“I alone can fix it” was one of Donald Trump’s signature lines from the first time he accepted the Republican presidential nomination more than a decade ago, even if it is most often quoted by his detractors, like “very stable genius.” Both later became titles of hostile books.
The first of these quotes appears to describe the president’s approach to the midterm elections and the dire situation in which Republicans currently find themselves.
Trump took center stage at an unprecedented midterm convention, despite a strong political argument for down-ballot Republicans running away from him. (Some did the more conventional thing and skipped the convention.) He is starting to spend his considerable war chest to boost GOP candidates, and neither he nor Vice President J.D. Vance plans to be strangers on the campaign trail.
Similarly, Trump isn’t afraid to star in the ads (though plenty of them contain anti-Democratic messaging that seems more likely to work in more places) or to put his name on new policy proposals.
Counterintuitive though it may seem, there is a logic to this strategy beyond Trump’s addiction to the spotlight, one based on a decade of real-world political experience. Anti-Trump voters show up in droves to make their feelings about the president known regardless of whether he is on the ballot, even supporting Nikki Haley’s zombie campaign long after she’d dropped out. But a critical mass of voters who like Trump can’t be bothered to show up to the polls if they can’t cast a ballot for him personally.
Trump can’t erase this inherent Democratic advantage, but he can do his best to try to neutralize it, especially among his supporters who may be reluctant to vote for other Republican candidates anyway. The key Senate races, especially, will be fought on what has previously been Trumpy terrain.
But what if all this is less true than before? The latest New York Times/Siena poll shows Republicans outrunning Trump’s job approval rating on many issues, including the economy and the cost of living. And the low-propensity voters Trump is trying to activate might actually be the part of his coalition most turned off by his actions on Iran or the Epstein files. (Vance seemingly implied as much in his own Dallas remarks.)
If the farmers and their neighbors revolt over the tariffs, while the war depresses young MAGA turnout, that could create the conditions for things to get ugly in November.
“The reason we’ll do poorly in the midterms is that the president started a war that he said would be over in four weeks, and now it’s been four months, and with that war, gas prices and diesel prices, fertilizer prices, have all gone much higher,” outgoing Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) told the Dispatch.
While there might be some sour grapes here after Cassidy’s defeat at the hands of a Trump-endorsed primary challenger, it is difficult to fault the doctor’s diagnosis.
Since the war, Trump has also lost his willingness or ability to tap into populist energy on issues that don’t cleanly break along conventional partisan and left-right lines. His comments on artificial intelligence and data centers spring from the same place as his dismissal of those parts of the coalition that have broken with him on Iran.
That’s not to say that Trump is as clearly wrong on the merits on these issues, or that the activists are unambiguously right. Yet splitting the difference in the interests of an electoral coalition is a Trump specialty. There is little direct evidence that the president is a true believer in MAHA, but he was able to understand its sentiments well enough to keep those voters in his camp for at least one election. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. remains publicly loyal to Trump and available to Republican candidates, among whom he is in demand.
In addition to not having his finger on the pulse of anti-establishment voters to the same extent as he did in 2024, Trump is focused on legacy projects (remaking the Middle East, presiding over the new AI economy, revamping international trade) more than affordability right now. And where he is interested in the economy, it is jobs and GDP that animate him rather than returning to the low inflation rates of his first term. Pushing the AI boom, jawboning the Federal Reserve on interest rates before inflation is fully under control, and promoting reshoring above low prices all reflect these priorities, which in some cases are the opposite of the voters’.
Trump has fixes for the Republicans’ problems, except for the ones most directly of his making.
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