President Donald Trump holds a Cabinet meeting, Wednesday, April 30, 2025, in the Cabinet Room. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)
An aide to President Donald Trump has revealed the current mood among White House insiders, telling MS NOW that administration officials are privately acknowledging the Republican Party is “already cooked” in the 2026 midterm elections.
“The vibe right now is we know we are already cooked in the midterms,” the anonymous White House official told MS NOW, according to a report published Saturday morning.
The source of the dismay is multi-faceted, including soaring gas prices, creeping inflation and an unpopular war in Iran.
“The numbers help explain the gloom,” MS NOW reports. “For the first time since 2010, voters say they trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle the economy, 52 percent to 48 percent, according to a recent Fox News poll."
The report also details “bubbling frustration among Republican strategists working House and Senate races,” who warn Trump “and his team have been slow to focus on” the 2026 midterms. Still, two White House officials told MS NOW there’s a plan in place to “kitchen-table issues and flood battleground states with Trump and Cabinet surrogates in the coming months.”
“Republicans, these officials insisted, have a record to run on, including a cut in taxes via the One Big Beautiful Bill efforts to reduce drug prices and beefed-up border security,” MS NOW reports.
Trump, meanwhile, “has been consumed by the war in Iran and by the construction of a $400 million White House ballroom that has become an unlikely political liability — a gilded symbol, his critics argue, of a president more focused on monuments to himself than on voters squeezed by more everyday concerns,” the report notes.
According to the report, the President’s antics — including his “inflammatory Easter morning social media posts, his attacks on the pope and his habit of naming things after himself” — have also “made life harder for Republican incumbents.”
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) told reporters he's "very concerned" about the current state of the Republican caucus ahead of the 2026 midterms.
If you aren’t concerned, you’d be kind of foolish," Van Drew said. "… We are either going to win the majority by a little, lose the majority by a little, or lose it by a lot.”
But it’s not all doom and gloom at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. As one White House official told MS NOW, “certainly there’s still a lot of work to be done, and that’s not a secret to anyone … But there’s still a lot of time left.”