President Donald Trump believes he handed Republicans a winning playbook for the midterms — if only they’d follow it.
Gerrymander everywhere possible, get rid of the filibuster, fire the Senate parliamentarian and pass the SAVE America Act.
None of it is likely to happen, and the gap between what is likely and what is possible explains Trump’s frustrations with many in Congress and the anger the White House channels at operatives and pundits who say the president isn’t doing enough to help retain control of Congress.
“If everyone just follows his lead, follows the blueprints he’s laid out, and runs on the record that he has, then I think we’ll fare well,” said a senior White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The divide reflects irreconcilable views of political power: Trump’s ends-justify-the-means approach is colliding with the protect-the-norms posture of Republicans on the Hill and in statehouses. Unlike Trump, rank-and-file Republicans are staring down years of electoral consequences and hedging their bets on institutions they will have to operate within long after he’s gone.
And, with five months until the midterms, the president and many in his party have been left talking past one another.
Nowhere is that disconnect more visible than in Trump’s repeated demands for the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act — by any means necessary.
On Monday, he wanted it attached to a must-pass national security bill, and on Wednesday he upped the stakes by blowing up the Senate’s plans to swiftly confirm his pick for director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton, until lawmakers did so. Last week, Trump demanded it be included in a third party-line bill that would deliver $350 billion to the Pentagon. Trump has repeatedly framed the election reforms — coupled with unrelated amendments to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports — as political winners, and the data generally backs him up.
A POLITICO poll from May found that key provisions of the SAVE America Act, such as voter ID and requiring documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote, are popular among Americans overall. And a Gallup poll released earlier this month found that 69 percent of U.S. adults believe transgender athletes should only be able to play on sports teams that match their birth sex. (Trump, speaking to reporters Wednesday, again advocated adding a ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors to the legislation, but restrictions on medical interventions receive more mixed support when polled.)
Despite the polling, the bill is unlikely to become law. GOP leaders have taken preliminary steps toward “Reconciliation 3.0,” but top Senate Republicans are already casting doubt that they can get it done with only a handful of legislative weeks left before November. And many Republicans are hesitant to blow up the Senate filibuster to pass it any other way, as Trump has demanded.
To the White House, it’s baffling that Congress has yet to advance something the president spent years campaigning on.
“None of this should be new. They’ve heard it for the last three years, essentially,” the senior White House official said.
Trump, who has never moved past his belief the 2020 election was stolen, despite no evidence to support that, insists Democrats cheat to win and the SAVE America Act is needed to counter their assault on democracy. He frequently “weaves” during press conferences to address the issue, seeing fraud all around.
Earlier this month, Trump took aim at California’s slow ballot-counting process to argue — again, without evidence — that Democrats were stealing the election.
“Look what’s happening in California, the Dumocrats, right before our very eyes, are stealing the Vote,” he wrote on Truth Social, using a pejorative for Democrats. “I hope the Republicans are watching so that they can finally pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT!”
The president is receiving encouragement from outside allies, including former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who believe it’s worth pushing the legislation despite Senate intransigence.
But few believe the SAVE America Act has a chance, and Trump’s insistence on attaching it to everything just makes it harder to pass anything.
“My God, we were about to fast track the DNI director and now we’re in this holding pattern,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). “At some point, we’ve got to return ourselves to being a board of directors versus like a manufacturing facility that just creates whatever product the White House wants. It’s not the way you can manage the Senate agenda over time.”
For many in the GOP, it’s the latest example of a president who just doesn’t get the difference between winning a primary and winning a general election.
“The president didn’t accept the results of the 2020 election. He still thinks he won. He wants to prevent what he calls cheating,” said one person close to the White House, a former administration official, who like others was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “The Senate’s kind of like, this isn’t the issue that’s going to keep us the Senate, or gain seats … This is a primary debate, this is not a general election conversation.”
Republicans also fret over Trump’s decision to back primary challenges against his own party’s incumbents — endorsing Ken Paxton for Senate in Texas and spending resources defeating state senators in Indiana who refused to redraw congressional maps in his favor. Outside Republicans see those moves as a costly distraction in what is shaping up to be a close election.
“I look at the Georgia Senate delegation and that should say all we know about Donald Trump picking the right people,” said GOP strategist Doug Heye, referring to the two consecutive cycles in which Trump-backed candidates cost Republicans opportunities to pick off Georgia Senate seats.
The war in Iran and its inflationary spike, the controversial selection of federal housing director Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence and Trump’s inability to stay on message to address Americans’ kitchen-table concerns have given outside Republicans more ammunition to argue the president is making their jobs harder.
Voters are “concerned about the cost of living and can they afford the things they want to afford for themselves and their family,” said Wisconsin-based GOP strategist Mark Graul. Yet, “if this Iran deal is truly going to be the deal that gets things going back in the right direction in terms of oil prices and gas prices and transportation costs, then absolutely it’s a good step in the right direction for the midterms.”
To Trump, the solution is simple: None of this would matter if Republicans would just follow his lead.
Even as Trump last week praised Senate Majority Leader John Thune, his frustration with the Senate has stayed close to the surface — occasionally boiling over. Part of it, allies say, stems from his conviction that Democrats steal elections and that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer would abandon the filibuster without hesitation if he were in charge.
“That’s what frustrates the president — you have something like the SAVE America Act, which you know basically only American citizens should be voting, show ID,” said a second person close to the White House. “That has overwhelming support among the American people. And if you’re John Thune, you should do everything in your power to get that passed.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, in a statement, said that the White House and Trump have “enjoyed working closely with Leader Thune and Senate Republicans to deliver on many important promises to the American people, including the largest tax cut for working Americans in history, and the Secure America Act that fully funds the President’s border security agenda.”
“We look forward to continuing these close relationships and fulfilling President Trump’s priorities that Americans elected him to enact,” she added.
But among the president’s most hardline allies, that frustration has cemented into something sharper.
“Thune is the problem — and his inaction is going to lead to the Republicans losing the Senate. He treats the president worse than a lame duck — with contempt and a lack of respect,” Bannon said.
A person familiar with Senate dynamics, granted anonymity to speak candidly, shot back that Thune’s eye is on the ball and that Trump’s focus on election integrity does more harm than good.
“Poll after poll shows that voters — the ones who decide general elections — are increasingly driven by the economy, not the SAVE America Act or arcane Senate rules, which is why John Thune has been practically begging his colleagues and the president to focus on wins like the president’s signature achievement: The One Big Beautiful Bill,” the person said. “It’s hard to turn on CSPAN2 these days without seeing Thune on the floor talking about the litany of pro-growth policies that are positively affecting American families – lower tax rates, no tax on tips and overtime, a bigger child tax credit. It’s no accident that he’s clearly trying to reset the narrative amid the litany of daily distractions.”
Even the White House allies who acknowledge the math problem Thune has and the impracticality of what he’s being asked to do sympathize with Trump’s exasperation. A third person close to the White House said that senators “barely check the box of trying” to pass Trump’s agenda.
“When the other day [Thune’s] answer was, ‘I’ve given a really long Senate speech,’” the person said, “I’m like, oh boy, man, nothing says I worked my tail off more than, ‘I gave a long speech.’”
Diana Nerozzi contributed to this report.
