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Republicans were shocked by President Donald Trump's finger-pointing and have questioned what's next after his lackluster primetime speech.

White House insiders and GOP lawmakers were reacting to responses to Trump's speech, CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes told viewers Thursday.

"Look, they're all watching everything closely, and they've seen how it's been reviewed. I will say one thing. The White House worked together as a team, as they often do the inner circle to craft this speech. And they needed a speech in which President Trump would stay on message, that was short, that addressed the economy," Holmes said.

Trump blamed former President Joe Biden, a common move he's made in the past — something his team has begged him to stop doing — and tried to say the economy was better than before.

"Now, whether or not you think his message was true, we obviously know that there were numbers that were inflated or just plain wrong. Or if you think that he went off topic, airing his grievances, he did talk about the economy more than we've ever we've seen him in the last several months," Holmes said. "And that is what the White House was intending to do, to try and get the message across that he is aware that things are not in the place that they need to be, and that they are working on it as an administration."

That message did not land well, she said. And Republicans outside the White House had a different response to what the White House had aimed for, "which is try and alleviate people's fears."

Instead, it only ramped up people's worries, especially ahead of the midterms.

"Republicans came out of that speech more anxious that the messaging around the economy was not where it should be going into 2026, and that the party as a whole was not really solidified in that messaging about the economy, especially when it came to all of this blame on the previous administration," Holmes said.

Trump's former campaign advisers have claimed that the president has previously made gains in convincing people he has an understanding of improving the economy. But now things have changed.

"The other thing they said was that it was a lot easier to run when President Trump himself wasn't in power. When you are running against something, you were saying, you can change something," she added. "Now he is facing the same exact circumstances that President Biden was facing at the time, and handling it the exact same way, which, of course, is raising a lot of questions as to where Republicans are going to go from here."

New evidence is emerging that could deal a major blow to President Donald Trump's case for stripping birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants.

The president has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to restore “the original meaning” of the 14th Amendment, which his lawyers argued in a brief meant that “children of temporary visitors and illegal aliens are not U.S. citizens by birth," but new research raises questions about what lawmakers intended the amendment to do, reported the New York Times.

"One important tool has been overlooked in determining the meaning of this amendment: the actions that were taken — and not taken — to challenge the qualifications of members of Congress, who must be citizens, around the time the amendment was ratified," wrote Times correspondent Adam Liptak.

A new study will be published next month in The Georgetown Law Journal Online examining the backgrounds of the 584 members who served in Congress from 1865 to 1871. That research found more than a dozen of them might not have been citizens under Trump’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment, but no one challenged their qualifications.

"That is, said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia and an author of the study, the constitutional equivalent of the dog that did not bark, which provided a crucial clue in a Sherlock Holmes story," Liptak wrote.

The 14th Amendment states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside," while the Constitution requires members of the House of Representatives to have been citizens for at least seven years, and senators for at least nine.

“If there had been an original understanding that tracked the Trump administration’s executive order,” Frost told Liptak, “at least some of these people would have been challenged.”

Only one of the nine challenges filed against a senator's qualifications in the period around the 14th Amendment's ratification involved the citizenship issue related to Trump's interpretation of birthright citizenship, and that case doesn't support his position.

"Several Democratic senators claimed in 1870 that their new colleague from Mississippi, Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first Black man to serve in Congress, had not been a citizen for the required nine years," Liptak wrote. "They reasoned that the 14th Amendment had overturned Dred Scott, the 1857 Supreme Court decision that denied citizenship to the descendants of enslaved African Americans, just two years earlier and that therefore he would not be eligible for another seven."

"That argument failed," the correspondent added. "No one thought to challenge any other members on the ground that they were born to parents who were not citizens and who had not, under the law in place at the time, filed a declaration of intent to be naturalized."

"The consensus on the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause has long been that everyone born in the United States automatically becomes a citizen with exceptions for those not subject to its jurisdiction, like diplomats and enemy troops," Liptak added.

Frost's research found there were many members of Congress around the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment who wouldn't have met Trump's definition of a citizen, and she said that fact undercuts the president's arguments.

“If the executive order reflected the original public meaning, which is what the originalists say is relevant,” Frost said, “then somebody — a member of Congress, the opposing party, the losing candidate, a member of the public who had just listened to the ratification debates on the 14th Amendment, somebody — would have raised this.”