Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters went on Fox Business Tuesday with a grim assignment: persuade viewers that the GOP’s political ship is not already taking on water ahead of the midterms. His pitch did not reveal a fresh plan for reversing the party’s troubles.

Reports cited in the story say voters no longer trust Republicans on the economy. Yet Gruters did not answer that problem with a new economic argument, instead reaching for the party’s familiar fallback of blaming President Joe Biden.

“Voters have a short memory because under [President Joe] Biden, we had a disastrous four years,” Gruters said. “And this president has gone to bat for the American workers since Day 1.”

That was the heart of Gruters’ economic message. He argued that voters had forgotten the Biden years and portrayed Trump as a champion for American workers, but he offered no new angle for confronting the reports about Republicans losing economic trust.

The interview then veered from recycled economic blame into a much stranger warning about Democrats. Gruters invoked a version of McCarthyism while trying to depict the Democratic Party as radically different from the one older voters might remember.

“This is not your grandparents’ Democrat Party,” Gruters continued. “We’re not even talking about guns or abortion—they want to do things like, they want to get rid of Thanksgiving, they want to get rid of July 4th.”

Gruters did not identify any new Republican idea or policy while making that claim. Instead, his argument jumped from the economy to the notion that Democrats want to eliminate two major American holidays, including Thanksgiving and July 4th.

The Thanksgiving claim came with an especially awkward historical wrinkle. Thanksgiving Day became a federal holiday during the height of the Civil War, when the South was not particularly enthusiastic about observing it.

After blaming Biden and warning that Democrats supposedly want to take holidays away, Gruters finally arrived at the plea hanging over the entire appearance. With the midterms ahead and the GOP struggling to reassure voters about the economy, he asked for patience.

“We need more time right now,” Gruters said. “We need a longer runway.”

The request amounted to an appeal for voters to keep waiting while Republicans try to prove that their economic stewardship deserves confidence. It also left unanswered the central political problem that brought Gruters to the interview: voters reportedly no longer trust his party on the economy.

The comparison offered in the original criticism was brutal. During Trump’s first term, the argument went, Trump and the GOP took four years to bring the economy to the brink of collapse amid a mismanaged pandemic.

This time, according to that same criticism, Republicans have managed the feat in less than half that time. Against that backdrop, Gruters’ request for a longer runway sounded less like a governing vision than a request to postpone voters’ judgment.

His Fox Business appearance contained plenty of familiar Republican material. Biden was blamed, Trump was praised, Democrats were cast as threatening American traditions, and voters were told that the party needs more time.

What the appearance did not contain was the new economic case that the moment seemed to demand. Gruters offered no fresh policies in the account, even as reports about voters’ declining trust placed the party’s economic message squarely under pressure.

The RNC chair’s answer was therefore not a reset but a rerun, complete with cultural panic and a plea for patience. As the midterms approach, “more time” is the message Republicans are left selling while their economic credibility continues to face a deeply skeptical audience.