Does Trump Want to Lose the Midterms?

Produced by Jack McCordick

Does Trump Want to Lose the Midterms?

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

My pet theory right now is that President Trump is not trying to win the midterm elections. I’m not saying he’s trying to lose them, exactly. I just don’t think he cares.

What he cares about is controlling the Republican Party. The Republican Party is his power base. The Republican Party is his protection. The Republican Party is how he can wield power far into the future, long after his presidency, and so control of it is what he’s prioritizing.

I call this a theory, but it’s more like a hypothesis. It has predictions that you can test. Trump is more unpopular at this point in his second term than basically any of his modern predecessors. The midterm elections are less than six months away. He could easily lose the House. He could lose the Senate now. So what is he doing?

Well, if he wanted to win the midterms, he’d be moving to the center. He’d be focusing on the things that Americans are angry about, disappointed in him about. He’d be supporting the strongest Republicans in contested races and doing everything he could to bolster Republicans in vulnerable states and districts.

He’s not doing even a little bit of that. Instead, he’s doing the opposite. He’s announcing a $1.8 billion slush fund that appears designed to pay out to Jan. 6 rioters. He endorsed the scandal-plagued, very controversial Ken Paxton over John Cornyn in Texas, giving Democrats a real chance at winning a Senate seat that should be way out of reach for them. He helped primary Thomas Massie, the House Republican who helped release the Epstein files. He helped defeat Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana senator who voted to convict him in his first term. He is attacking Brian Fitzpatrick, one of the very few House Republicans representing a district that voted for Kamala Harris.

Archival clip of President Trump: He likes voting against Trump. You know what happens with that. It doesn’t work out well.

Archival clip of President Trump: He likes voting against Trump. You know what happens with that. It doesn’t work out well.

He’s threatening to escalate the Iran war. And when asked whether he was worried about Americans’ finances, about their pocketbooks, about their cost of living, here is what he said:

Archival clipReporter: Mr. President, to what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?Trump: Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran — they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.

Reporter: Mr. President, to what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?

Trump: Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran — they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.

What a gift to Democratic ad makers that clip is. Trump cares about control of his party, not of Congress. If he can win the elections in a way that tightens his control of Republicans, like through redistricting, he’ll take that. If not, he’s busy. He’s got other things to do.

I’m not saying he wants Democrats to win, but I don’t think he’d mind it if they did. A Democratic-controlled Congress gives him an enemy to fight. I think he gets a little lost without an enemy. It frees him from the tedious work of trying to pass legislation. It puts him back in the place he’s most comfortable, which is not wielding power; it’s claiming persecution.

What Trump would mind, what he does fear, is a Republican Party with a spine. He fears a Republican Party in which members of Congress begin to participate in the investigations of his scandals or they abandon him as his fortunes fall. And so he’s made his choice. He is showing them that to oppose him, even from the right, is to light your political future on fire.

The point isn’t just to defeat Massie or Cassidy or Cornyn or any of them. It’s to scare every Republican left in Congress, to make sure they know that Trump would gladly destroy each and every one of them personally, that he would gladly burn the entire Republican Party to the ground if that’s what it took to save himself.

I thought it’d be interesting to hear how this looks to someone whose business has been winning elections for the Republican Party, particularly Senate elections. Liam Donovan is a Republican strategist and a president at Targeted Victory, a Washington public affairs and digital marketing firm. He has worked on the National Republican Senatorial Committee and for Cornyn, and his political commentary has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications.

Ezra Klein: Liam Donovan, welcome to the show.

Liam Donovan: Good to be here. Thanks for having me, Ezra.

Trump is now under 40 percent approval in a bunch of different polls — more unpopular at this point in his term than basically any modern second-term president. Let’s start with him. Why is he down there?

If you think about the mood of the country that produced the comeback of Donald Trump, putting together the coalition that he did, that was predicated on a rejection of the status quo and the bet that Trump would be able to return us to the economy and maybe the vibes of pre-Covid 2020.

Of course, that’s much harder to do than it is to talk about.

I think this is fundamentally about frustrations of how difficult some of these problems are to tackle. There’s an electorate that is not really looking to be told that everything is going well.

Then when you compound that with some of the policy choices that have been made — that I think might prove to be wise in the longer run, but they are legacy-minded moves, not immediate-term electoral plays.

Was it so much harder?

