President Donald Trump marked the first year of his second term with a lengthy press conference, rattling off his achievements and lamenting his failure to break through on the economy.
“Maybe I have bad public relations people, but we’re not getting it across,” Trump said of his economic performance. “I don’t like to do this, but I do it because I’ve got to get the word out.”
“One of the reasons I’m doing this news conference, I think it’s important we have taken a mess and made it really good,” he continued. “It’s going to get even better.”
Trump is the marketer-in-chief, but his return to the White House has been marred by the occasional branding misstep.
The biggest came early: the naming of his landmark tax and border funding law, so far the biggest legislative achievement of his second term and arguably the most significant thing he has done economically, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
A Pew Research Center poll last year found that 46% disapproved of the law and 32% approved. Another 23% said they were unsure.
While the bill was still being debated in Congress, a KFF Health Tracking Poll showed that 64% of American adults viewed it unfavorably, including large majorities of Democrats, independents, and Republicans who identify as members of the Make America Great Again coalition.
At least part of the problem is the name. It was called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act for process rather than substantive reasons.
When Trump became president again, there was a disagreement among Republican lawmakers over whether to pass his major agenda items in one or two bills. The plan was to use a legislative maneuver known as reconciliation to enact the legislation to avoid a Democratic filibuster and pass it in the Senate on a party-line vote.
The legislation would include top Trump priorities, such as the 2017 tax cuts, which were set to expire because they too were passed through reconciliation, and funding for immigration enforcement.
Trump publicly went back and forth on which legislative approach he preferred, and eventually settled on one big bill rather than attempting to break it up into separate reconciliation packages. Big and beautiful became the bill’s popular nickname and, for a while, its official title.
Two problems with this quickly became apparent. One is that this name fed into the messaging of a handful of fiscal conservatives who opposed the legislation because of elevated federal spending levels.
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk told CBS News near the end of his time running the Department of Government Efficiency. “I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”
Musk’s comments, which he later elaborated on by calling the bill “an abomination” along with “massive,” “outrageous,” and “pork-filled,” contributed to his ugly rift with Trump, though the two have since reconciled.
In the end, just two Republicans in the House voted against the bill, with only Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) doing so because it contained too much spending. (Trump and Massie have not subsequently reconciled.) Three Republicans voted no on final passage in the Senate, necessitating a tiebreaking vote from Vice President JD Vance.
But the greatest problem was that the emphasis on bigness and beauty did not even really attempt to sell the public on any of the policies contained therein.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) famously said Congress needed to pass the Affordable Care Act so the public could find out what was in the bill. Trump uncharacteristically did not lead with the actual contents of his signature economic package.
The polling on the legislation at the time suggested that the popularity of the individual policies varied widely. It was always going to be about which party defined it successfully.
Trump is usually better than the leading Democrats on that. But not here.
All this has contributed to the impression that Trump, who won in 2024 in large part because of stubborn inflation, is not sufficiently dialed in on the economy.
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This has continued with Trump’s Greenland obsession, which has itself since been rebranded as a grudge match over the Nobel Peace Prize, and with an increased focus on international affairs. Trump headed to Davos shortly after defending his economic stewardship in the White House briefing room.
You can’t message your way out of economic problems. People know the state of their own finances. Surprisingly, however, Trump hasn’t tried as hard as he could have.