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Trump Wants Voters to Pretend He’s on the Ballot

But Republican midterm candidates are hoping everyone forgets he exists.

Donald Trump greets supporters at the 2026 Republican National Convention on Thursday, Sept. 10, 2026 at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas.

The balance of commentary on the GOP’s midterm pep rally in Dallas has focused on President Donald Trump’s outlandish and unlikely scheme to bribe voters with a $5,000 payoff should the Republicans prevail in the midterms. That’s understandable, since Trump’s scheme is brazenly illegal—as was the case when Elon Musk promised a similarly sleazy $1 million “lottery” windfall to right-leaning voters in Wisconsin’s 2025 balloting for state supreme court justices. (The only material difference here is that Musk was in a position to deliver the promised bribe, while Trump very much is not.)

Yet such rank corruption is increasingly the Republican Party’s business model—which is why the mini-convention also featured blaring violations of the Hatch Act, with both Attorney General Todd Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent electioneering for the GOP in a register only marginally less corrupt than their boss’s spectacle of transactional grift. (In Bessent’s case, the bond markets reacted with an alacrity that our judicial system now conspicuously lacks.) Until we regain a viable system of genuine constitutional oversight, the most urgent question before our flailing political order is whether Trump’s pitch to voters is likely to work. By this, I don’t mean the president’s bribery ploy but the political appeal he also made in Dallas: “Pretend that I’m on the ballot” in November’s midterm elections. 

Sure, that’s a predictable come-on from a chief executive who sees all the basic operations of government as an extension of his own ego. At the same time, it’s a likely recipe to kill off botch any Republican prospects for keeping the party’s present governing trifecta intact. Trump is a stunningly unpopular president, reaching a nadir of approval in the low to mid 30s just last week. That’s why a strong contingent of vulnerable GOP candidates running in swing states were no shows to what Republicans were calling Dallas’s “Trump-a-palooza.” It’s also why a growing number of similarly situated Republican hopefuls have been........

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