U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event at The Villages Charter School at The Villages, Florida, U.S., May 1, 2026. REUTERS_Nathan Howard
Inside sources in the GOP are seriously peeved that President Donald Trump and his family can't stop concentrating on enriching themselves long enough to get Republicans through the November midterms.
Trump and Republicans are at risk in the upcoming midterm elections, due in no small part to regret from his own supporters, and even many Republicans who continue supporting him feel as if they are "walking the plank" on his behalf. Yet according to a recent report, Trump continues to focus on money-making projects instead of shoring up support from American voters — a fact that is worrying many of his fellow Republican politicians.
"If voters experience Republican government as expensive groceries and gasoline, higher input costs and endless stories about rich people, special access and government extravagance, it becomes more difficult to persuade them that Washington Republicans are the tribunes of the forgotten man and woman," The Daily Mail's Mark Halperin reported on Thursday. "Even White House denizens that I speak to are hoping the President and his family would decide – just for a few months – that they are already rich enough and cool it with the self-promotional ventures."
Earlier in the same article, Halperin detailed Republicans' political plight.
"For much of this year, the Republican strategists have focused more on what they hoped to happen in the run-up to the midterm elections rather than what was actually happening," Halperin wrote. "They had hoped that Donald Trump's poll numbers would improve, that voters would begin to appreciate tax cuts, that tariffs would start looking shrewd rather than disruptive and that economic conditions would improve for most Americans."
He continued, "The most optimistic hoped that the Iran situation would settle down or even be successfully concluded and that gas prices would then drop. Nearly all thought that they could effectively scare voters about the rise of Democratic Socialists and that the President and the White House would get their midterm messaging straight. Almost 60 days from the vote in November, most of that hasn't happened."
Halperin also pointed out that "political forecaster Charlie Cook, who has been doing this longer and better than nearly anyone alive, put numbers on the GOP challenge this week. His most likely scenario has Republicans losing 26 to 35 House seats and four or five Senate seats, which means Democrats would take control of both chambers of Congress."
One ominous possibility is that Trump is indifferent to voter perceptions of him because he plans on rigging the midterms. That may be why he is demanding voter data from all over the country, even though elections are constitutionally administered by the states.
“The administration's demand that every state turn over its voter rolls has culminated in the most recent executive order Trump issued, where one of the buckets orders two executive branch agencies to compile these massive databases called the state citizenship lists,” Pooja Chaudhuri, Senior Counsel/Deputy Legal Director at Democracy Defenders Fund, told AlterNet in June. “Under the terms of the executive order, those lists have to be made available to the states 60 days before the election. We've seen states like Texas and Missouri use federal government lists — they've used the SAVE database — in order to verify whether people are citizens, and have wrongly purged and wrongly targeted people who are US citizens. The administration now creating these massive lists before every federal election is going to create not just massive chaos, but also, again, a chilling effect on voters.”
Chaudhuri also said it is “a very realistic concern" that voters could show up at the polls to find they have been scrubbed from the rolls.
