President Donald Trump has told aides that he thinks Republicans could still outperform expectations in the midterm elections this November, seemingly unwilling to confront the worsening political climate for the GOP.
But aides acknowledge privately that the national polling for Trump is shockingly bad, and the White House, in recent weeks, has begun to contemplate for the first time losing both the House and Senate majorities.
One longtime Trumpworld operative, who correctly predicted weeks before the 2024 presidential election that Trump was on course to win every battleground state, summed it up for Inner Loop: “Oh, yeah, we’re going to get creamed.”
Trump’s approval rating recently dropped to 37 percent in a Wall Street Journal poll, the lowest of any president heading into a midterm election dating back to 1990, when these polls first began. Trump’s more positive outlook has been informed in part by internal polling that shows Republicans down by less in individual House races, the sources say.
“No one can dispute the fact that President Trump has created one of the most robust coalitions in political history with the MAGA movement,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle tells WIRED. “The choice has never been more clear: doubling down on President Trump’s winning, commonsense agenda or the Democrats’ extreme liberal policies and obstruction.”
To counter the deeply negative political environment for Republicans this cycle, Trump’s team started looking for foreign policy wins last month that he would be able to tout to voters in order to encourage turnout from his MAGA base, sources say.
That led Trump to quickly sign an agreement between the US and Denmark that allows more American forces on Greenland, even though it stopped short of a US takeover that the president has long desired.
Trump also proclaimed an oil deal with Venezuela. However, that deal is likely to need renegotiating because it asserts a 100-year concession on oil production that contravenes Venezuela’s national hydrocarbons law barring such practices.
But while Trump sees foreign policy as a legacy-defining issue, voters have been far more focused on domestic issues like high grocery and gas prices.
Diesel prices hit a record high this month and regular gasoline reached a national average of $4.43 a gallon, according to the AAA, while Trump has been on the opposite side of public opinion on tech issues like AI regulation and data centers.
Now, with their election chances that much slimmer, Trumpworld is much more concerned about planning a response to what will likely be an immediate crush of subpoenas from Democrats in Congress, the sources say.
Broadly speaking, the White House expects a dual track of Trump asserting executive privilege and attorney-client protections, the bedrock legal principle designed to protect confidential discussions with lawyers, to shield senior aides from oversight probes.
Attorney-client privilege is set to be supercharged when it involves government lawyers, after the US Supreme Court ruled in the so-called Trump immunity decision in 2024 that not even federal courts could “peel back the curtain” to examine discussions that involve deliberations central to the presidency.
One unique aspect of Trump’s second term has been the conversion of his personal lawyers into government lawyers, producing a consistent network of overlapping legal protections around himself and his top aides.
Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche, for example, has become the attorney general. Many of Trump’s aides were previously represented by the current number three at DOJ, Stanley Woodward, who also was a Trump 2024 campaign lawyer. Trump’s former appellate lawyer, Will Scharf, recently moved from White House staff secretary to White House counsel, replacing former Trump lawyer David Warrington.
Trump’s aides are hoping that the double protections will stymie Democrats for years. And they have some precedent: Trump’s White House counsel from his first term, Don McGahn, only testified to Congress about the Mueller investigation after Trump had already left office.
After November 3, the midterms will end in the minds of most Americans. But for Trump’s White House, it’s all just beginning.
This is an edition of Hugo Lowell’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.