Opinion

MARK HALPERIN: Trump strategy super session plots midterm survival as history stalks GOP

Trump's senior political command understands the president's unpredictable nature but also the rules of the game

By Mark Halperin Fox News

Published February 19, 2026 7:00am EST

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Tuesday night at the Capitol Hill Club, just steps from the House office buildings and a world away from cable news hysteria, the senior Trump political command gathered its core team to talk midterms. It was not a rally. It was not a pep talk. It was a working session — about two hours, a chicken-and-steak buffet, roughly 75 to 100 people in the room, many of them Cabinet secretaries and their top aides, almost all political veterans.

The mood, according to one attendee, was not panicked. Not shaken. But not sanguine, either. Just focused. The kind of focus that comes from knowing that, at the moment, the patterns of history are not on your side.

Midterms are almost always brutal for a president’s party. Since World War II, the president’s party has lost House seats in all but a handful of elections. The average loss is measured not in single digits but in dozens. The modern political era is replete with examples: 1994 for Bill Clinton, 2010 for Barack Obama, 2018 for Donald Trump himself. The gravitational pull of backlash is real.

Which is why Tuesday night’s meeting mattered.

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Susie Wiles, the president’s chief political architect and one of the most disciplined operators in either party, hosted and spoke briefly. Then pollster and strategist Tony Fabrizio took over,........

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