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President Donald Trump is drafting Cabinet members and top aides — at least those who haven’t been fired or about to be let go — for a targeted new strategy aimed at the midterms.
Key members will travel around the country to try to mitigate the party’s losses in November, especially in Republican districts.
In: The more popular parts of the Trump agenda.
Out: The more controversial aspects of Trump’s agenda that have suddenly become politically inconvenient.
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President Donald Trump is drafting top administration officials to take charge in the midterms. (Alex Brandon/Pool via AP Photo)
It is a tough climb. Trump has acknowledged that the president’s party typically lags in its sixth year. Some Trump loyalists privately acknowledge that the GOP will almost certainly lose control of the House and possibly even the Senate.
If Hakeem Jeffries becomes speaker, it would trigger endless investigations, which would certainly make Trump even more of a fool under the Constitution.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a classic example. In keeping with his lifelong anti-vax campaign, he has spent much of the last year campaigning against vaccines, which are not supported by scientific evidence. Kennedy named his movement Make America Healthy Again.
He has removed the CDC director (who said RFK ordered him to rubber-stamp his policies without evidence), removed other agency officials, and still has not come up with a permanent director.
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But as Politico reports, Kennedy “has been asked by the White House to step away from some of the more polarizing parts of the MHA agenda, such as vaccine skepticism, and instead focus on issues like nutrition.”
The website says the campaign aims to re-engage nearly half of MHA supporters who say Trump and Kennedy have not done enough to make America healthier. RFK is a lifelong Democrat, and his party sees a chance to influence voters interested in goals long identified with the left, such as combating unprocessed foods and decreasing chemicals in the environment.
Trump is hardly the first president to use his Cabinet in the midterms. Jimmy Carter fired his Health Secretary, Treasury Secretary, Energy Secretary, Transportation Secretary, and Attorney General in 1979. This did not help. And when Iran captured 52 American hostages later that year, they were deeply saddened.
According to Politico, the White House has reportedly advised that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “stay away from some of the more polarizing parts of the MAHA agenda.” (Andrew Harnick/Getty Images)
“Cabinet members will be urged to focus on the many things Trump has done since taking office,” Axios reports.
According to media reports, he is also considering removing FBI Director Kash Patel and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, but has canceled plans to remove Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard after discussions with aides.
The President took a swipe at one of our longtime allies yesterday:
“We rebuilt Germany. Let Germany tell us, let Germany tell us, OK, this is not their war. ‘We have nothing to do with this.’ They wanted me to go and tell them everything I was doing. ‘We didn’t know anything about it.’ Well, if I had told them, they would have leaked it, and we probably wouldn’t have been as successful, okay?”
He also blamed the media for revealing that the second crew member from the F-15 shot down by Iran was missing, even though this was immediately revealed.
“We didn’t talk about the first one for an hour. And then somebody leaked something, which we’ll find – that leaker. We’re working very hard to find that leaker. And talked about that somebody is missing. They basically said we have one and somebody is missing. Well, they didn’t know that somebody was missing until this leaker came forward with the information. So whoever it was, we think we’ll be able to figure it out, because we Going to the media company that released this, and we’re going to say national security – drop it or go to jail and we know who – and you know who we’re talking about.
Israel’s Channel 12 reporter Amit Segal posted this on Friday at 11:19 a.m. ET: “Western sources: One of the US crew members successfully rescued.”
Conservative columnist says Donald Trump has lost the country. It’s complicated.
A New York Times report on Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of the radical mass deportation campaign, is revealing:
“He faces questions about how aggressively he can continue to pursue the deportation campaign, and how much appetite his party and country have for strategies that proved successful in helping boost arrests of immigrants but reignited a polarizing debate over what it means to be an American… Miller also scaled back his public appearances for a time.”
So he’s pushing all the same policies, even against immigrants with no criminal records, but… quietly.
“Rather than see his power diminished, Mr. Miller has moved to exert it in other ways, seeking policies that would pressure undocumented immigrants to leave on their own.”
According to the New York Times, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “faces questions about how aggressively he can continue the deportation campaign.” (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Oh, and one more thing.
You might get the impression that there will be a giant blue wave in November.
But Charlie Cook, an experienced and completely impartial political analyst, explains why this is not the case.
While Democrats are virtually assured of taking the House, “only three Republicans were elected in 2024 in districts where Kamala Harris won. Among independents nationally, Trump’s approval ratings are generally in the high 20s and low 30s, but gerrymandering and political self-sorting by population has reduced the number of purple districts, thus reducing the power of independents. There are very few Republican-held anywhere. There are seats that are in so much danger.”
With Republican approval of the president in the ’80s, “MAGA voters love him so much and trust him so much that nothing — neither the Epstein files nor the attacks on Venezuela and Iran — is going to unsettle him. So the Democrats have their work cut out for them to flip many red districts.”
This brings us to mathematics. “Only 17 GOP seats are rated as a tossup or worse. Adding the next level of competitive seats (‘Lean Republican’) brings only three more GOP seats into the competitive pile – which is well below the average midterm result of a 26-seat loss for the president’s party since World War II…Democrats could run over the table, hold all of their vulnerable seats, and still win in 2006 or “May be left behind by your pickup in 2018.”
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Furthermore, says Charlie, over the past eight years, “the party that lost seats in the House actually gained seats in the Senate. With only a third of the Senate seats gaining ground every two years and only a few seats being competitive most years, the results for the upper chamber are more bizarre.”
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Trump is deploying his Cabinet because he fears serious losses in November. But it may not be the blow most forecasters are expecting.
