President Donald Trump knows exactly what Democrats plan to run against this November: Orange Man Bad.
So President Trump made a decision that has some political professionals reaching for the smelling salts. MAGA Inc. has roughly $400 million in its political war chest, and Trump wants part of it used for national advertising that tells voters what his administration has actually accomplished.
The strategy is almost embarrassingly logical. Democrats plan to make congressional races a referendum on Trump.
He's accepting the invitation.
From The Atlantic:
President Trump gathered his top political advisers in the Oval Office early this month to solve a problem of riches: how to spend his super PAC’s $400 million political war chest with fewer than 100 days to go before the midterm elections.
Republican strategists are concerned about Trump’s low approval ratings and voter anxiety about the economy. One person familiar with the Oval Office strategy meeting put it this way: “When the issues that you typically campaign on don’t move voters—or voters are pissed off at you about those issues—the question becomes: What do you campaign on?” Some GOP strategists favor focusing entirely on specific races in an effort to convince voters of the merits of individual candidates and local issues.
But Trump himself has rejected that approach. House and Senate Democrats, the president noted during the meeting, will make their fall campaigns a referendum on him. His advisers told him that the poor polling reflects the fact that the voting public still does not know about many of his accomplishments—the dozens of new stock-market highs, a decline in fentanyl deaths, the “sealed” southern border, the increase in domestic-manufacturing production.
The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself. The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests. Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks. “Go look at the clips,” the president told his team, according to this person. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”
Critics scream danger! Trump's approval numbers are weak, voters remain worried about prices, and the president isn't personally on the November ballot.
Some Republican strategists would rather spend the money entirely on individual House and Senate candidates.
Trump sees a larger problem: voters can't judge accomplishments they rarely hear about.
Consider the record. His tax law created deductions for qualified tips and overtime, increased the deduction for seniors, and created a deduction for interest on qualifying American-made vehicle loans.
Those are no longer campaign promises: they're in the tax code.
Then there's the border. Southwest Border Patrol encounters fell 93% in May 2025 compared with May 2024, while releases of illegals by Border Patrol dropped from more than 62,000 to zero for the month.
Trump also ordered the operation that captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas on Jan. 3, 2026. U.S. forces apprehended Maduro and his wife, ending years in which an indicted Venezuelan strongman operated comfortably in America's hemisphere while Washington mostly issued statements about him.
Iran's nuclear infrastructure took another beating under Trump. U.S. strikes against Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan severely damaged key nuclear facilities, with intelligence assessments concluding that several would require years to rebuild.
Somehow, a president who delivered tax relief, shut down much of the border chaos, captured Maduro, and smashed critical Iranian nuclear infrastructure is supposed to quietly sit while Democrats define his presidency for him.
Why?
Trump learned years ago that waiting for the legacy press to fairly present his case is a marvelous strategy if his goal is to grow old waiting.
Trump did something brilliant by planning a midterm Republican convention, despite polling that always seems to prop DNC candidates up. But the great Victor Davis Hanson cautions against believing what we're seeing:
So, what I’m getting at is the polls are worthless. And what we need to look at is what the status is right now.
The war is starting to wane. If it should end or if the Iranians crack in the next 60 to 70 days, that would be a spectacular achievement that Donald Trump—you know, we’ve tragically lost 17 Americans—but at a tolerable cost in blood and treasure, he ended a 50-year problem that seven presidents said was existential.
You could not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and the pressure that he’s put on them and the damage he’s inflicted would probably, in the next year or two, prompt a renewal of internal opposition against a theocracy that is bleeding.
The second thing to remember very carefully is, as I said earlier, the redistricting, the red state redistricting and the Supreme Court prohibition on racial gerrymandering might give him an additional four or five seats.
But the most important developments are money and the agenda of the new Democratic Party.
Very quickly, Donald Trump has got a war chest of about $400 million, and he’s now going to use it. He says he’s going to use it all in his political action committees to help save the Republicans in the midterms.
Elon Musk said that he is going to match dollar for dollar the Democratic oligarchic class that if they start to donate in great amounts to Democratic candidates.
So, the money issue probably favors also, like, the redistricting and maybe the course of the Iran war that could wane and be not an issue.
He built Truth Social partly because he understood the value of speaking directly to millions of people. During the 2024 campaign, he sat with Joe Rogan for more than three hours. The interview drew tens of millions of views because Americans increasingly prefer hearing someone speak at length rather than receiving a 14-second clip followed by a panel explaining what they were supposed to think.
November creates the same problem on a far larger scale.
Historical midterm trends favor the opposition party. Republicans have little room for error in the House. Democrats believe Trump's numbers give them an opening, and they're hardly hiding their intention to nationalize congressional races around them.
Trump's answer is to nationalize them right back.
Some consultants will call it reckless; perhaps voters will reject the argument. Elections remain stubbornly determined by voters, despite Washington's best efforts to turn them into spreadsheet exercises.
But surrendering Trump's record to people who have spent a decade portraying virtually everything he does in the darkest possible terms would be considerably more reckless.
Democrats want Trump on the ballot.
He heard them.
Now they're going to get him.
The political class counts on Americans forgetting what happened five minutes ago. PJ Media VIP doesn't. Join us for exclusive columns, analysis, and commentary, and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your subscription.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member