Trump faulted for giving GOP nothing to run on: 'Still looking for that agenda'

President Donald Trump did not provide Republicans with a message to rally around, according to an analyst on "CNN This Morning."

The 79-year-old president spoke Tuesday for a record one hour and 47 minutes, where he boasted of an economic "turnaround for the ages" and claimed to be making deals to benefit all Americans, but CNN's Edward-Isaac Dovere said he did not lay out much of an agenda for GOP candidates.

"I think that the question here for the Republicans in the audience is what the president gave them to run on this year, in this midterm year," Dovere said. "It was a speech that was very much about him and his accomplishments and what he's done, and when you have Democrats who are both attacking what he's done and trying to say that the Republicans in Congress are just a rubber stamp on him, they are still looking for what that agenda would be, to say this is what we're going to keep doing or what we're going to do now, rather than what we're going."

Trump lambasted Democrats for opposing his mass deportation campaign but conspicuously did not address the controversial specifics of that agenda, including the Immigration and Customs Enforcement occupations of Democratic-led states and cities, host Audie Cornish pointed out.

"He did not address ICE, did not address DHS, did not address these things that are actually like lots of people, like, hey, give me an answer on this," she said. "Like, where do you stand on this conceptually? Do you think it's something that is going to, again, Republicans on the trail are going to have to answer for?"

Republican strategist Bryan Lanza, who was a senior adviser to Trump's 2024 campaign, said those issues were just a matter of framing, but Cornish challenged him to explain how GOP candidates would do that.

"That's why I'm asking what's the framing?" Cornish said. "I think the framing so far is we've done a lot to help with the border, and they've done nothing. But he's not talking about what happened on the way to accomplishing that."

Lanza argued that voters didn't care about the process.

"Well, I don't think he has to," he said. "I mean, at the end of the day the voters are going to look at the end result voters. What we've learned in politics, at least over my 20 years, is voters don't care about process, they care about results, and so the process that you're seeing take place is great for TV clicks and great for for newspaper articles. But voters ultimately decide was he was he successful."

Dovere said the polling so far shows that voters do not believe Trump's second presidency has been successful.

"At least so far, that's not what we're seeing from the reactions and the polls and other things over the last couple of months where people are saying, that a majority of them saying that they agree that there is a problem with immigration, the border, they they are still support for president trump doing things about it," Dovere said. "But they have consistently said what happened in Minneapolis, not like this, essentially, right, and the president didn't give it like he was saying. There was no acknowledgment, no acknowledgment, there was nothing to address that, to say, okay this is how that happened, and this is what's going to happen differently going forward."

- YouTube youtu.be