On the road again. After a year of acoustic performances delivered from the Oval Office, president Donald Trump got the band together and flew up to the Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania, on a frigid December night to deliver a message on the American economy in a strange performance in which he seemed caught between past and future.
“All these people,” he marvelled at the very end as the crowd in the Mount Airy Casino, Mount Pocono, chanted “USA! USA!” and Trump thundered: “We will fight, fight, fight, and we will win, win, win. We will make America healthy again! We will make America safe again! We will.”
But fight who? And win what? The general election took place in November 2024. Even anti-Trumpites are familiar with the soundbites at this stage. Those election proclamations have come to sound stale a year into his second term. This was an unusual speech by Trump: half fiery defence of the economic performance of his administration, half diatribe about enemies old, like Joe Biden (“a sleepy son of a bitch”) and new, like Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar (“she comes in with her little turban – all she does is bitch”).
For those who tuned in as a December freeze settled across the Plains and Rust Belt, this was a different rally. The small stage was a new departure from the blue-skied mega rallies of previous years, with its midnight-blue curtains and US flags decked out to resemble a typical American Legion hall: patriotic and homely. Visually, it was an intimate and retro town hall-style sermon: even the banner message, Lower Prices. Bigger Paychecks, had a Reagan-era font.
And the music! For a long time before Trump took the stage, the crowd was entertained with a series of Dad Rock classics that could be categorised as spliffy – Space Oddity, the full-length Layla, Stairway to Heaven – as though the crowd were being entertained by the president’s own Spotify Wrapped.
As always, they were having a good time: one guy, directly in front of the stage, was dressed in the full garb of the 1776 Revolution and gave such a fluent display of air-guitar, air-drums and even air-mouth organ that the thought occurred that maybe Trump, watching on the screen backstage, had become so mesmerised and intimidated by his dance moves that he was refusing to go out. But no: Trump appeared, he did the Lee Greenwood sway and then eased into old refrains.
“Well this is a nice crowd. We gotta lot a people standing outside … it’s freezing, they got here at like two o’clock in the morning or something. I’m a little worried about them. Would anyone here like to give up their place?”
It was a line I’d first heard Trump use in Conway, South Carolina, in February of last year when he was gathering the election momentum that proved unassailable. But now, in December 2025, he has had his hands on the reins of power for over a year. At times, it sounded like he was fighting an election that has already passed and which he has long been declared winner.
President Joe Biden is a private citizen enduring treatment for cancer with fortitude and grace. Nobody is talking about eggs any more. Trump made an oblique reference to the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July of last year when he commented on a chart off-screen, reminding people that he had turned his head to look at a chart on that summer’s day in Butler a split second before the bullets were fired – and that had made all the difference.
“My all-time favourite chart is the one in Butler. I don’t care how good that chart looks, it’s s**t compared to the one in Butler.”
It was a disconcerting allusion to that dark episode. So much has happened since, much of it generated by Trump himself, that it seems longer than a year-and-a-half ago. Trump has a masterful capacity for conjuring up new headlines and events. But that can leave it hard for his own supporters to see the wood from the trees.
For instance, the quiet southern border has been his most spectacular domestic success. But it’s difficult to know which was more useful to him: a teeming, overrun border to which he could point as a true crisis caused by Democratic ineptitude. Or an empty frontier which …
“And now I’ve fixed it and nobody wants to talk about it,” he said in an observation that spoke of internal tensions.
“Even my own people! They say don’t put it in your speech, sir. Why? Because nobody cares about it. You’ve fixed the border. You know how bad that is? Because they forget what we did.”
It’s true. Once the mechanic fixes the car, you don’t talk about engines any more. He told the crowd that in president Biden’s term, real wages plummeted by $3,000 per year while they had risen by $1,300 in his first year. But reading drear stats, even flattering ones, has never been his thing.
No, this was Trump sounding vexed at not getting the credit; at low approval ratings; at the desertion of staunch loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom he did not mention here; and at what he is calling the “con job” perpetrated by the Democrats.
“So, they look at the camera and they say this election is all about ‘affordability’. I can’t call it a hoax because they will misconstrue that. But that’s their one word. And everyone says: ‘oh that must mean Trump has high prices.’ No. Our prices are coming down – tremendously. They caused the high prices and we are bringing them down. If there is one message … you are getting lower prices and bigger paychecks. The only thing that is really going up big … it’s called the stock market and your 401(k)s.”
Plenty of Republicans enjoy healthy dividends from the buoyant stock market. But tens of millions don’t. Data consensus is that inflation has not moved throughout the year while grocery prices are marginally higher. In a Tuesday afternoon interview with Politico, Trump gave himself an “A plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” grading. But the cash register does not lie. Whether in the McMansions of northern Virginia or the Dollar Generals in the food desert locations of the interior, people are going to know what they are paying by looking at their receipts.
In Pennsylvania, he promised that the best is yet to come. “No tax on tips. No tax on tips on social security for our great seniors. Our seniors! And all of that kicks in on January 1st. We’re doing great and it hasn’t kicked in.”
But also coming are the stark changes to healthcare premiums and Medicare and Medicaid in the new year.
This was low-wattage Trump. But still, when he joked about four more years, the crowd duly chanted back. But those four-more-years pleas raised the sharpening problem of succession. For even on a rambling night, it is difficult to imagine any of the Republican figures touted as Trump’s heir-apparent – JD Vance or Marco Rubio or Ron De Santis or Don Jr – generating anything like the same energy or loyalty. He knows it. His staff know it.
At one stage, Trump broke away to recall the conversation with his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, that persuaded him to leave the White House for the short flight up to the Poconos. “We have to start campaigning, sir. We have to win the midterms and you’re the guy whose gonna take us over the midterm. Where’s Susie? She’s great.”
That’s the dilemma. Maga needs the cult and strange magnetism of Trump more than ever. But on this evidence, Donald Trump is more interested in refighting old battles and reliving old glories, while the people insist that he solve their future problems.