With barely a month to go before a midterm election in which the signs look increasingly dire for Republicans, President Donald Trump is busting out his old moves like an aging rocker on a comeback tour.
They do not get the love from the fans that they used to, so he is upping the audacity to 11. A new round of television spots, for instance, is drawing attention less for its message than for its eyebrow-raising notation: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
He also put himself center stage in Dallas at a first-of-its-kind Republican midterm convention in recent weeks. That effort to revive the boisterous euphoria of the 2024 gathering in Milwaukee saw only the Democrats receiving a postconvention bounce.
Ken Paxton, the GOP’s beleaguered Senate nominee in Texas, conceded the negative impact in a private meeting with conservative donors and lobbyists. “To be honest with you, the numbers — when we did that convention — it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good,” he said, according to a recording obtained by the New York Times.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security issued an ominous warning that a huge migrant caravan has crossed into Mexico from Honduras and was moving north.
It sounds familiar. “We have not seen a caravan headed to the U.S. southern border in several years, why now?” former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), a Trump acolyte turned critic, wrote on social media. “Oh yeah, there is an election coming and the GOP needs to scare you into voting because nothing else is working.”
And while bashing the media has long been atop his playlist, Trump’s banishment of three news organizations from the White House backfired spectacularly. It not only was blocked in court but also prompted other outlets to turn off their own cameras in solidarity, producing a temporary blackout of the live video coverage during much of Trump’s high-profile summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, starving the president of attention.
Midterm elections are nearly always a referendum on the president and party in power. With his approval tumbling into the 30s, their lowest level ever, the current of this election season is running against Trump. The generic ballot, a broad measure of which party is in the lead, has been on the upswing for Democrats, even as they remain unpopular. It appears likely the House will flip to Democratic control, and the party is increasingly hopeful the Senate is moving within reach as well.
Looking for advantage, Trump is turning where he always does: to massaging the Republican base. One of the new ads uses a 30-second video that looks identical to one from his 2024 campaign and hits nearly every trigger point.
“With you at my side, we will demolish the ‘deep state.’ We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists; we will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists,” he says in the narration. “We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”
The ads are reportedly being paid for with tens of millions from the DHS’s budget for border protection and customs enforcement. Using the government to finance them is a level of brazenness that has shocked even some Republicans.
“It’s a great message, I like the message, but it shouldn’t be paid for by taxpayer dollars,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said.
“It feels like Viktor Orban talking to the Hungarian people,” retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) said, invoking an authoritarian leader.
Federal law prohibits agencies from using taxpayer money for unauthorized “publicity or propaganda,” which the Government Accountability Office has interpreted to mean communication that is purely partisan.
The White House contends that the spots — which have been playing on shows as wide-ranging as “Saturday Night Live,” college and professional football games, and “Fox News Sunday” — are merely “public service announcements,” similar to ones that predecessors including George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden used to explain their policies.
“The announcements are a reminder for Americans to love their country and know why it’s worth defending — at home, at the border, and abroad,” the White House wrote in a news release.
If anything, Trump’s tendency to train every spotlight on himself has become even more pronounced. At the midterm convention in Dallas, he asked attendees “to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” which Democrats hope voters will do as well.
He also instructed the crowd to raise their hands and repeat after him a promise to vote, which he framed as an act of fealty.
“I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends,” he directed them to say. “I’ll do it any way, I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do.”
It was yet another reiteration of his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen — Trump’s equivalent of closing things out with “Auld Lang Syne.”
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