Few things make President Donald Trump angrier than the memory of his two impeachments. Despite his return to the White House this year, he frequently complains privately and publicly about Democrats’ efforts to remove him from office in his first term. Trump, to this day, insists that he did nothing wrong, calling both impeachments “witch hunts.”
And he is fearful that he might have to go through it all again.
The party out of power tends to do well in midterm elections, and Trump remembers how Democrats wielded the majority after capturing the House of Representatives in 2018. If the Democrats win control of one chamber of Congress next year—they are the slight favorites in the House, whereas the Senate would be harder—they won’t just have the ability to block whatever remains of Trump’s lame-duck legislative agenda. Armed with the power of the subpoena, they would also be able to open investigations into the Trump administration, dragging key officials to the Hill for embarrassing, headline-grabbing hearings. And even a simple majority in the House would allow Democrats the chance to impeach Trump for a third time.
The specter of investigations and impeachment has fueled many of the president’s most dramatic actions in recent weeks, three senior White House officials and two close outside allies told me. Trump’s unprecedented (and, Democrats say, illegal) mid-decade redistricting push, the deployment of the National Guard to Washington, his unceasing pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates—all can be seen as part of a sweeping, frantic attempt to swing next year’s midterm elections.
The president has told confidants that he does not want a repeat of what happened after Republicans lost control in 2018 and is not going to cost himself this time by adhering to political norms. He has been pushing aides to focus on the midterms, and he is making more of an effort than he did seven years ago to nationalize the races and to motivate Republican voters who haven’t turned out when his name isn’t on the ballot. Trump believes that not just the tenor of his final two years in office, but the shape of his legacy as a whole, ride on whether he can reverse historical political trends and hold on to the House and the Senate in 2026.
“The president believes that he stayed in his lane” in 2018—“that he took a more conservative approach and tried to reach across the aisle,” one of the senior White House officials told me. (This person, like others interviewed, was granted anonymity to speak about internal discussions.) “And look where that got him: We lost. He’s not making that mistake again.”
Trump has a tendency to inject politics into nearly every presidential act or social-media post. But the White House made a concerted pivot toward the midterms once the Republicans’ signature piece of legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, was passed into law in July, the three White House officials told me. White House aides, working with the congressional-campaign committees, knew almost immediately that they had a problem: The legislation’s tax cuts overwhelmingly favor the wealthy, and the bill will slash services and health care for many poorer Americans. The president, to the surprise of many in his party, has done very little domestic travel to promote the legislation. After Republican lawmakers began facing hostile crowds at town halls, the White House asked the GOP congressional leadership to hold fewer of them.
Meanwhile, the years-old Jeffrey Epstein scandal flared up again over the summer and has proved impossible for Trump to extinguish as more details have emerged about his relationship with the disgraced financier, who died in prison in 2019 in what was ruled a suicide after he was charged with sex trafficking. The president has faced rare defiance from portions of his MAGA base, which has demanded that the administration fulfill its promise to release more information about the powerful people who associated with Epstein. Trump’s summer of discontent has continued as he has struggled to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, while the economy, reacting to the president’s scattershot tariff policies, has begun to flash warning signs.
Trump’s top advisers convened a series of late-summer West Wing meetings in an effort to change the political narrative. One of the officials I spoke with downplayed the level of anxiety—“We’re not freaking out and trying to play 4-D chess,” this person told me. But the White House plotted methods to reverse its slide, including rethinking the way Republicans sell their signature piece of legislation. In recent days, the White House and Trump himself have suggested to lawmakers that they move away from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” moniker—even though it was Trump’s own coinage—and instead embrace a new name. They’ve kicked around a few possibilities, including the (not exactly accurate) “Working Families Tax Cut Bill.”
Trump’s midterms push has gone far beyond the megabill. In June, he began floating the idea that Texas should redraw its congressional-district maps in an effort to create five additional Republican seats—enough to allow the GOP to keep the House. Although both parties have long engaged in partisan gerrymandering, the Texas plan was particularly audacious: Traditionally, redistricting takes place once a decade, after the census. It had just been done in Texas in 2021 and was not due again until after the 2030 count. Texas lawmakers went ahead at the behest of the president. Democrats howled, and their local lawmakers fled the state. It didn’t matter. The maps were redrawn, setting off a redistricting arms race. California moved to redo its own maps to offset the GOP gains in Texas, while other red and blue states—Missouri, Indiana, New York, and more—began considering their own redistricting plans. (“If Republicans thought they could win on their record, they wouldn’t have opened the redistricting conversation in the first place,” Andrew Bates, a former senior staffer to President Joe Biden, told me.)
