‘We are facing almost certain defeat’: Trump’s hand-picked RNC chair fears midterm blowout

Diehard Donald Trump fan, Joe Gruters, is trying to set expectations very low for the 2026 midterm elections. The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger captured Gruters on SiriusXM Patriot with Mike Slater, WBT Charlotte’s Brett Winterble Show, Cats and Cosby on WABC in New York City, and the Chris Stigall Show this week. He’s openly trying to convey the message that the people in power almost always lose the midterm elections.However, he has a solution.”We are facing almost certain defeat,” he said. “… The only person that could bring the nose up and help us win is the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”He isn’t wrong, as a new AP-NORC numbers show.”Still, it’s remarkably abnormal to see the chair of the institutional Republican party—the head of the party’s campaign apparatus!—openly predict doom for his candidates,” Egger wrote. “It risks further depressing GOP voters and encouraging lawmakers to retire early. And, beyond that, it’s far from clear that the Republicans who actually need to get elected next year share Gruters’s assessment of how to fix their electoral predicament.”Egger said that he spoke to Republican operatives in swing states over the course of the week about the president and what the 2026 midterms are starting off with. They were “blunt,” he said. “The biggest reason Republicans seem bound for disaster isn’t historical midterm trends. It’s the world the president has built for them to run in—particularly when it comes to affordability.”Egger didn’t include names to protect their careers.“His message sucks. It’s absolute trash. ‘Affordability is a Democrat hoax’??? Give me a break,” one strategist who has worked on presidential and congressional campaigns said. “It’s the non-college-educated version of the Biden message, and we saw how well that worked. . . . Nobody believes the economy and particularly affordability is getting better.”A Georgia Republican said Trump’s message is “landing like doo doo.”“There have been past White Houses where it was okay to have some distance between yourself and the president,” a different GOP strategist told The Bulwark. “A candidate who says, ‘Yeah, maybe tariffs aren’t a great idea because of what they’re doing to prices,’ or whatever the case may be . . . That is clearly not the case with this administration.”On Monday, Trump went to Pennsylvania to deliver a speech on “affordability.” There were discussions about Trump trying to change the GOP’s tune to more of a “we feel your pain” mood. Polling showed that blaming former President Joe Biden isn’t working on the matter, as most Americans see tariffs as a key component that is raising prices. Trump confessed in Pennsylvania he’d been advised that “I can’t call [affordability] a hoax, because they’ll misconstrue that.”As Eggers explained, “Even when he can be talked into talking about affordability, though, Trump can’t help falling back into meta-narratives about how unfair it is for him to have to talk about it at all.”“This isn’t going to get better unless he either, one, shuts off the tariffs and starts a real economic turnaround, or two—well, I don’t know what two is,” the first GOP strategist said. “I think the GOP is looking at a very rough midterm.”Read the report here.

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