President Donald Trump listens during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy (not pictured) amid negotiations to end the Russian war in Ukraine, at the White House (Reuters)
In spite of recent gerrymandering wins for the GOP, one White House correspondent has argued that there is still a "part" of President Donald Trump that believes that the midterms are a "lost cause" for him.
Democrats remain primed to retake the House majority in the November elections, but their potential margin of victory shrank last week after the Virginia Supreme Court shot down the state government's new district map, which would have fought back against the GOP's gerrymandering crusade and potentially created four new Democratic seats. Red states in the South are also moving swiftly to gerrymander away majority-minority districts with Democratic representatives after an alarming recent ruling from the conservative Supreme Court.
On Monday, Semafor's Shelby Talcott appeared as a guest panelist on CNN's Inside Politics with Dana Bash, where she discussed the prevailing sentiments within the Trump administration about their midterm chances in the wake of these developments. According to her sources, those close to the president remain cautiously optimistic, much as they were in the lead-up to the 2024 election.
"When I talk to trump administration officials about the midterms, specifically, I would describe it very similarly as how I would have described the end of the campaign, which is cautious optimism," Talcott explained. "They truly believe, as they did during the campaign, that they have some inroads. But there's acknowledgment that there is a lot against them."
Breaking with that feeling, she added, there are certain key signs to suggest that the president has not internalized that sort of optimism.
"And to that point, I always go back to what the president himself has said repeatedly, which is essentially that, you know, the party in power oftentimes does very poorly in the midterms," she continued. "And to me, that signals that there is a part of him that believes that, you know, this is kind of a lost cause almost."
Elsewhere during her appearance on Monday, Talcott also touched on some brewing concerns from "nervous Republicans" about what sort of backlash their actions are inviting from Democrats once they return to power.
"That's been an argument that some of the more sort of nervous republicans have made, whether it be related to the midterms or really anything that the president is doing, whether it's the Supreme Court, ome of these lawsuits that he's pushed," Talcott said. "Is that hold on a second. We might not be in power forever. Right. And when democrats get to power, aren't they just going to use all of these mechanisms that you've now opened up?"
