Trump commandeers Cabinet members to campaign in midterms, ordering them to drop or mute controversial stances
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 squarely at the midterms.
Key members will be criss-crossing the country, particularly in Republican districts, trying to minimize the party’s losses in November.
In: The more popular parts of the Trump agenda.
Out: The more controversial aspects of the Trump agenda that have suddenly become politically inconvenient.
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It’s an uphill climb. Trump has acknowledged that the president’s party usually gets shellacked in its sixth year. Some Trump loyalists privately acknowledge that the GOP will definitely lose control of the House, and possibly even the Senate.
If Hakeem Jeffries becomes speaker, that will trigger endless investigations that are certain to make Trump seem even more of a lame duck than he is under the Constitution.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the classic example. He has spent most of the last year crusading against vaccines, in keeping with his lifelong anti-vax campaign that is not supported by scientific evidence. Kennedy has branded his movement Make America Healthy Again.
He has fired the CDC director (who said RFK ordered her to rubber-stamp his policies without evidence), ousted other agency officials, and still hasn’t come up with a permanent director.
But as Politico reports, Kennedy has "been told by the White House to stay away from some of the more polarizing parts of the MAHA agenda, like vaccine skepticism, and focus instead on issues like nutrition."
The campaign must reengage the roughly half of MAHA supporters who say that Trump and Kennedy haven’t done enough to make America healthier, the website says. RFK is a lifelong Democrat, and his party sees a chance to influence voters interested in goals long identified with the left, such as battling unprocessed foods and shrinking chemicals in the environment.
Trump is hardly the first president to utilize his Cabinet in the runup to the midterms. Jimmy Carter, in 1979, fired his health secretary, treasury secretary, energy secretary, transportation secretary and attorney general. It didn’t help. And when Iran seized 52 American hostages later that year, he was toast.
"Cabinet members will be urged to focus on several things Trump has done since taking office," including tax cuts, Axios reports.
He is also considering removing FBI Director Kash Patel and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, according to media reports, but has dropped plans to dump national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard after discussing it with aides.
The president took a hard shot at one of our longtime allies yesterday:
"We rebuilt Germany. How about Germany telling us, Germany telling that, well, it’s not their war. ‘We had nothing to do with it.’ They wanted me to go and tell them everything I was doing. ‘We didn’t know anything about it.’ Well, if I would have told them, they would have leaked it, and we wouldn’t have been nearly as successful, possibly, right?"
He also blamed the media for disclosing the disclosing there was a second crew member missing from the F-15 that Iran shot down, though that seemed to come out almost immediately.
"We didn’t talk about the first one for an hour. And then somebody leaked something, which we’ll hopefully find — that leaker. We’re looking very hard to find that leaker. And talked about there’s somebody missing. They basically said that we have one and there’s someone missing. Well, they didn’t know there was somebody missing until this leaker gave the information. So whoever it was, we think we’ll be able to find it out, because we’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re gonna say national security — give it up or go to jail. And we know who — and you know who we’re talking about."
Amit Segal, a reporter for Israel’s Channel 12, posted this on X at 11:19 a.m Friday: "Western source: One of the American crew members was 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, architect of the hardline mass deportation campaign, is revealing:
"He faces questions about how aggressively he can continue to drive the deportation campaign, and how much appetite his party and the country have for tactics that proved successful in helping to boost arrests of immigrants but reignited a polarizing debate over what it means to be American…Miller even pulled back his public appearances for a time."
So he’s pushing all the same policies, even against immigrants with no criminal record, but… quietly.
"Rather than Mr. Miller seeing his power recede, he has moved to apply it in other ways, seeking policies that would pressure undocumented immigrants to leave on their own."
Oh, and one more thing.
You might have the impression that there will be a huge blue wave in November.
But Charlie Cook, a seasoned and utterly nonpartisan political analyst, explains why that’s not the case.
While the Democrats are virtually assured of taking the House, "Only three Republicans were elected in 2024 in districts that Kamala Harris won. Among independents nationally, Trump’s approval ratings typically are down in the high 20s and low 30s, but gerrymandering and political self-sorting by the population has shrunk the number of purple districts, thus diluting independents’ power. There are very few Republican-held seats anywhere in that much peril."
With Republican approval of the president in the 80s, "MAGA voters are so in love with him and trust him so thoroughly that nothing—not the Epstein files nor the attacks on Venezuela and Iran—are peeling them off. So Democrats have their work cut out for them to flip many red districts."
That brings us to the math. "Only 17 GOP seats are rated as Toss Up or worse. Adding in the next level of competitive seats (‘Lean Republican’) brings only three more GOP seats to the competitive pile—still well below the post-World War II average midterm outcome of a 26-seat loss for the president’s party…Democrats could run the table, hold on to all their own vulnerable seats, and still fall short of their pickups in 2006 or 2018."
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What’s more, says Charlie, in the last eight years, "the party that lost seats in the House actually gained in the Senate. With just a third of the Senate up every two years and only a handful of seats competitive in most years, the upper chamber’s results tend to be more idiosyncratic."
Trump is deploying the Cabinet because he’s looking at serious losses in November. But it may not be the blowout that most prognosticators are expecting.