I feel you could imagine a Trump administration second term that sealed the border but didn’t do the aggressive internal ICE and C.B.P. enforcement, so you wouldn’t have things like the battle of Minnesota; that did not go to war in Iran; that did not do the tariffs.

They could then draft on what was a fairly strong and certainly well-recovering economy coming out of Joe Biden’s presidency, that was getting a bunch of A.I. investment and doesn’t make a bunch of what seem to me to be errors, and maybe he’s in a really different place.

The way you have to think about this is the mythology of the Trump first term as understood by Trump versus as it was understood by the electorate.

Looking back, the reason Trump lost, the reason he wasn’t as successful as he might have been was that he was held back from his impulses and his policy preferences by the “deep state,” by Never Trumpers, by the Bush-era Republicans that don’t reflect or respect his version of how the country should look.

At some level, you could argue he was saved politically by that layer of insulation. If you think about what’s changed, it’s that he has absolutely installed loyalists. There is a threshold question of: Are you absolutely committed to this project?

Therefore, he’s feeling for the first time what it looks like to get what you’re asking for. And the electorate that re-elected him just wanted to go back to the way it was.

This was very striking to me when I looked at the poll numbers on it: At this point in his first term, he had a 10 net disapproval. He’s now at 21 net. So he is twice as unpopular at this point in his second term as in his first.

But it all goes to this question, which is whether or not you understand the weakened political state he’s in as a function of the mood of the country or as a function of the country’s reactions to Trump’s policies.

Is it just dyspeptic, or does it not want this?

There are layers to it. There’s now a ceiling in a way that there didn’t use to be. We’ve seen this over the last 20 years, maybe since the Obama era, since our coalitions have shifted, the parties have and the country has polarized.

It’s very, very difficult to imagine a president getting above, say, 48 percent — the coalition that got him there. So in that sense, it’s a hard cap. You need to almost grade on a little bit of a curve, in terms of where these things are.

That said, the president’s approval rating — I don’t care which party you’re from — wants to be above 40. It wants to be at 42, 43. That is your firm base.

What we’re seeing here is that there are elements of the Republican coalition that consider themselves Republican who are disillusioned for one reason or another.

Either they are antiwar or skeptical of foreign entanglements, maybe they are simply upset about the cost of living, they don’t like tariffs or what have you — they just don’t like the way things are going. I think that is the layer that is the easiest to imagine getting back.

If we’re looking forward to “How does this get back to a place where Republicans stand to have OK or just par midterms?” it’s that he floats back up above 40, because that’s kind of where these people want to be.

They want to be given a reason to like Trump. They want to be given a reason to vote for Republicans.

So why doesn’t Trump want to give them that reason? This is where I wanted to get us to, this question of agency, because he could get some of them back.

I always took Trump as somebody who cared, on some level, about his popularity and who has a real sensitivity to the whims and wins of public opinion.

But as his numbers have fallen in the second term, he seems to be going on to tilt. He’s doing this $1.8 billion slush fund to hand out to people convicted around Jan. 6, or who he feels were the victim of Biden-era lawfare. He is talking about re-escalating the Iran war. He is intervening in a bunch of Republican primaries to purge people who opposed him in one way or another.

He’s not doing the things that you might imagine a president worried about losing the midterms would do. He’s not doing a big pivot to the center. He’s not trying to avoid certain kinds of controversy.

It seems he doesn’t care. Why do you think that is?

Well, I think we have to step back for a minute and think about how we got here. How did Trump get the nomination in the first place? It was, in a sense, running against the institutional Republican Party, running against the establishment.

The fact that he doesn’t find himself aligned with the broader forces of the party — he’s not of the party. That’s not what drives him. That’s not his imperative. That’s different than any president we’ve ever seen, maybe in both parties but certainly in the Republican Party.

We saw it in 2018. I mean, he went on a victory lap the day after the elections, even though it was rough, dunking on members that didn’t stay closer to him.

Flash-forward, and I think that lesson’s been learned. I think people realize you have the R next to your name, you’re going to, by and large, own what the president is doing, so you need to make the best of that.

And going against him, picking fights with him, except in very rare exceptions, does not redound to your electoral benefit.

That’s true, but it doesn’t necessarily answer the question of Trump himself. As you mentioned — and I think this is an important point to expand on a little bit — there’s a history here.

In 2018, Republicans under Trump do terribly in the midterms, but Trump comes out the next day and is excited about some of the ones who opposed him who lost.

