Trump and Senate Republicans Struggle to Get on the Same Page as Midterms Loom

In a typical midterm year, the August recess serves as a vital time for those up for reelection to pitch their record to their constituents. For most presidents with a governing trifecta, it’s a time to get in messaging lockstep with members of their party, touting their accomplishments as a united front. Donald Trump, however, is not most presidents.

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The day the Senate came back into session for a vital two-week stretch before leaving for recess, Trump called for the chamber to cancel the month-long break if it did not pass the SAVE America Act, the GOP’s signature election security legislation, which had stalled there. Later in the week, he questioned whether Majority Leader John Thune was the right person to lead the chamber’s Republicans and insinuated that certain GOP senators were resisting his attorney general nominee because they were bitter that he would not support them for reelection. Such rhetoric may not help Republicans in November.

“Every day that a Republican in the White House criticizes a Republican over here, it’s undermining that Republican’s ability to get out the voters who will get out for President Trump,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina told National Review. “By inference, when the president makes a critical statement of a member of the Senate, he’s probably convincing one or two people who really only want to go out to vote for him [not] to even waste their time coming out in November.”

Though Tillis chose not to run for reelection after Trump called for primary challenges against him, his comments reflect a growing frustration among Republicans with the president’s attitude toward the midterms. Some feel he has not been sufficiently helpful to his party in the lead up to an election that, if historical trends hold, is set to be difficult for the GOP to win.

“He does that at our peril and at the peril of us continuing to be in the personnel business come next year,” Tillis said.

Tillis would not say how pervasive his feeling is within the Senate GOP conference, but there are indicators that he is not the only one who is dissatisfied with the lack of coherent support from the president. In a meeting of Senate Republicans last week with GOP-aligned political operatives, Senator Steve Daines of Montana, who is also retiring at the end of the year, asked when Trump would begin attacking Democrats rather than Republicans, Politico reported.

This week, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin expressed concern over the disparity between Republican and Democratic voters in his state’s primary. Around 700,000 Democrats voted, compared to about 500,000 Republicans. “President Trump is going to have to encourage the people that voted for him not to vote for socialists, like they did in New York, but to vote for Republicans so that he’s not facing impeachment charges in the House and that we can retain the majority in the Senate,” he said in an interview on Fox Business.

White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales called Trump “the undisputed leader of the Republican Party” and said he will not let the country “become a communist nation run by far-left lunatics.” She also teased forthcoming trips to support GOP candidates in the lead-up to the election.

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“The President has drawn a sharp contrast between his commonsense agenda and radical-left Democrats who want to raise taxes; protect illegal alien drug dealers, rapists, and murderers; and defund the police,” Wales said in a statement to NR. “In the months ahead, President Trump will continue fighting to lower costs for working families while traveling across the country to highlight his accomplishments alongside Republicans in Congress.”

To be sure, many of Trump’s antics are just typical of the personality the American people have known for over ten years. “If you are hoping that Trump would ever stay on message, then you just don’t know Donald Trump,” Barrett Marson, a veteran Republican consultant based in Arizona, told NR. “It would be great if he did. He’s never been able to do that for any sustained amount of time. And so, you really cannot expect him to do that.”

Messaging discipline aside, Trump has not even shown that he feels much of an obligation to support his fellow Republicans in their reelection battles. “I don’t have to be away in Nevada yesterday. I didn’t have to be in Los Angeles yesterday making speeches,” he said in an interview with Punchbowl News last week. “I didn’t have to be supporting all the people. I have a busy schedule. I said to somebody, ‘Wait a minute, you don’t understand. I won. I’m not campaigning.’” Trump went on to acknowledge that many voters who chose him in 2024 were angry at his party, but he claimed he was not a target of their anger. “They’re angry at Republicans, but they’re not angry at me,” he said.

One thing that could soothe Republicans’ worries would be for Trump to start spending his massive campaign war chest to help his party. His MAGA Inc. super PAC hit $400 million cash on hand last month, but it has not spent any of it on campaigns in recent months. The last spending of the sort was when it helped Representative Clay Fuller of Georgia win his bid to succeed Marjorie Taylor Greene in March and helped to primary Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky in May. It has not yet made plans to spend money for candidates this fall. Asked about the PAC’s spending plans in his Punchbowl interview, Trump said only, “I’m going to help Republicans.”

MAGA Inc. did not respond to a request for comment.

Still, fears about Trump misusing (or not using) his influence are not universal. Although some Republican insiders have expressed concern at the lack of spending thus far, Trump still has time to use his PAC to make an impact on the race. Labor Day is typically the time at which campaign season kicks into high gear, and there is almost a month left before that point.

One Republican consultant in Pennsylvania — where, although there is no Senate race this year, Republicans will need to defend several critical House seats in November — indicated to NR there was an understanding that Trump’s world was prepared to spend resources there before the election. This person also said that there was not a widespread discontent over Trump’s rhetoric among candidates in the state.

“It’s probably pretty conventional to what you normally find,” the consultant said of the environment in the state. “I haven’t heard a lot of criticisms.”

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