Donald Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles has revealed that the White House has flipped its strategy for the 2026 midterm elections and will make the president “campaign like it’s 2024” in the hope of avoiding the kind of coast-to-coast wipeout that Republicans suffered last month.
Weeks after Democrats delivered a resounding rebuke at November’s off-year elections, Wiles said that Trump would effectively be “on the ballot” so that voters turned up to ensure the GOP kept control of Congress.
“Typically in the midterms, it’s not about who’s sitting at the White House—you localize the election and you keep the federal officials out of it. We’re actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot because so many of those low propensity voters are Trump voters,” Wiles revealed in a rare interview with “The Mom View,” a YouTube channel run by the conservative group Moms of America.
“We saw (during the off-year elections) what happens when he’s not on the ballot and not active. I haven’t quite broken it to him yet, but he’s going to campaign like it’s 2024 again.”
The 2024 presidential election saw Trump criss-crossing every battleground state, backed by mobilization efforts from the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point operation and big-money donors such as Elon Musk, who spent at least $273 million to help the president win.
But one year into his resounding victory, concerns about affordability, ICE raids and the Epstein files have made Republicans increasingly nervous about next year’s midterms when all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs, along with a third of the seats in the 100-member Senate.
If the Democrats were to flip control of the House in November, they could stall Trump’s legislative agenda for the next two years, probe and subpoena his activities, and potentially file articles of impeachment against him and members of his Cabinet.
Last month’s clean sweep of electoral losses also set off alarm bells in the White House. In New York, for instance, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected as the city’s first Muslim mayor, despite the president pleading with voters in his former home state to pick his opponent, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
In Virginia, former Democratic congresswoman Abigail Spanberger became the state’s first female governor, riding to victory on an anti-Trump wave over the government shutdown and federal cutbacks.
And in New Jersey, former helicopter pilot Mikie Sherrill edged out another Trump-endorsed candidate, Jack Ciattarelli, who had embraced the president’s tax and immigration policies.
Wiles, however, said she was confident in the president’s ability to deliver victory for his party.
“He doesn’t help everybody, but for those he does, he’s a difference maker, and he’s certainly a turnout machine,” said Wiles, who was Trump’s co-campaign manager in 2024 and the first woman to be appointed chief of staff in the White House.
“So the midterms will be very important to us. He’ll work very hard to keep the majority.”
Some Democrats have nonetheless welcomed the strategy to put Trump front and center of the campaign, believing it could hinder some candidates.
“THANK YOU for rerunning your 2017-18 strategy of putting Trump on the ballot!! Trump is old and weak, but please make him visit every swing district,” Congressman Ted Lieu wrote on X.
Dear @WhiteHouse: THANK YOU for re-running your 2017-18 strategy of putting Trump on the ballot!! Trump is old and weak, but please make him visit every swing district.
CA Rep David Valadao would LOVE to have Trump visit to talk about tariffs on farmers and ICE racial profiling. https://t.co/3SmIjaB0Mc— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) December 8, 2025
Veteran political scientist Larry Sabato agreed the strategy was risky.
“You can put him at the centre of the campaign, but that’s a very different position when you are the president United States and things aren’t going well, your ratings have dropped considerably, and when the economy is not viewed as strong,” he told the Daily Beast.
Wiles’ comments come as Trump heads to the critical swing state of Pennsylvania on Tuesday to sell his economic message amid growing concerns about the cost of living pressure.
The issue has become a pressure point for the president, who came to office promising to tackle soaring grocery prices “on day one” but now describes affordability as a “democratic hoax.”
“We’re bringing prices way down,” Trump said at the White House on Monday.
“You can call it ‘affordability’ or anything you want, but the Democrats caused the affordability problem, and we’re the ones that are fixing it.”
Asked how he would grade his performance on the economy, he told Politico on Tuesday: “A-plus-plus-plus-plus.”
However, a year into his second term, the reality for many Americans is different and the president’s approval ratings have dived.
Polling from conservative outlet Fox News even suggests twice as many Americans now blame Trump for the economy’s struggles as his predecessor, Joe Biden.
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