CNN host Abby Phillip said President Donald Trump isn’t “living in the real world” on Saturday, pointing to his claims amid disastrous approval ratings that Americans might be mad at the Republican Party — but not him.
Phillip made her case during a “Table for Five” panel discussion after her guest, Democratic strategist Yemisi Egbewole, said Trump’s attempt to distance himself from criticism is part of the same “obsession with being remembered.”
“I cannot, I can’t get over…I mean, even just what you said,” Phillip told Egbewole. “He did say, ‘Oh well, Americans are mad, but they’re not mad at me — they’re mad at everybody else. They’re mad at Republicans.’ That’s not true, OK?”
She continued, pointing to a recent CNN poll’s results: “His approval rating, as we just said, is at a record low: 65% of Americans think that he and his policies have worsened economic conditions. Again, the president is not living in the real world. And I’m not sure if that will ever change.”
Phillip noted, however, that it will surely have “significant consequences” for the Republican Party.
A Fox News poll released in late July had Trump’s approval rating at 39%, and when asked why during an interview with Punchbowl News earlier this month, Trump said, “I don’t know. I mean, they’re angry at Republicans. But they’re not angry at me.”
Many conservative commentators have warned the GOP could face disaster in the upcoming midterm elections, as Trump’s former vows to boost the U.S. economy and avoid world conflicts have been broken by the ongoing affordability crisis and his war on Iran.
Recent polls show a significant chunk of MAGA voters are unhappy with Trump and his second term, with even the non-college voter base that helped re-elect him in 2024 joining their college-educated counterparts in disapproving of the president’s job performance.
Fellow guest and Tangle News editor-at-large Kmele Foster noted that what people are seeing is a realization that the MAGA movement has betrayed core Republican principles — and is the actual “mind virus” that so many Trump voters decried the “woke” movement of being.
“I don’t mean it in the sort of most pejorative sense, but in the sense that it shows up and it kind of displaces all of the things that the GOP was traditionally recognized for, this commitment to free markets and limited government, out the window,” Foster explained. “Now, suddenly the federal government of the United States is a joint owner of some 31-odd American companies that are publicly traded, in some cases. It’s an extraordinary change. This is the most economically interventionist administration of my own lifetime.”
“And they’re Republicans,” Foster noted. “This isn’t how any of this was supposed to work.”