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Politico
11-05-2025
- Politics
- Politico
Trump Is Already Obsessed With the Midterms
President Donald Trump delivers remarks in the Oval Office at the White House, on May 6, 2025. | Francis Chung/POLITICO Rachael Bade is POLITICO's Capitol bureau chief and senior Washington columnist. She is a former co-author of POLITICO Playbook and co-author of "Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress's Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump." Her reported column, Corridors, illuminates how power pulses through Washington, from Capitol Hill to the White House and beyond. Early in Donald Trump's first term, the president received what he now views as bad advice: Don't worry about the midterms, some advisers whispered back then. If Democrats won majorities in 2018, their thinking went, it would only help him politically — giving him a political foil down Pennsylvania Avenue and opportunity to triangulate in a gridlocked Washington ahead of a tough reelection — a la Bill Clinton. That failed to pan out, spectacularly: Trump's agenda ground to a halt as he instead dealt with two years of nonstop investigations and a pair of impeachments. He lost to Joe Biden anyway. This time, Trump is taking a different approach. Not even three months into his second term, the president is already hyper-engaged in the fight to keep the GOP's majorities in Congress. Far from writing off the House or Senate, he's bullish about defying history and keeping Democrats away from committee gavels and subpoena powers, according to five Republicans I've spoken to, including several close Trump confidants. He's rolling out early endorsements in hopes of forestalling messy primary fights that could divert precious resources from the general election campaigns. He's making recruitment calls and buttonholing other Republicans about how he can best use his political muscle. And he's continuing to raise boatloads of money to shell out in 2026. Trump's midterm obsession is also hovering over Capitol Hill as GOP lawmakers try to write his sprawling domestic policy agenda into law. On issue after issue, Trump appears to sympathize with swing-district moderates — the 'majority makers' whose races will decide the majority. Trump and his aides have pushed back on steep cuts to Medicaid in part because the politics stink. They've given a wide berth to blue-state Republicans who are pushing to raise the cap on the deduction for state and local taxes — a policy Trump signed in 2017 that helped sink him in suburban districts a year later. He's even toyed with the idea of raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans — something he believes would parry Democrats' certain political attacks on a bill they say benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. (Faced with massive conservative backlash, Trump on Friday backed off, saying 'Republicans should probably not do it, but I'm OK if they do!!!) 'We think we can have four years,' one Trump adviser told me, summing up the attitude inside the presidential political shop. 'We reject the defeatist attitude of operating from the perspective that this is our only shot and we only got two years.' Part of Trump's midterm infatuation is his love of the game — reading polls, making endorsements, playing kingmaker and otherwise moving pieces around on the political chess board. He ticks off his won-loss record in congressional races and loves to go deep on the details of his own campaigns. But Trump is also deeply motivated by his desire to avoid suffering through dozens of new investigations and a third potential impeachment: 'He knows what happens if we lose the House,' added the adviser, noting that there's already several impeachment resolutions filed in the chamber. Historically, of course, even the king of the political comeback would seem to have the odds stacked against him — particularly in the House, where parties in trifecta governments have tended to lose dozens of seats during the midterms of the modern era. Trump's GOP lost 40 in 2018. 'For some reason, the president — whoever the president is — the midterms are tough,' Trump himself mused at an NRCC dinner last month. 'Why would they be tough? If we're doing great, they should be easy.' But there are in fact reasons for Trump to be optimistic: Predecessor Joe Biden managed to keep his own midterm bleeding to a relative minimum in 2022. The congressional battlefield has shrunk in recent years, leaving only a couple of dozen seats truly competitive in the eyes of most political analysts. And voter opinions of Trump might have slipped in recent months, but Democrats aren't gaining — in fact, their own voters are furious with the party. Some of the early efforts Trump's political team have undertaken in coordination with the congressional campaign committees have fizzled. One GOP official told me Trump's political team told Rep. John James (R-Mich.) that the president wanted him to forgo a bid for governor and instead run for reelection in his swingy suburban Detroit seat. James didn't listen, and now Republicans have a costly open seat to defend. Trump also made personal calls to onetime adversaries Chris Sununu and Brian Kemp in an effort to get