How Trump dashed Republicans’ big hope for the midterms

For Tax Day, Republicans tried to focus on trumpeting new tax breaks popular with a broad segment of voters. President Donald Trump had other plans.

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Championing no tax on tips and no tax on overtime was meant to shore up the GOP’s standing ahead of the midterms, especially after the controversial war with Iran inflated gas prices to more than $4 per gallon. Many Republicans are betting that bigger tax refunds will give voters a reason to re-elect them even as Trump’s management of the economy hits new lows in public polling. 

But instead of zeroing in on a kitchen-table message, the Republican Party’s chief salesman was mudslinging on biblical terrain that’s about as far away from the kitchen table as possible. 

In the past few days, Trump has brawled with the Vatican, including sharing an image depicting him as Jesus Christ. It didn’t take long for him to take down the post, but the move helped overshadow the GOP’s celebratory messaging around the tax cuts. 

During a staged event on Monday in which a DoorDash worker delivered McDonald’s to the White House, Trump could not avoid questions from reporters about the Jesus image and his caustic attack against Pope Leo XIV that generated criticism from Catholic officials. Three days later, the president appeared critical of his team’s effort to promote the tax cuts.

“To be honest, it was a little tacky,” Trump said in a flash of self-awareness at a roundtable discussion in Las Vegas. “They come up with these crazy ideas … we do these things in politics. They’re a little embarrassing.” He has also kept up his criticism of the Holy See and ruled out an apology.

Trump hasn’t been able to avoid repeated blunders that threaten to imperil the GOP’s control of Congress this November, beginning with his decision to green-light the unpopular war with Iran. Sharp price increases for gas, groceries and more will swallow most Americans’ tax refunds this year, all but wiping out the political boost Republicans could wring from last year’s megalaw. 

Start with the swelling cost of refilling the gas tank, an expense few Americans can dodge. A group of Stanford University economists recently projected that American families will spend an extra $776 this year on higher gas prices. Those aren’t the only new charges they are grappling with: The Tax Foundation estimates that tariffs will consume another $600 of their budgets this year in what amounts to a tax increase.

Meanwhile, though tax refunds are up, they are not keeping pace with the price increases walloping Americans. Refunds are only $350 more compared with 2025, per IRS data. That falls short of White House promises of a $1,000 boost straight to taxpayers’ bank accounts. Sluggish wage growth won’t bail Republicans out either, and inflation overtaking pay raises will hit middle- and low-income families particularly hard.

It helps explain why U.S. consumer sentiment is plunging to record lows, driven by concern that the price hikes will stick around and stretch budgets for the foreseeable future. A recent Fox News poll showed 64% of voters disapproved of Trump’s handling of taxes, an issue long viewed as a GOP strength. That share included almost 80% of independents and even 27% of Republicans, in a warning sign of eroding support.

Already, key Republican senators are acknowledging a partywide failure to tout the megalaw ahead of the midterms.

The president’s polling on the economy is similarly poor, but the White House seems to reject those numbers. Asked on Thursday why people aren’t feeling better about the economy, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent responded: “Well, in their heart of hearts, they feel good. I’m not sure what they’re telling the survey people.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was Republicans’ biggest hope for the midterms. But it’s falling into a familiar sequence of events — an instance of déjà vu, if you will — that similarly troubled the 2017 Republican tax law.

Shortly after entering office in 2017, Trump put the repeal of the Affordable Care Act at the top of his to-do list. The spectacular collapse of the repeal effort was among the biggest failures of his first term. Only then did Republicans retreat to their safe space of gigantic tax cuts, most of which benefited wealthy Americans and large corporations.

Democrats, though, zeroed in on health care during the 2018 midterms, a decision that propelled them back to controlling the House. They painted the GOP tax law as a giveaway to the rich, an impression that gained sway among voters and contributed to the measure’s lackluster popularity. Many GOP candidates barely mentioned tax cuts on the campaign trail that year.  

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Credit Republicans in Congress for learning from their mistakes. For this legislative go-round, they designed distinct tax benefits for restaurant servers, Uber drivers, hairstylists and others in the service sector who rely on tips or are used to working overtime. But the learning only went so far: Most of the law’s benefits were again freighted toward the richest Americans while leaving poorer ones in the lurch.

Democrats are capitalizing on messaging similar to 2018 and chipping away at the law’s approval ratings. Already, key Republican senators are acknowledging a partywide failure to tout the megalaw ahead of the midterms. Sen. Steve Daines of Montana said at a Semafor event this week that “we’ve done a very poor job” in selling it. “We’ve just not done a good job litigating that,” he said.

Republicans want voters to deliver a favorable verdict in November. Yet Trump’s decisions that led to surging prices for groceries, gas and more are setting them up to fail if the election hinges on the economy. Many voters will correctly judge that a war with Iran wasn’t part of the agenda. Neither was picking fights with pontiffs.

Joseph Zeballos-Roig

Joseph Zeballos-Roig is a reporter who has covered economic policy and politics for Semafor, Business Insider and Quartz, among other publications.