ROOKE: Trump Won The Battle, But Sen. Warren’s Revealing Interview Shows Democrats Are Coming For Americans’ Top Issue

Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren opened up about her frustrations with former President Barack Obama and how the Democratic Party allowed President Donald Trump to win the war for middle America.

In Monday’s episode of the New York Times podcast “The Opinions,” Warren reveals that Democrats knew as early as 2008 that the economy would be a top issue for voters. Still, when she tried to get her party to win the narrative battle on this issue in 2012, she implied Obama’s team tried to stop her.

“I just want to tell you something that I don’t think I’ve ever said publicly, and it fits in this conversation,” Warren said to “The Opinions” host and NYT opinion editorial director David Leonhardt.

Warren said the summer before her 2012 Senate election, the Democratic Party invited her to do a keynote speech at the national convention, which she described as a “big moment” for her campaign.

“So I sit down, I write my speech. I go back and forth with the folks on my team on this speech, and the line I have in this speech is something like, ‘People all across this country feel like the game is rigged against them. And they’re right. It is.’ Then I talk about the things I think we should do. So we send this speech in to be approved by the powers that be in the Democratic Party,” Warren said.

“Which is basically the Obama White House at this point,” Leonhardt interjected to clarify.

“And they say, no. Take those lines out,” she continued. “You cannot say that this economy is rigged. And I said, huh? But it is. And they said, No, you can’t say that.”

Warren was eventually allowed to keep this line in her speech. Still, she admits that because of her party’s reluctance to acknowledge what Americans were feeling about the economy was true, it gave Trump the upper hand when, four years later, he made it a cornerstone of his first and last presidential campaigns. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)

“But then, the year leading into the 2024 election, what does he grab hold of? He grabs hold of this phrase that he uses over and over and over. On Day 1, ‘I will lower costs for American families. I will do it. I, Donald Trump, will do it,’” she said. “How do I know that was really effective? Partly because he used it, but partly because right after he was elected … when he sits down for his first interview, one of the first questions is, ‘So, you know, Donald Trump, why? Why did you win this election?’ And he said, ‘Because I promised on Day 1 to lower costs for American families.’”

The economy remains a highly significant issue for U.S. voters in 2025, consistently ranking among the top concerns in national polls. The University of Michigan runs a monthly survey called the Consumer Sentiment Index, which basically measures how middle Americans feel about the U.S. economy, their personal finances, and future job prospects. The higher the score (1-100), the more Americans feel optimistic and confident about their financial future. A lower score signals they are worried or pessimistic about their economic future.

The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index for September 2025 stood at 55.4. It marks an over 3-point decline from August 2025, when the index was at 58.2, and an even bigger fall from September 2024, when it was at 70.1. Overall, Americans’ mood about the economy is getting worse. The index shows a growing trend in which Americans report feeling more downbeat and less hopeful than they did before.

US consumer confidence has fallen below the consensus forecast, with job insecurity joining persistent inflation as a key concern.
Per the reporting from the Wall Street Journal (below), the widely-followed University of Michigan consumer sentiment index dropped to 55.4 in… pic.twitter.com/gxJ5XGFx07

— Mohamed A. El-Erian (@elerianm) September 12, 2025

It aligns with a June 2025 Harris Poll, which shows that 67% of Americans feel “under siege” in the U.S. economy. Still, the poll shows that Americans blame corporations more than Trump, according to Harris Poll CEO John Gerzema.

“Three-quarters of Americans are concerned about tariffs, and most are blaming businesses for price hikes over policymakers,” said Gerzema.

However, this raises a point that Warren made in her NYT interview, where she admitted that politicians have a tendency to tell hurting Americans that their pain is fictional.

“You can’t fight with people and tell them they’re just doing fine financially because you looked at some average spreadsheet and it looked like they were doing OK,” she said.

Warren believes there is a political opportunity here to make inroads on the economic narrative battle that Trump has largely won over the last decade. And she’s right.

While Trump and his administration have highlighted several positive developments in the U.S. economy, including record tariff revenues, massive foreign investments pouring into the country, falling inflation and mortgage rates, rising wages, booming retail sales and stock markets, and job creation through the reshoring of manufacturing. The sentiment among everyday Americans remains negative.

Under @POTUS, mortgage rates have fallen to a THREE YEAR LOW.

THAT’S THE TRUMP EFFECT! 🇺🇸🏡 pic.twitter.com/Vr44kwuj8r

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 17, 2025

The U.S. economy and the smaller, more personal financial score don’t always align. Trump is going to have to make personal finances (i.e., dinner table prices) a bigger part of his economic recovery plan if he wants to continue winning this battle against Democrats. (Democrats Move To Hold US Hostage Unless GOP Gives Into $1 Trillion In Demands)

As he discovered in 2015, it only takes one candidate to be brave enough to stand up against the established narrative on the economy, sympathize with ordinary people’s financial struggles, and offer a plan to address them, for the entire political machine to change course. If Trump allows Democrats to outflank him by ignoring the suffering of everyday Americans, he will be seeding the most critical political issue in decades to the opposition.

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