drawing young, new and disenfranchised voters on the economy and immigration.
"And those numbers have just flipped on their head," she said.