EXPECTING THE WORST

Trump Admits He’s Worried About GOP Losses in Midterms

The president appeared pessimistic about the Republican’s prospects to win in the midterms.

Donald Trump has revealed that he fears Republicans may stumble in the 2026 midterms.

The president made the rare candid admission during a softball interview on the right-wing One America News network that was taped Wednesday.

The MAGA channel’s Chief White House Correspondent Daniel Baldwin asked Trump if he believed his “economic success” would be “enough to buoy Republicans” in the midterms, which are just over a year away.

“I hope so,” the normally boastful president replied. “Now, the one thing that I worry about is that, if you look over many many years—I don’t have the numbers—but the person that wins the presidency always seems to lose the midterms.”

“I don’t know why—it’s crazy. Even presidents that did well, and there have been some,” he added.

Trump is right. Since World War II, the sitting president’s party has lost ground in the House in 18 of 20 midterms, and Senate seats in 13 of the 20 postwar midterms.

Trump is also speaking from experience: Democrats picked up a net 41 House seats in the 2018 midterms, during his first term, to take back control of the lower chamber. However, the GOP netted 2 Senate seats that year.

The GOP currently controls one of the narrowest House majorities in history, with 219 seats to Democrats’ 213. Republicans also control the Senate 53–45, with 2 seats held by Independents.

After his unusual moment of candor, Trump, 79, returned to his familiar bluster. “I think we’re at the top of the list in terms of doing well,” he said. The Nobel Prize hopeful, who has compared himself to the likes of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, once again claimed that he had “solved” seven wars.

But he admitted that the swift end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict he promised on the campaign trail last year has continued to elude him.

“We’ll get Russia taken care of,” he said. “I thought that would be an easy one—that’s been a difficult one.”

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Trump also wrongly claimed, “we have no inflation.” The Producer Price Index (PPI) in August showed wholesale inflation was up 3.3 percent from a year ago, the largest year-over-year increase since February.

And though Trump boasted that he won the 2024 presidential election “on groceries,” 47 percent of Americans said it was harder to afford groceries this year compared to last year, while 34 said it was about the same and 19 said it was easier to afford, according to a poll commissioned by Axios and released Thursday.

But in a statement to the outlet, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt implied former President Joe Biden was to blame for Trump’s inability to bring down prices. “He inherited the worst inflation crisis in a generation from Joe Biden, and that is why he has tasked his admin with fixing it. Grocery prices are coming down, such as egg prices which have plummeted by nearly 80%, and we recognize there is more work to be done,” she said.

Determined to prevent another 2018 “blue wave” and to hold onto the Republican trifecta, Trump has successfully pressured red states to redistrict their maps in favor of the GOP.

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