Republicans want a message. Trump keeps making news.

Por Megan Messerly and Alex Gangitano — POLITICO – TOP Stories

Republicans are playing whack-a-mole with President Donald Trump in the final two weeks of the midterms.

GOP candidates are desperate to stick to tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump accounts for children and the president’s work to lower the cost of prescription drugs.

Instead, in the midterms’ final stretch, Trump and his administration have forced Republicans on the trail to respond to live streaming the firing squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter, his taxpayer-funded political ads promoting his achievements and an announced deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to try to bring down diesel costs. His latest move, exempting Russia from a new sanctions law sponsored by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, even provoked mild criticism on Saturday from South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham, the late senator’s sister who is running for re-election.

He’s also attacking Republicans: Rep. María Elvira Salazar for her ad targeting his immigration policies; Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) for holding up a daylight saving time bill and, on Thursday, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, whose political career Trump effectively ended, as well as veteran GOP strategist Karl Rove, for hurting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign.

The deluge has left many Republicans rudderless as they stare down the prospect of losing Senate seats in Republican strongholds like Alaska, Iowa, Kansas and Texas, and feeling increasingly despondent about their chances of keeping the House.

“We’re learning about a lot of these things at the same time that the voters and the Democrats and everybody else is, and that just makes it a lot more difficult to navigate,” said one senior GOP operative working on House and Senate campaigns, who like others in this story was granted anonymity to assess the impact of the president’s messaging. “You’re caught flat-footed a lot of the time, and you’re expected to react to things in real time.”

Midway through a second term, no one counts on Trump for message discipline. But with his polls as low as they’ve ever been and Republicans facing their toughest election prospects in two decades, some had hoped that he or his staff would at least limit the sideshows in the final weeks of the campaign.

“He has constantly been distracted,” said one GOP operative working on multiple midterm races, “and not focused on what the voters care about. It’s insane.”

These headaches are not responsible for voter dissatisfaction or tight races in states Trump won by double digits in 2024. Republicans concede that some of their candidates are genuinely bad, Democratic ones are genuinely good — and they’re facing a brutal midterm cycle where voters are angry at the war the president started and blaming him for the higher gas prices it’s caused.

Even Trump acknowledges the environment is bad. He routinely says that the president’s party often loses in midterm cycles. He maintains that the war was necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons but knows it is costing Americans at the pump.

Some of the headlines distracting Washington’s political class — like the resignation of Kimberly Guilfoyle, U.S. ambassador to Greece, or the controversy surrounding the work two of the president’s top political aides in the Balkans — are unlikely to break through with average voters.

But others have: 86% of Americans, including 80% of Republicans, said that the taxpayer-funded ads featuring the president were inappropriate, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. And the president’s proposal to import diesel from Russia was so controversial that several Republican Senate candidates — Mike Rogers in Michigan, Dan Sullivan in Alaska and Ashley Hinson in Iowa — came out against it.

While no one expects the president to take to the stump with a detailed policy speech, Republicans say that Trump’s attacks and misadventures are headaches they don’t need in a cycle where Democrats already have the upper hand.

“Republicans would normally be counting on the White House to set a meta message,” Rove said earlier this week before Trump called him out. “Look at each day last week. What was the message from the White House? Little of it was constructive.” Rove then declined to respond to Trump’s latest barb.

Trump’s closest political aides argue the president is a net positive on the trail. He can juice turnout and change the makeup of the electorate enough to nudge a Republican to victory. But that means taking Trump as a whole package.

“The idea that you can remove Trump from the election cycle is just not real,” said one senior Republican familiar with the thinking of MAGA Inc., the Trump-aligned super PAC.

Asked about the criticisms, RNC press secretary Natalie Baldassarre said that “Republicans can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

“The president will continue barnstorming the country to highlight the administration’s achievements on the campaign trail over the next two weeks,” she added.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle added that “the choice has never been more clear: doubling down on President Trump’s winning, commonsense agenda or the Democrats’ extreme liberal policies and obstruction.” The White House also provided a lengthy list of the president’s accomplishments, including recent infrastructure and manufacturing announcements he’s made on the campaign trail.

It hasn’t helped that turmoil pervades the White House as several of the president’s top aides have left or been asked to leave. Katie Zacharia departed her role as press secretary Friday, five days after she took the job. Former press secretary Karoline Leavitt, deputy chief of staff James Blair and legislative director James Braid, who were once all part of Trump’s inner circle, have left the White House. The knives have even started to come for chief of staff Susie Wiles, who has been long seen as untouchable.

Aides have at points attempted to prevent the president from attacking Republicans. They’ve tried explaining to Trump the politics of the moment and worked with candidates to ensure their messaging doesn’t run afoul of the president. It hasn’t always been successful.

After Trump attacked Rove and Cornyn, a Texas-based GOP consultant called it “counterproductive.”

“Not only are they turning off our voters but they’re also pissing off all of us,” the person said.

Trump’s defenders insist the handwringing is just never-Trumpers who have been wrong for a decade about the president. They note the successful rallies Trump held just this week in Alaska, Arizona, Kentucky, Georgia and Montana.

“When a novel coalition like MAGA is successful, the opposition organizes and recruits insider dividers,” said Michael Caputo, a longtime GOP operative and Trump ally. “The president’s team knows this divider effort down to the district level. I’m confident they are deploying President Trump, the undisputed leader of this coalition, where he is most effective.”

The president’s team is betting that doing so will boost Republican enthusiasm more than it will energize Democrats already angry with the president. GOP operatives are counting on the fact that Democratic enthusiasm is already near its ceiling, with a recent Pew poll finding that Democrats were 17 percentage points more likely than their Republican counterparts to say they were “extremely motivated” to vote in November.

“It’s a delicate thing but I’m convinced it’s a good thing. And the reason I say that is Democrats are pouring out to the polls no matter what Trump does, that die is cast. [The] uncast die is how many Trump voters will turn out to the polls in the midterm election,” said Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary for former President George W. Bush. “So I see little to no downside in the president being out there — because he’s already out there as far as the Democrats are concerned.”

Adam Wren contributed to this report.

Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories