Mar-a-Lago, we have a problem: Trump talks too much

President Trump’s State of the Union address, followed quickly by the start of war against Iran, has soaked up media coverage and masked an ongoing problem slightly below the surface for the 2026 Republican campaign apparatus.

Most political consultants will tell you that a quality they treasure in their clients is the ability to stay on message. In the world of political communication, that means limiting the opportunity for the mainstream media to talk about issues not in your candidate’s best interest and instead driving home a poll-tested and winning message. The more the candidate “stays on message” the less opportunity there is for the media to cover the campaign in a less favorable light.

Trump is by far the most accessible president in my lifetime. In contrast to his predecessors, he takes questions from the media seemingly every day. Walking across the south lawn of the White House to Marine One, he often stops to answer questions from the media. When he meets with a foreign leader in the Oval Office, he often invites members of the media in for a photo op and answers some of their questions. At the start of his lengthy Cabinet meetings, he often invites the media in to get their camera shots and inevitably answers some questions.

All of Trump’s expounding on a wide range of issues should be a good thing. But it is not. Why? Because when a president answers multiple questions in a day, the White House loses control of what the media reports during that news cycle. 

Perhaps Trump will be asked what his administration is doing to lower grocery prices. But in all likelihood, he will also be asked and will talk about Venezuela, Gaza, Greenland, the Epstein files, tariffs on Canada, why he fired former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and why he pardoned a convicted felon. Left to his own meanderings, Trump may also throw in his complaint about the NFL’s new kickoff rule, Bill Belichick missing out on the Hall of Fame selection and (of course) the rampant fraud that he often claims deprived him of a 2020 election victory.

Trump talks to the media incessantly, day after day. But for all this back and forth with the media, and for all of his constant expounding on a wide array of issues, Trump receives no credit at all. So why do this if it is not a positive for you?

This is the very media he often fumes about and has sued on multiple occasions. Why, then, hand them control over what the public learns about the job he is doing on their behalf?

Few swing voters care about any of the so-called issues Trump brings up in his unscripted, unforced conversations with reporters. The White House seems to have finally admitted that the issue voters want the president to deal with is the economy. Certainly, top-notch White House chief-of-staff Susie Wiles and chief pollster Tony Fabrizio understand this. 

Yet every couple of weeks, we are told Trump is going to Pennsylvania or Iowa or Georgia or somewhere to lay out his economic program, only to have him take the stage and talk for 90 minutes or more without notes. Whatever comes into his head comes out of his mouth. That is a problem. 

Yes there will be a mention of gasoline prices having come down, which was true before the Iran war drove them up, but then there will be the highly doubtful claim that inflation has been “solved.” Truth seems to become an undervalued quality as President Trump wanders rhetorically through a litany of exaggerations.

For those who say “Let Trump be Trump” the result is that the airwaves and newsfeeds are filled with the president talking endlessly about things voters do not care about. This fuels a perception that he is out of touch with the lives of hardworking families who look at the bottom line on their grocery receipts to determine how their economy is doing, and who do not know and do not care what acronyms like BLS (the Bureau of Labor Statistics) stand for.

The solution is simple: Respectfully, Trump should stop talking so much, and he should definitely stop taking questions from reporters so often.   

Is this going to happen? Republicans had better hope so.

Kevin Igoe is the former deputy chief of staff of the Republican National Committee and former executive director of the Maryland Republican Party. He served as chief of staff of the Maryland Department of Budget and Management and was a Reagan White House appointee.

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