DALLAS — President Donald Trump is trying to defy history and stave off the pounding that the party controlling the White House typically takes in the midterm elections. To accomplish that, he wants voters to act like he’s running and use his MAGA Inc. political operation to make it feel like he actually is.
“Pretend I’m on the ballot,” Trump said Wednesday night in a nearly two-hour speech at his party’s midterm convention. “I’m on the ballot. Just one more time.”
White House advisers have said for much of the year that the 80-year-old president plans to aggressively campaign in the final weeks of the race. With the convention wrapped up in Dallas, he’s on the clock.
“The president is focused obviously on helping mobilize the base and get people out to vote,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-New York) told The Washington Sun on Thursday, ahead of his convention speech with families whose loved ones were killed by undocumented immigrants.
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Lawler is locked in a tight battle that could help determine control of the House. Asked where he wants to see the president go first, he was tight-lipped: “I defer to the White House on what they’re gonna do. He’s already come to my district.”
The White House announced Thursday that Trump would visit North Carolina next week, his first campaign event after the convention. Few additional specifics have been released about the president’s pledged barnstorming, though he has said he’ll focus on what his team believes are the most competitive 35 races across the country.
Questions about the president’s focus, and whether he actually cares who wins the midterm elections, have caused concern among Republicans.
Candidates and party leaders spent weeks publicly asking Trump to unleash his political operation’s cash on the crucial races. After a Trump-affiliated PAC called No Going Back made $68 million in ad reservations, according to AdImpact, allies hope it’s the first step of a multipronged approach.
“President Trump is the unequivocal leader and unmatched motivator for the Republican party who is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales told The Sun in a statement.
One Republican official told The Sun that the White House is considering more than 30 rallies and dozens more telerallies. The official, like others in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations and plans. Voters should also expect to see more Cabinet members fanning out across the country to help the party make its closing pitch, according to two sources familiar with the planning.
“This week was a big preview,” said one MAGA operative familiar with Trump’s political operation. “And it will be a lot more classic politicking.”
MAGA Inc. did not respond to requests for comment.
In Dallas, Cabinet officials took to the convention stage one by one to slam Democrats and paint a dark picture about what would happen to the country if the party wrested control of the House and Senate from Republicans.
One Cabinet official told The Sun that the Hatch Act prevented them from talking directly about their work at a political event, which limited what they could convey to voters. The official said the White House meticulously examined the planned speeches to avoid violations at the convention, limiting what policies they could tout from their professional life in their personal capacity.
One of the few Cabinet members who didn’t take the stage was Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who still came to Texas. A GOP source familiar with his efforts said Wright met with key stakeholders in the energy sector. And the Energy Department announced — with Wright in attendance — that Dallas’ Southern Methodist University would receive a multimillion-dollar grant.
Vice President JD Vance is scheduled to attend his second MAGA Inc. event next week, this time in Kansas. Some Republicans expect more such deployments ahead of November.
Additional gimmicks, such as the $5,000 “dividend” Trump floated Wednesday night, are also expected to come from the administration, according to the MAGA operative, as the administration tries to win over Americans who cite high prices and affordability as their top concerns in poll after poll.
Whether Trump will embark on a cross-country campaign blitz that rivals his 2018 midterm campaign travel remains an open question to some, even within his own party.
“His presence will actually help in a lot of places. But the more he can boost his approval numbers, the better it will be for the party,” Marc Short, who served as Trump’s legislative director in 2018, told The Sun. Still, he added, “the promises have been made for nine months that he’s going to barnstorm the country and we just haven’t seen it.”
In 2018, the first-term president embarked on a 44-city blitz ahead of Election Day, holding rallies mostly in states where he maintained high support. His main affiliated super PAC at the time, America First Action PAC, spent around $30 million, according to Open Secrets.
Despite that effort and cash, the Republican Party still lost the House to Democrats.
This time around, the president’s PAC has amassed a massive and unprecedented amount of money. While the most recent Federal Election Commission filing showed the organization’s cash on hand at $404 million, Trump said last week the PAC had nearly $1 billion.
“They’re very aggressive about fundraising and they can be because of the incumbency,” said a Republican source close to the president.
But MAGA Inc. has become a boogeyman of sorts as Republicans have raised concerns publicly and in private that the PAC — and by extension, Trump — may not spend enough money to combat the president’s sinking approval numbers, high prices stemming from the Iran war and the historical tradition of the president’s party taking a midterms beating.
“What I know to be true is that the people that are in charge truly don’t care about public pressure at all,” said one GOP operative close to Trump’s political operation. ”But they value public perception within our party. And if our party is banging down the door, they will then feel pressured to let the president know.”
The PAC’s contributions have started to flow. Last week, it spent $10 million to support Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in his tight Senate race, a financial disclosure filed Saturday afternoon showed.
“I do think there’s a sense of relief now that they’re coming out of stealth mode with their plans, the division of labor with other groups and party entities is coming into focus, and campaigns and donors have a clearer picture of what to expect,” said Liam Donovan, a GOP strategist and former National Republican Senatorial Committee aide.
Under a new PAC established Sept. 1, called Not Going Back, the president’s political operation has scheduled nearly $60 million in ads for Senate and House races in New Hampshire, Michigan and Ohio, as first reported by The New York Times.
It’s not without precedent. When the political operation used the Save America PAC as the driver for presidential spending, before switching to MAGA Inc., it seeded money in 2022 to the Georgia PAC to fund state-based operatives, according to a source familiar with the move at the time.
Democrats say the change is to shield Trump’s sinking numbers.
“Trump’s consultants are already failing at their attempted MAGA Inc. rebrand,” C.J. Warnke, spokesperson for the Democratic House Majority PAC, told The Sun. “They know he’s underwater in every single battleground House district, which is why they’re trying to hide the truth from the voters.”
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