The upcoming elections this fall look to be among the most nationalized congressional races in history. Republicans have looked at each loss or near loss of the special election season and attempted to rationalize big blue swings by finding something “special” about each candidate. Something they don’t believe Democrats can recreate on a national basis. The truth is, there is something special about Democratic candidates—they don’t support Donald Trump. And neither does the public. Unable to find any center or principle other than whatever appears on Twitter during “executive time,” Republicans can only bite their lips and hope that the polls are wrong, the press is wrong, and their rapidly fleeing colleagues are wrong.
And leading them in this delusion, is Donald Trump.
President Trump is privately rejecting the growing consensus among Republican leaders that they may lose the House and possibly the Senate in November, leaving party officials and the president’s advisers nervous that he does not grasp the gravity of the threat they face in the midterm elections.
Trump’s strategy for every situation has been Be More Trump. Because his reading of the 2016 election is that voters love it when he’s rude, crude, and illogical. And Trump has lived his entire life moving from one scam to another, taking little personal damage in the process. In fact, even as he was suffering his largest business failing, facing charges for a record amount of money laundering, and being bailed out by Russian mobsters, Trump’s image with the public was soaring thanks to the hard-working editors at The Apprentice. Trump can not believe that anyone is really going to hold him accountable, or that he will have to face any consequences for his actions.
Republicans in Washington and Trump aides have largely given up assuming the president will ever stick to a teleprompter, but they have joined together to impress upon him just how bruising this November could be for Republicans—and how high the stakes are for Mr. Trump personally, given that a Democratic-controlled Congress could pursue aggressive investigations and even impeachment.
Under the Republicans, the House launched no fewer than eight investigations into Benghazi. House Republicans have just launched new investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email and the many-times resolved Uranium One deal, while cutting short the House investigation into Russian interference in the election expressly so they could hand Trump a no-collusion report to wave around.
All of that could turn upside down in seven months.
… Marc Short, the White House’s legislative liaison, used the dinner to offer an even starker assessment. The G.O.P.’s House majority is all but doomed, he said.
But Mr. Trump was not moved. “That’s not going to happen,” he said at different points during the evening, shrugging off the grim prognoses, according to multiple officials briefed on the conversation.
There is still time for a few dozen more Republicans to seek shelter at the network of billionaire-funded think tanks and consulting firms before the fall.