Sneak peek at Trump's bonkers midterm 'closing message' ignites online firestorm

Fox News aired a sneak peek Sunday of a new interview with President Donald Trump, and the “final message” he delivered to voters ahead of Tuesday’s midterms left critics dumbfounded.

“What’s your final message to the voters to get them out?” asked New York Post columnist Miranda Devine in a video interview with Trump, scheduled to air in full on Monday.

Trump immediately pointed to the United States’ “poverty numbers” in his final pitch to voters just days out from the midterms.

“Poverty numbers are the single best, meaning they’re the best!” Trump said. “Poverty is a bad thing, but poverty is poverty, and we have the best numbers we’ve ever had.”

Trump has bragged about the United States having the “best poverty” multiple times over the past month. And, while the official U.S. poverty rate in 2025 was the lowest on record, using other methods to measure poverty such as the supplemental poverty measure painted a far bleaker picture.

“By that measure, 13.1% of the U.S. population was living in poverty in 2025, which was higher than the low of 7.7% in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the pre-pandemic low of 11.7% in 2019,” reads an analysis published last week by FactCheck.org.

“Hell of a closing message: More people are in poverty than ever before!” sarcastically quipped Hemant Mehta, a podcast host, writer and reality television personality.

Prominent liberal influencer Ed Krassenstein argued that Trump’s “closing message to voters” amounted to bragging “that poverty numbers are ‘the best,’” and Joanne Carducci, another prominent liberal influencer, flagged Trump’s remark about “poverty is poverty” in apparent disbelief.

“His closing message is ‘poverty is poverty’???” Carducci wrote in a social media post on X to her more than 1 million followers.

Mark Bland, a radio host, liberal political commentator and former professional wrestler, suggested the president had simply run out of material.

“We have the fattest poor people on earth and the best-fed homeless population. Poverty numbers barely move regardless of who’s President. He has nothing left to run on,” Bland wrote. “At this point, even his talking points have failed.”