Last month, Trump spoke with Steve Bannon, and the influential outside adviser began outlining to him other maneuvers to try to change who will be able to vote in 2026 and how they will be able to do so. Over the course of a few days, Bannon called on his podcast for a mid-decade census that would exclude people in the United States without authorization (which experts have argued would be unconstitutional) and a requirement of proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections (which critics have described as an attempt at voter suppression). Bannon also railed against mail-in voting, a longtime crusade for Trump, and the president picked up that fight again last month by threatening an executive order to ban the process, which he claims, without evidence, has led to rampant fraud.
“There’s a very potent brew of deeply held beliefs driving these tactics,” Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist who was a senior aide on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, told me of Trump’s midterms push. “First and foremost, Trump thinks that his election was an absolute mandate, delivered by the voters despite every attempt by his opponents and critics to use politics and lawfare to defeat him.”
White House aides know that next year’s midterms could very well turn on the economy and privately worry about what will happen if Trump’s tariffs, which they have sold as a way to revive American industry, are permanently struck down in the courts. Most experts would say that Trump should be worried about what will happen to the economy if the tariffs do go into effect. August’s weak jobs report showed slowing growth, and that followed the previous month’s sluggish report, which had prompted Trump to fire the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on unfounded claims of bias. The West Wing is aware of these weak signs, and is warily watching inflation and looking for ways to juice the economy. Officials are discussing a sweeping deregulation effort due this fall that is meant to spark business growth.
But Trump is also taking more extreme measures. He has unleashed a relentless pressure campaign on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to lower interest rates and, when met with defiance, mused about ousting Powell before his term ends in May. That prospect rattled the markets, and Trump briefly backed off, only to then latch on to a right-wing narrative that Powell had overseen a wildly over-budget renovation of the Fed building in Washington and could be fired for cause. Although Trump donned a hard hat and toured the building, he seems to have let that issue slide, while continuing to slam Powell. More recently, Trump tried to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud. (Cook is suing Trump in response.) Her departure would allow Trump to replace her with someone willing to vote to lower interest rates. Or, as some in his orbit have suggested, he could demand that Powell fire Cook and then try to oust the chairman if he refuses, on the theory that the resulting cuts in rates would offset any initial market blowback. The Department of Justice recently opened an investigation into Cook, further alarming those who believe that Trump is weaponizing the federal government against anyone he sees as a political obstacle.
Although officials in the West Wing are anxious about the future of the economy, they feel confident about the radical steps Trump has taken on what they believe is a winning issue for the midterms. For generations, Republicans have attacked Democrats as soft on crime. This time, Trump is doing it with armored vehicles. His deployment of the National Guard to Washington last month triggered a backlash in the city, where many residents have made clear that they don’t want a military presence, particularly if the troops appear to be there mostly for photo ops around the National Mall. And although the president has more authority in the nation’s capital than he does in other cities, Democrats have denounced his move as federal overreach and a prelude to authoritarianism, especially after he floated the idea of also deploying troops to cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, and New York over the objections of those states’ governors.
The White House believes that the debate puts Democrats on the defensive. Violent crime rose nationwide during the coronavirus pandemic and in its immediate aftermath, and although it has fallen in most of the country since then, polling suggests that it remains a significant concern for many Americans. Trump believes that he has tapped into that, looking to play on voters’ fears more successfully than he did in 2018, when he hyped up the dangers posed by an alleged “caravan” of migrants approaching the southern border.
The overall goal of Trump’s various presidential power plays, aides told me, is to nationalize the midterms and make them about him. Trump has long believed that he is his party’s best messenger, and he mused recently about holding a national political convention in 2026, an unusual move for a nonpresidential year.
“President Trump has delivered win after win for the American people since taking office—a booming economy, a secure border, historic investments in United States manufacturing, massive tax cuts for working Americans, and the list goes on!” the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told me in a statement. “As the leader of the Republican party, President Trump will obviously play a critical role in all efforts moving forward—after all, there’s nothing more powerful in politics than a Trump endorsement.”
But this strategy holds risks for the party. Trump’s unpopularity hurt the GOP in 2018. And although the midterms are more than a year away, polling shows that Trump is losing support from some of the voting blocs that helped put him back into office. Traditionally, the president’s own party is held accountable if voters don’t feel that their lives have improved—no matter how hard the chief executive tries.
“Donald Trump knows that he needs the Republicans to control the House in order for him to keep operating without any checks on his power and avoiding congressional investigations,” Susan del Percio, a longtime Republican strategist and a Trump critic, told me. “But in the end, like almost every election, it will be about the economy, price of groceries, and if swing voters feel like they got screwed by the White House.”
The post Fear of Losing the Midterms Is Driving Trump’s Decisions appeared first on The Atlantic.
