Donald Trump has begun a two-week holiday vacation in South Florida, with plenty to mull over while hitting the links in West Palm Beach, as a top Democrat says the president was on thin ice amid sagging approval numbers.
Trump is expected to interview candidates at his Mar-a-Lago resort to replace Jerome Powell next year as Federal Reserve chairman. While White House aides have been pushing the president to shift his focus to domestic matters such as still-high prices, foreign policy matters will find him in Florida.
Asked Thursday about a possible visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his holiday break, Trump said, “Yeah, he’ll probably come to see me in Florida.”
“We haven’t set it up formally, but he’d like to see me. We’ve had great success. … Aside from everything else, we now have peace in the Middle East,” he said of the tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The foreign leader visits might not end there. Trump was also asked if Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi could drop by. “I’d love to have him,” he told reporters. “He’s a friend of mine.”
Trump was expected to make a late-afternoon announcement Monday from Florida about military shipbuilding alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan.
The president’s planned 16-day stay in the Sunshine State could also include what could be a tense summit with the heads of major insurance companies, pushing them to lower rates in an attempt to pare Americans’ runaway health care costs. Trump teased the possibility Friday during an event on drug pricing before he departed Washington.
“If I called a meeting of the insurance companies, the companies that are involved with health care costs, I would be willing to bet, I think, that they would reduce their prices very, very substantially,” he said.
“We could have fair health care in the country,” he added. “There’s another way of doing it, and that’s getting the insurance companies to ease up and to cut their pricing way, way down and stay part of the system. So I’m going to call a meeting. It could be in Florida this coming week or it could be back in the White House the first week, not the second or third week [of 2026].”
The president’s instincts to lean on insurance executives comes amid what feels like a shift internally in the West Wing toward domestic matters, with Trump’s aides seeming to want the boss to talk more about kitchen table issues that polls show are front-of-mind to most Americans.
During nearly a dozen interviews this year with Vanity Fair, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles revealed she has urged the president to spend more time focused on and talking about domestic matters. The president has responded with mixed results, staying mostly on script during Friday’s drug pricing announcement but veering into other subjects and focusing on grievances during a rally in North Carolina later that night.
“Beating Hillary [Clinton] was fun. Well, Hillary has a much higher IQ than Kamala [Harris],” he said of his presidential election opponents. “I would say, I think Hillary has probably 50 or 60 [IQ] points higher. Now, Hillary was smart. She was nasty. Whew. I wouldn’t want to go home to her.”
“Remember? Remember? She was a nasty person. I was gonna use a b-word,” he said as supporters at the event outside Raleigh laughed. At another point, he complained that FBI agents who raided Mar-a-Lago ruffled through his wife’s undergarment drawer.
The 79-year-old Trump delivered those lines with a noticeably hoarse voice, evoking questions about his health that have surfaced since he underwent a second MRI in October. (The White House has said the imaging showed no major health problems.)
But Democratic lawmakers and strategists in recent weeks have said Trump’s second term entered a different phase in December, after his administration bulldozed through his first 10 months back in the Oval Office, now covered in gold leaf.
“As Democrats, we’re promising to focus relentlessly on driving down the high cost of living to make life more affordable for everyday Americans and to fix our broken health care system, which Republicans have been damaging in an extraordinary way throughout the year, including by enacting the largest cut to Medicaid in American history,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told ABC News on Sunday, referring to provisions in Trump’s signature tax and spending measure known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“And because of Republican policies in their ‘One Big Ugly Bill,’ we know hospitals, nursing homes, and community-based health centers are closing all across the country, including in rural America,” the New York Democrat added. “Working-class Americans are being hurt. Black and brown Americans are being hurt. Small-town America is being hurt. The heartland of America is being hurt.”
Democratic strategist Brad Bannon said in an email late last week that Trump was “floundering in the polls” and described his prime-time address to the nation Wednesday as “smacking of desperation.”
About Trump’s end-of-year flooding the zone with addresses and announcements, Bannon said: “Will anybody be watching during the festive days before Christmas besides MAGA Nation? I doubt it.”
As Trump golfed Saturday and Sunday and then prepared for Monday’s announcement nearly 1,000 miles south of Washington, the White House has not yet announced any Mar-a-Lago meetings or domestic policy-focused speeches.
So far, it has been up to top aides to make the case that Trump is on the case to address affordability concerns.
“What we’re saying is that incomes are up again,” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told Fox News on Sunday, while accusing Democrats of having “empty rhetoric.”
“We’ve got rhetoric with substance,” he said. “I think that the American people are going to see it in their wallets. They’re going to see it in their bills. And they’re going to, as they did in the Trump first term, they’re going to see that President Trump’s policies are making them better.”
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