Trump commandeers Cabinet members to campaign in midterms, ordering them to drop or mute controversial stances

President Donald Trump is recruiting Cabinet members and top aides — at least those who haven’t been fired or about to be fired — for a new, targeted strategy aimed squarely at the midterm elections.

Key members will crisscross the country, particularly in Republican districts, to try to minimize the party’s losses in November.

In: The Most Popular Parts of the Trump Agenda.

Out: The most controversial aspects of the Trump agenda that suddenly became politically embarrassing.

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President Donald Trump is recruiting the administration’s top brass to take charge of the midterm elections. (Alex Brandon/Pool via AP Photo)

It’s a difficult climb. Trump acknowledged that the president’s party was generally criticized in its sixth year of existence. Some Trump loyalists privately acknowledge that the Republican Party will permanently lose control of the House, and perhaps even the Senate.

If Hakeem Jeffries becomes president, it will trigger endless investigations that are sure to make Trump look even more of a lame duck than he is under the Constitution.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the classic example. He has spent most of the last year campaigning against vaccines, in line with his lifelong anti-vax campaign that is not supported by any scientific evidence. Kennedy called his movement Make America Healthy Again.

He fired the CDC director (who said RFK ordered him to approve his policies without evidence), ousted other agency officials, and still hasn’t found a permanent director.

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But as Politico reports, the White House told Kennedy “to stay away from some of the more polarizing parts of the MAHA agenda, like vaccine skepticism, and instead focus on issues like nutrition.”

The campaign needs to re-engage about half of MAHA supporters who say Trump and Kennedy haven’t done enough to make America healthier, the website says. RFK is a lifelong Democrat, and his party sees an opportunity to influence voters interested in goals long identified with the left, like fighting unprocessed foods and reducing chemicals in the environment.

Trump is not the first president to use his cabinet in the run-up to the midterm elections. Jimmy Carter, in 1979, fired his secretaries of Health, Treasury, Energy, Transportation and Attorney General. That didn’t help. And when Iran captured 52 American hostages later that year, he raised a toast.

The White House reportedly advised Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “stay away from some of the more polarizing parts of the MAHA program,” according to Politico. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

“Cabinet members will be asked to focus on several things Trump has done since taking office,” including tax cuts, Axios reports.

He also plans to fire FBI Director Kash Patel and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, according to media reports, but abandoned plans to fire National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard after discussing it with aides.

Yesterday, the president took a serious swipe at one of our long-time allies:

“We rebuilt Germany. And if Germany told us, Germany would say, well, it’s not their war. ‘We had nothing to do with it.’ They wanted me to tell them everything I did. “We didn’t know anything about it.” Well, if I had told them, they would have leaked it, and we might not have been as successful, right?”

He also criticized the media for revealing that a second crew member was missing from the F-15 shot down by Iran, although this appeared to be revealed almost immediately.

“We didn’t talk about the first one for an hour. And then someone leaked something, which we hope to find – this leaker. We searched really hard to find this leaker. And we talked about someone being missing. They basically said we had one and someone was missing. Well, they didn’t know anyone was missing until this leaker gave the information. So, whoever it was, we think we can find out, because we’re going to go to the media company that published it, and we’re going to say national security – give it up or go to jail. And we know who – and you know who we’re talking about.

Amit Segal, a journalist for Israel’s Channel 12, posted this on X on Friday at 11:19 a.m.: “Western source: One of the American crew members was successfully rescued.”

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A New York Times report on Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, architect of the massive and harsh deportation campaign, is revealing:

“There are questions about how aggressively he can continue to pursue the deportation campaign, and how much appetite his party and the country have for tactics that have proven effective in helping spur immigrant arrests but have reignited a polarizing debate about what it means to be American…Miller even withdrew his public appearances for a time.”

He therefore advocates the same policies, even against immigrants without criminal records, but… quietly.

“Rather than see his power recede, Mr. Miller decided to apply it in other ways, seeking policies that would pressure undocumented immigrants to leave of their own accord.”

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller “wonders how aggressively he can continue to pursue the expulsion campaign,” according to the New York Times. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Oh, and one more thing.

It might feel like there’s going to be a huge blue wave in November.

But Charlie Cook, a veteran and completely impartial political analyst, explains why that’s not the case.

While Democrats are virtually assured of winning the House, “only three Republicans were elected in 2024 in districts won by Kamala Harris. Among independents nationally, Trump’s approval ratings are generally declining in the 20s and 30s, but gerrymandering and political self-sorting of the population have reduced the number of purple districts, diluting independents’ power.

With the president’s Republican endorsement in the 1980s, “MAGA voters are so enamored with him and trust him so much that nothing — not the Epstein files nor the attacks on Venezuela and Iran — deters them.” So Democrats have their work cut out for them to flip many red districts. »

This brings us to mathematics. “Only 17 GOP seats are classified as Toss Up or worse. Adding the next tier of competitive seats (“Lean Republican”) brings only three additional GOP seats to the competitive pile – still well below the average post-WWII midterm outcome of a 26-seat loss to the president’s party…Democrats could run the table, retain all of their own vulnerable seats and fall short of their 2006 victories or 2018.”

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Plus, Charlie says, over the past eight years, “the party that lost seats in the House actually won in the Senate.” With only a third of the Senate renewed every two years and only a handful of competitive seats most years, the upper chamber’s results tend to be more idiosyncratic.

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Trump is deploying the Cabinet because he faces heavy losses in November. But it may not be the blowout most prognosticators expect.