In 2022, Trump is not in office anymore, but he exerts a lot of control over Republican primaries, and you end up with candidates like Blake Masters and Dr. Oz and Kari Lake. Republicans lose a bunch of very big and very winnable races.

Right now, you see Trump intervening in places, like Texas with Paxton, in ways that, at the very least, create the possibility that Republicans will lose some key races that they could have otherwise won.

So I take your point that Trump does not come from the institutional Republican Party, but he seems to care more about the control he has over Republicans than the control Republicans under him have over Washington.

He is running a risk here of losing the Senate but with more control over the rump Republican senators, when he could be trying to win the Senate but have a couple of people who might be more willing to oppose him.

Does he want to control Congress or control the Republican Party?

There’s something to the point. I do think he’s more committed to and sensitive to the risk of not having control than he was four years ago, eight years ago — whenever. Time doesn’t mean anything anymore.

I think that’s where the project of the structural gambit of trying to create a more resilient map for Republicans in the House ——

Redistricting efforts.

That doesn’t happen if the president doesn’t care. That doesn’t happen if the president doesn’t believe that a Democratic majority could do him damage.

Let’s think about Indiana, where it’s like, “What was their sin?”

Their sin was, well, one, not listening to the White House and doing what they said to do.

On not doing the redistricting map.

But what’s the interest of the redistricting? The interest of the redistricting is maintaining congressional majority.

So in that case, his priority was trying to win more seats. Is that self-interested? Sure. But it wasn’t punishing them for going against him; it was punishing them for going against what he saw as the interests of the party.

So I think that’s your signal right there.

In the Senate, I’d push back and say this is something the Republican Party has had to learn a number of times over.

If you think back — my time at the Republican Senatorial Committee was 2010. It was a great cycle, but they left a great deal on the table ——

Because of the Tea Party primaries ——

Picking bad candidates, not coordinating, and they did it again in 2012.

It wasn’t until 2014 that they figured out a path forward of how to find suitable candidates that could please the broader coalition and had a level of coordination that led to a great cycle.

Trump comes in and doesn’t even have a consistent set of preferences, so he just kind of mashed buttons.

I think 2022 is the example, kind of like 2012, where we realized: This is unsustainable. Republicans have to do something about this.

They figured that out in 2024, in both directions. Both the party and its leaders figured out how to work with Trump and his political operation, and Trump figured out where he can be effective.

I’d argue that Trump and his political operation have done quite a good job this time directing traffic in a way that they hadn’t previously. It’s what makes instances like Texas — to a lesser degree, Georgia — notable.

I think they’ve done a pretty good job there. But it makes the exceptions that much more glaring.

So your argument is that unlike in 2022, if you look at most of the competitive races, the Trump operation has cohered around a candidate who doesn’t look wildly out of step with the state.

But then there is this separate thing that happens of Trump going to punish and purge specific candidates who he feels were disloyal to him.

It’s more notable, but it’s not the macro story.

That’s right. For each state, there’s an interesting story we can get into. Louisiana is the most obvious. But he understands that in Maine, Susan Collins is the only Republican who can win there and should win there, and he’s not mucking around there in the way that he is in, say, Louisiana.

Texas is a unique one in that it became a bargaining chip, and in some ways, Cornyn became collateral in this broader tug of war.

You know that one well. You used to work for Cornyn.

What happened there between Trump and Cornyn?

I think in the White House’s ideal timeline, Paxton doesn’t get in. I don’t think there were entreaties from the White House or from the Trump operation to get him in to challenge Cornyn.

The problem is that he did it anyway, and it created a really difficult dynamic.

Why did it create a difficult dynamic? Why doesn’t Trump just say, “Cornyn’s our guy. What are you doing here?”

Because Paxton was his guy, too, so he’s got people competing for his affections in a way that the president, obviously, likes a great deal.

And maybe it’s worth it for you to describe who Paxton is in Texas politics.

Who is Paxton, and why did Trump decide in the final moments of that primary runoff to endorse him over Cornyn, possibly risking that seat?

Paxton is the sitting attorney general of Texas. He’s been elected statewide a number of times. It’s important to get out there. It’s not the Senate, it’s not the governor, but he has been elected, and he has been statewide elected since carrying some of the political baggage that he does.

To the extent that he’s known, it’s largely because he........

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