the popular former GOP governors to run for Senate in New Hampshire and Georgia, respectively. Neither bit, though Trump's team remains closely engaged in vetting other alternatives for those key Democratic-held seats. He might have more success in New York, where he intervened last week with a preemptive endorsement for GOP Rep. Mike Lawler, who has spent months telegraphing a potential challenge to Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul. Trump's endorsement, coming after MAGA favorite Elise Stefanik announced her own gubernatorial explorations, was meant to send a clear signal: We want you to defend your precious House seat instead. Trump on Thursday rolled out a host of additional primary endorsements, backing several vulnerable Republicans in swing seats — even some he's not particularly close with — in a bid to ward off would-be primary challengers. Last cycle, for instance, Illinois Rep. Mike Bost faced a tough GOP primary — winning a Trump endorsement only after he'd been forced to burn cash to ward off a far-right challenger. On Thursday, roughly 18 months from the general election, the president threw his support behind Bost, effectively shutting down a potential primary. 'This makes sure they can focus on their general from now on — not wasting money fending off a primary,' one GOP political operative texted me. 'Big win.' Republicans are hoping that Trump decides to do much the same in the Senate — with a major effort underway to convince him to back Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is facing a fearsome primary challenge from Attorney General Ken Paxton. But the GOP has a bigger advantage in the Senate, and so far Trump, who is close with Paxton, has remained on the sidelines — though one prominent member of his operation has not: Trump consultant Tony Fabrizio is now polling for Team Cornyn, POLITICO reported this week. Something else has changed for Trump since his first term: his willingness to play team ball. In 2018 and 2020, Hill Republicans privately griped to me that he was stockpiling cash and fundraising resources for his own reelection and not doing enough to help the rest of the party. Kevin McCarthy, then serving as House minority leader, went so far as to beg Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was controlling the political pursestrings, for help. It didn't materialize. But now that Trump is free from the burden of reelection (something he finally admitted this week), he's ready to pile his massive resources into the party. Trump-related committees are expecting to have as much as a half-billion dollars in their collective war chests by this summer, and two Trump allies said the president plans to be generous. 'I'll put it like this: It's not like he's directing people to just give to his presidential library, you know what I mean?' one of them said. 'He's not doing that. I don't think he would be actively fundraising into the political entities the way he is unless he planned on playing in the midterms.'
Politico
06-02-2025
- Politics
- Politico
Democrats Are Falling For Trump and Musk's Foreign Aid Trap
Several Democratic lawmakers rallied outside USAID headquarters Monday. Many more raised public alarms. |Rachael Bade is POLITICO's Capitol Hill bureau chief and senior Washington columnist. She is a former co-author of POLITICO Playbook and co-author of "Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress's Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump." Her reported column, Corridors, illuminates how power pulses through Washington, from Capitol Hill to the White House and beyond. After three months of soul-searching about how to revive their party, some Democrats this week believe they have finally found a rallying point following Donald Trump's presidential victory. Billionaire Elon Musk's campaign to dismantle the federal bureaucracy piece by piece at Trump's behest, starting with the U.S. Agency for International Development, lit a fire under many Democratic lawmakers — several of whom rallied Monday outside USAID headquarters. But relaunching the resistance to defend one of the least popular corners of the federal budget could be a monster miscalculation — and some prominent Democrats told me they have serious strategic reservations about how their party is fighting back. When I asked veteran strategist David Axelrod whether Democrats were 'walking into a trap' on defending foreign aid, he literally finished my sentence. 'My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: 'Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,'' he said. 'When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.' Rahm Emanuel — the former House leader, Chicago mayor and diplomat — told me much the same: 'You don't fight every fight. You don't swing at every pitch. And my view is — while I care about the USAID as a former ambassador — that's not the hill I'm going to die on,' he said. Trump's orbit, meanwhile, couldn't be happier seeing Democratic lawmakers lined up on a downtown Washington sidewalk Monday — in their view, wasting political capital defending an agency that they believe the public doesn't give a rip about. Musk himself spent the following 24 hours posting videos of Democrats protesting the move. 