Voters are already souring on President Donald Trump's economic performance, former GOP strategist Tim Miller told MSNBC's Ari Melber on Thursday's edition of "The Beat" — because he hasn't kept his most important promises.
All of this is entirely on top of the headache Republicans have created for themselves by cutting $1 trillion from Medicaid in their tax cut megabill, he added — something even Republicans knew would be a massive political liability.
"The big tell on this is that a lot of these cuts don't actually go in place until after the midterms on the health care side," Miller explained. "There will be impact, particularly rural hospitals, because, you know, hospitals have to plan. And they're, you know, there's kind of complicated factors that go into this sort of stuff. But like, the actual, like, cuts to benefits, a lot of — most of that is post-2027 and after."
Another highly revealing fact, he continued, is that "Josh Hawley, like, this is the most — you know, besides Vance, now that he's out, probably the most traditionally MAGA, on a policy front, senator, was like, I'm voting for this bill because I don't think that health care cuts will ever go into effect. I think that they'll hurt our voters, and I'm going to fight to block them from actually going into effect in 2027. So that tells you all you need to know. They know that it will be unpopular with their own voters if it goes into effect. And I think that's a real problem for them, probably in 2028, not 2026."
"What's the bottom line on how you describe the Trump economy so far?" asked Melber.
"Look, it's stagnant. It's stagnant," said Miller. "The tariffs have put a big cap on it. If you were a Trump voter who went in there because you were worried that costs were too high, like nothing has helped you. Like housing costs are still up, grocery prices are up. I saw, thanks to the tariffs, gaming console prices are up now. Gas prices are maybe down a hair, and egg prices are maybe down because the avian bird flu is over. I don't think Trump gets credit for that."
"So I mean, I think that's why you see his numbers so bad on the economy right now. He's not delivering what he promised to people," added Miller.
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