The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Uses Prime-Time Speech To Blame Biden, Immigrants For Economy Woes

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

President Trump used his prime-time speech Wednesday night to blame the country’s ongoing economic challenges on the Biden administration. We discuss what we learned from the speech and whether it is likely to sway Americans who don’t already support Trump. This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Regular insurance is great for your standard day-to-day risks. But for those once-in-a-generation catastrophes, countries like Jamaica have made other preparations. We all realize that hurricanes are inevitable, and we can't just sit here and hope we had to be proactive. On Planet Money, how Jamaica weathered the worst hurricane in the country's history with a bet. Planet Money, listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's the NPR. our politics podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, I also cover the White House. And I'm Domenica Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And we are recording this podcast at 108 p.m. on Thursday, December 18th, 2025. Today on the show, we are talking about President Trump's prime time address to the nation. It was billed as a review of Trump's accomplishments during his first year back in office. And here's a taste. Tonight, after 11 months, our border is secure. is stopped. Wages are up. Prices are down. Our nation is strong. America is respected and our country is back stronger than ever before. We're poised for an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen. So many Trump trademarks in there. Danielle, what did you make of this speech? Well, Trump is just flat out not feeling people's pain. Now, he's not a guy known for being super

fuzzy and empathetic. I get it. But right now, as we have talked about just recently on this podcast, this is a White House that is trying to refocus on an economic message as Americans are really feeling squeezed economically. You have consumer confidence down. You have Americans saying they don't love how Trump is handling the economy. And yet, instead of coming out and trying to say something new or reassuring, what you got was you got Trump yelling at you. And not only that, but yelling a rally speech, essentially. This was kind of a hodgepodge of the greatest hits from Trump. It was a lot of blaming Joe Biden, insisting that his own administration is the greatest ever, super successful.

So there just wasn't any, hey, I hear you. Domenico, what jumped out of you? Well, I mean, considering, you know, what our latest NPR PBS News Marist Paul found, you know, with him only at 36% approval rating on his handling of the economy, what we've seen all year with people saying that the economy is their top concern, Republicans losing in special elections and in those elections in November. You know, Trump was really on a defensive foot here, and he certainly sounded defensive throughout this speech. His message was essentially, the economy's fine, and if it's not, then it's the Democrats and immigrants' fault, and really came back to those culture war talking points. But again, really removed from that reality of how people are feeling, you know, Republicans and his base continue to support him, but majorities of everyone else just aren't seeing

this message. Yeah. Last week, he held a rally in Pennsylvania on Friday this week. He will hold another rally in North Carolina. That rally in Pennsylvania was 90 minutes long. He's had a whole lot of things. I feel like this speech was actually what was on the teleprompter. Like, this was the points that the White House said he was going to make last week.

But now here he is giving a primetime address, which has a certain gravitas. Yes, this was not a stayed, my fellow Americans moment, which is what we tend to hear during these primetime addresses, sort of often seated behind a desk saying, hey, I'm talking to you one-on-one. I am meeting you. This was not meeting. This was, you know, kind of yelling down from on high. And maybe his supporters appreciated this. But that is not what Trump needs right now. His base is just in lockstep with him. They love him. But what he needs, if he wants to get Republicans elected next year and to get more of his agenda passed, is for people to be on his side. And it is hard for me to see how the speech did that.

Yeah. I mean, the speech may have reloaded the talking points, so to speak, for Trump and the MAGA base. But it didn't really do a whole lot of making important announcements. breaking big news, talking about a major international event, for example, which is the kind of thing. These primetime addresses are usually, you know, therefore, you know, the networks usually don't like breaking into their programming in prime time because, you know, they make a lot of money in prime time. I think we can say that the only major announcement, Domenico, was the Warrior dividend. Tonight, I am also proud to announce that more than one. 1,450,000. Think of this. 1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call Warrior Dividend before Christmas, a warrior dividend. In honor of our nation's founding in 1776,

we are sending every soldier $1,776. Yeah. And, you know, this is something, though, that Trump rebranded as seeming like it was new. And then we find out today that it actually was something that was tucked into the one big beautiful bill. So, you know, they're kind of picking out things to be able to say, what can we say here? Because we know our policies are a problem for independence, certainly Democrats, and Trump's numbers are at the lowest they've ever been for his presidency, either this time or the first term. And I think that they're struggling politically with trying to figure out how to message around this, because the economy was a relative strength of Trump's in the first term. And it certainly is not now. And when you're messaging, you're struggling. Like, I can't tell you how many presidents I've covered. Well, I can actually tell you how many presidents I've covered. But every single one of them has at some point with their team thought, if I just deliver this one speech, if I just explain it, then people will get it and they'll understand and my numbers will get.