'The federal bureaucracy is very unpopular. … It's a pretty widely held, majority position — if you poll it, people think the government is wasting money. And, very simply, that's the battle that we're fighting,' one senior Trump administration official told me Tuesday. 'The Democrats are now taking the opposite position: 'Everything's perfect.' 'Nothing to look at here.' 'No money is wasted.' 'All your tax dollars are being spent well.'' 'Not a very politically tenable position,' the person added. The political considerations in vocally defending foreign aid are of course entirely separate from the humanitarian and national security concerns at play. Dismantling USAID is already having tragic consequences for health and development programs worldwide, Axelrod pointed out, and America's withdrawal from the world will give its adversaries new opportunities to win influence abroad. Republicans had long been proponents of exerting 'soft power' — winning global hearts and minds by feeding the hungry, fostering emerging economies and getting vaccines to the most vulnerable populations. China, notably, stands ready to fill the void. That's to say nothing of the argument that Democrats' fight needs to be everywhere all at once given the scale of the threat. That's what Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz passionately argued to me soon after this column first published. 'People empowered by the president are violating federal law in multiple ways, taking over federal payments, illegally shutting down whole departments, freezing Head Start and Medicaid, and the best these podcasters can muster is that we should wait for a more popular program to defend? Spare me,' said Schatz, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing USAID. 'The emergency is now. We need to act like it,' he added. 'This isn't about any particular program or the theater criticism that substitutes for strategy. This is about making sure these billionaires are not able to loot the federal government and strip it for parts.' But most Americans have no idea what USAID is, let alone what it does. In fact, much of the country wrongly believes that foreign aid constitutes as much as 25 percent of the federal budget, according to the Brookings Institution. It's actually closer to 1 percent. What's more, Democrats aren't reading the room: Trump's team believes his 'America First' stance has resonated beyond his own base, and they're also acutely aware that there's a large, online conspiratorial contingency surrounding the agency. In short, they're not sorry about targeting foreign aid, and they're reveling in the outrage. 'My message to my Democratic friends and to the tofu-eating wokerati at USAID is, 'I hear your question, but you need to call somebody who cares,'' Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters this week. Democrats' messaging problem goes beyond USAID, however. They've raised alarms about Trump and Musk firing inspectors general, purging FBI officials who probed Trump and offering to buy out thousands more federal workers. Only a fraction of Americans have a personal connection to any of it. The situation, Axelrod said, reflects the Democratic Party's broader existential crisis. How, he has been asking himself lately, 'did the party of working people become a party of elite institutions?' 'Part of the problem for the Democratic Party is that it has become a stalwart defender of institutions at a time when people are enraged at institutions,' Axelrod said. 'And they become — in the minds of a lot of voters — an elite party, and to a lot of folks who are trying to scuffle out there and get along, this will seem like an elite passion.' Another challenge Democrats face is that Trump is upending so much so quickly that they're having trouble focusing. If they balk at everything, voters could simply tune them out. It's not that Democrats should call off the fight against Musk. Longtime campaign strategist James Carville said it's a winning message for his party to cry foul on a billionaire coming in and slashing government services for Americans. 'I know this: When the public doesn't have the bureaucracy, they notice it pretty quickly,' he said. 'Here you have some nice people doing a good job, then some billionaire comes in and takes a wrecking ball to everything.' But Carville, Axelrod and Emanuel agree that Democrats need to save their outrage for issues that will resonate with voters: Cutting benefits. Rising prices. Not slashing foreign aid. ' It's a question of what you emphasize and how you emphasize it,' Axelrod said. 'In the big conversation, where do you want to put your chips?' The opportunity could come soon enough. With Trump poised to dismantle the Department of Education, special education programs for American kids with disabilities as well as federally subsidized student loans could be on the chopping block. There, Emanuel said, is a fight Democrats can feel comfortable picking — and winning. 'A third of the eighth graders can't read ... and now he wants to close the Department of Education?' the former ambassador to Japan asked. 'I'm for USAID, but that makes your coastal Democrats really, really comfortable about our moral principles. I care about the kids who can't read.'
