I'm John Bledch with my colleagues, Judy Dempsey and Berlin for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,

Thaddeus McCotter in Detroit, Michigan for American greatness.

We're told by the Wall Street Journal that the president looks to sell the economy to the American people

for the state of the union address. Sell the economy.

The unhappiness with the Trump administration is evident in a poll taken over the weekend by ABC and the Washington Post.

What was surprising to me is the worst marks are for the economy, not for the war, not for the changeable nature of the rhetoric out of Washington, sometimes rude, sometimes incoherent.

No, but for the economy, for inflation, for the very things that elected Donald Trump.

So what we're looking at here is a state of the union message where the president is going to be

imploring, perhaps chastising the American people that we don't appreciate how good we have it.

That is, how good do we have it?

The three of us are doing okay. But, well, honestly, John, to a certain extent, we've seen this

over and over. This is a cycle that both parties do. They inherit a mess, and then they talk about

the mess they inherited, and they talk about how

they're going to fix it, and either they do or they don't, because there has to be palpable

benefits to the American people in terms of prosperity. The Trump administration, to a certain

extent, has not followed FDR's advice, which is to continually point back and say, look, they created

the mess. We're trying to fix it. Instead, he's kind of jumped around. You know, people care more about the green in their pocket than they do about Greenland right now in the United States. The polls are all showing that. There has not been a disciplined messaging about the economy, about how they're going to fix it. There's not been enough of a palpable benefit to the American people in their pocketbooks for them to think, okay, we're making progress.

And there hasn't even been enough blaming of the Democrats for creating the mess in the first place. So now he's a prime of a cap of his own failure to have a disciplined message at this point. And the state of the union is going to go a long way. And we've all seen reports where they're huddled up to try to figure out how to get the

state of the economy into the state of the union and have it put forward.

But even if that happens, John, is there going to be a continuous push on the economy

to show that affordability and the things Americans care about like inflation are being

at the forefront of this administration?

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