better. Right. Yeah. And that's what Trump is trying to do right now. That's what Joe Biden tried to do during the last administration. And when you think about the logic of it, you don't even have to go far down that road to realize that would be a near impossible task, or at least it certainly seems that way, to tell someone who is looking at their bank account, wow, I have crazy high energy bills. To tell that person, no, actually things are great, I don't know how you convince them of that. Yeah, and look, past presidents have really struggled. I mean, if you go down the list on this, and that's because, you know, presidents really don't have a ton of control over the economy, even though Trump himself has pulled a lever on tariffs, as we've talked about another podcast, that have actively made prices more expensive. But I mean, if you think about Joe Biden, he had Bidenomics and trying to convince people, and that didn't exactly work. That didn't last long. Right. President Obama had to bring in Bill Clinton to be the, quote, explainer in chief. because he was struggling on trying to explain the economy. Messaging is important, but actual policy and whether things turn around is more important. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break and we'll have more in a moment. On Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, Famous actors remember their days of obscurity, like when Pedro Pascal remembered the stress of being a waiter. The logistical labor

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Listen to the NPR News Now podcast. Now. And we're back. We've been talking about, President Trump's end of your address. A major focus of the speech was the economy. The idea that Trump inherited a mess from the Biden administration and that he is now making everything great. One area he talked about was the cost of medications. I negotiated directly with the drug companies and foreign nations, which were taken advantage of our country for many decades

to slash prices on drugs and pharmaceuticals by as much as 400, 500, 500, and even 600 percent. Danielle, how accurate is the picture that the president painted? Well, in the micro, what I hear there is a mathematical impossibility. Trump's saying that pharmaceutical prices are going to go down by up to 600 percent. It is hard to see that happening unless a pharmaceutical company is going to pay you to take their drugs. Oh, please pay me. Right. Yeah, that would be great. But to get at the context of when he is saying this right now, as I know,

has been discussed previously on this podcast, Congress has been debating trying to come up with some sort of a fix for Obamacare subsidies that are expiring at the end of the year. And if those do expire, which it really appears they will, that means that people's premium prices are going to skyrocket. So people who are on those exchanges are very, very worried about their costs right now. And in general, Americans are always worried about health care costs because health care, as we all know, is very expensive. Right now, Broadly speaking, the U.S. economy is not doing crazy awesome. It's also not doing terribly if you're looking at just big macroeconomic indicators. Yeah, I mean, we got a new inflation number today. And it was not bad. Yeah. Not good, but not bad. Right. The Labor Department today said that year over year, inflation right now is at 2.7%. That means it has slowed down a little from the roughly 3% where it's been. It's not quite where the Federal Reserve and a lot of economies. would want it at 2%. But yeah, cooling off. Great. I was going to say, though, that 2.7% is fairly roughly kind of where it was when Trump took office, wasn't it? That's also true. And that is that brings me to where I was going with this, which is that, yes, it is possible, as Trump did last night, to point at various statistics that are looking pretty good. For example, gas prices, yes, they're down. Egg prices way down from their peak. Wages rising faster than inflation? Yes. that is absolutely happening. Did prices rise a bunch under Joe Biden? Yes, sure. So Trump is right on all of that. But that masks so much. This week, Fed Governor Chris Waller talked at the Yale CEO summit. And he said that upper income people are doing fine, great, dandy. Lower income people, they are not. And so that is really a big locus of the affordability crisis right now. And not only that, but if you look at the jobs report. The latest one had unemployment ticking up again. The labor market is

softening. What that means lower demand for workers, which means wages could soften as well, which means even if inflation does cool off, it is hard to see those lower income people in a soft labor market see their wages go up and have everything solved. Well, not least because lower income people spend a larger share of their income on good. Goods. Yes. Yes. And goods are getting more expensive, not by a huge amount, but every little bit hurts, especially if your wage growth isn't in the place as wage growth of higher income people. That's absolutely right. And some goods have gotten much more expensive. That inflation report today showed coffee, beef, electricity, used cars. There's a whole mess of things that have gotten quite a bit more expensive. That can make everyday life much more difficult. And there are all kinds of stressors. I mean, if you don't have a job, it's not the easiest time to find a job and get one. You know, and that's why, you know, in our polling, a majority of people said that they feel like we are in a recession, even though technically we're not in one. You know, technically it would be two consecutive quarters of negative gross domestic product growth, GDP. We haven't seen that. But clearly, it's how people are feeling right now. And they're not feeling great. A lot of people saying that they're barely making ends. meet. Let's talk about the base and something that he talked about a lot in this speech that is something that really does activate his base, and that is immigration. He talked about it a lot.

A major factor in driving up housing costs was the colossal border invasion. We have never been invaded. This is the worst thing that, frankly, in my opinion, the worst thing that the Biden administration did to our country is the invasion at the border. The last administration and their allies in Congress brought in millions and millions of migrants and gave them taxpayer-funded housing while your rent and housing costs skyrocketed. Over 60% of growth in the rental market came from foreign migrants. Domenico, tell us what you heard there. Well, first of all, you know, the fact is when you've seen people priced out of houses, you know, since the pandemic, a lot of it had to do with, get this, low interest rates. How is that? Because suddenly you had a lot of people who felt like they could spend more money because it was cheaper than if you had high interest rates.

That drove up the prices. There was a lot of demand. And it just became this demand on demand sort of leapfrogging that drove prices through the roof in a lot of places. And there's just a shortage of housing. So, sure, there's a shortage of housing. And if you bring in people into the country who need housing, then yes, there's a degree to which immigrants who've come into the country need housing. Most of them, though, are renters, not people who are buying houses and driving up the cost of houses. And there just aren't that many of them to say that they are the driving force behind what was happening. It's really disingenuous to say that. But it works for the base. Yeah. And the administration is really relying on pointing the finger at immigrants quite a bit on a whole bunch of issues. And they've done this for a while, of course, on crime, drugs, that sort of thing. But also they have been doing this on jobs, trying to say that immigrants are taking all of the jobs.

So this is a group that is, as it has been for a while. a sort of catch-all group to point the finger at. So if you think about a rally speech as a message for the base, then a primetime address to the nation is, in theory, remarks for all of America. Sure, he won't persuade Democrats. But what about all those independents who used to support him and don't right now? To the extent that they picked up on the main topics of this speech, which are, this is Biden's fault and my administration is fixing all the things. I think it's hard to convince those people, especially if they are feeling the pinch, especially if they cannot meet a

budget, cannot pay their bills. I do not know how much it comforts that person to hear that Joe Biden is still at fault and to hear, hey, I really am fixing things. Now, you can imagine a message where the president says something more like not, you're right, my administration is screwing up, no president's going to say that, but something to the effect of, I hear you. There was not an I hear you in this speech. Was there a, and there's so much more work to do? There was, things are going to get better because of our great policies, like the big, beautiful bill. Because of that, you might get a bigger tax refund next year. There was, we've done all these amazing, amazing, amazing tariffs. And therefore, or at some point all of this investment is going to catch up, lead to more factories and more jobs.

There was that. But you did not get the tone of not just, hey, we're doing great things, but hey, we are looking at what you are scared about, what you need. And thus, we are working to do the things that would fix the things that you are worried about. That was missing. You know, I was struck by the distance between what Trump was saying in his messaging here and what moderate Republicans have been saying and what they were. were saying after his speech. Moderer Republicans are not talking about vagaries of, you know, tax bill that's going to help you next year and things really aren't as bad as they seem, you know, and there could be some health care thing that might help you that we're going to

try to pass. No, they're talking about those Affordable Care Act subsidies that are hitting a cliff in a couple weeks and are going to drastically raise a lot of people's premiums who are shopping on the Affordable Care Act exchanges around the country, that Republicans really can't even get on the same page with themselves about what to do around this. But we know that Republicans in those moderate frontline swing districts are hearing it from their constituents and they're really worried that they're going to lose their seats over affordability and in particular health care. And to go back to your question, Tam, you asked about this president going beyond the base last night, trying to speak to all Americans. This is not a president who is terribly practiced

or he often doesn't terribly care about talking to all Americans, who he is often talking to is his base. And he has at times been explicit in saying, hey, I want to help my people. And so is it terribly surprising that he struggles to go beyond that? Not really. You know, and look, this is someone who kind of had a by default trust on the economy from a lot of voters when he ran in 2015, 2016, because they saw him as a businessman. man. They saw him on the celebrity apprentice and they just thought, this is a guy who knows the economy. And in that first term, it certainly seemed like he was benefiting from an economy that was doing pretty well and has never really had to struggle with a message on the economy. And

even in this second term, he revealed himself very clearly a few times, very early on, to say, you know, I never really thought the economy was that big of a motivating factor anyway. It was really about immigration. That's the thing that's at the heart of what he wants to talk about. And I think that if they can't figure out a message, and more than that, if people's outlook on the economy doesn't improve over the next year, Republicans are in a lot of trouble in the midterms. All right. Well, we are going to leave it there for today. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I also cover the White House. And I'm Domenica Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics

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