The White House Urges Republicans to Ignore Trump DiversionsNEWS | 24 February 2026Last Thursday, the White House tried to get President Trump to focus on the economic concerns driving the midterm elections. Instead, he issued a 10-to-15-day ultimatum to Iran, claimed that his wife’s documentary was so good that some women had seen it four times, and accused his predecessor Barack Obama of releasing classified information about space aliens.
Few actually watched his 68-minute speech on the economy later that afternoon at the Coosa Steel Corporation in Georgia. But even if they had tuned in, they would have found Trump’s recitation of his economic talking points overshadowed by his banter about wanting to award himself the Congressional Medal of Honor, claims that the FBI found “plenty of stuff” when it raided Fulton County’s election office, or the suggestion, denied by his own advisers, that inflation was no longer an issue: “I’ve won affordability.”
So it fell to aides at the White House to email reporters with the message top political advisers have tested and refined as the best way to move voters in 2026. Their strategy is to highlight the accomplishments of the administration—tax cuts, lower gas prices, foreign investment—while promising that more is to come. “Republican leadership is building a brighter, more prosperous future for all Georgians—and today’s visit underscores President Trump’s unrelenting commitment to finishing the job,” the press release said.
Trump will have another chance to sell his economic agenda tonight, when he delivers his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress, in what is likely to be his most-watched speech of the year. But top White House advisers and Republican strategists have so little faith that he will stick to the script in the months ahead that they are reverting to a 2024 playbook: They will let Trump be Trump, while demanding discipline from the rest of the GOP ecosystem.
Many of Trump’s top advisers gathered with the Cabinet last Tuesday at the Capitol Hill Club, not far from the House chamber, for a briefing on the new strategy. James Blair, the White House deputy chief of staff in charge of midterm efforts, explained to the group that the message had to be nuanced, recognizing both Trump’s accomplishments and the continued economic struggles of many voters, one of the Republicans in the room told me, requesting anonymity to discuss the private meeting. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1934 midterms, did not go around saying that everything was great, Blair told the crowd. Instead, Roosevelt’s team argued that things were getting better, and that if Democrats stayed in power, much more improvement awaited.
The challenge, of course, is similar to the one Trump’s team faced during the previous presidential election, when they rolled out an advertising strategy largely focused on economic concerns that felt disconnected from everything Trump was saying. That difficulty is amplified because Trump is now in the White House, and this is his economy. The president fills his speeches with superlatives—the best, the greatest, the biggest—not nuance. He has for months been focused elsewhere, on foreign policy, building projects, getting revenge on those who he feels have done him wrong—all areas where he has more control. Inside the White House, aides have tried to keep Trump from becoming fatalistic about losing the House, after he told a reporter, “When you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” in January. He has committed to traveling the country about once every two weeks until the start of spring, when his travel is expected to increase to weekly or more.
At the Capitol Hill briefing, Blair and the pollster Tony Fabrizio asked Trump’s top deputies to drive the economic storyline that Trump sometimes discards. “The president will have his message. And that works for him. But you are not the president, and here are the messages that the data show work,” the person who attended the meeting told me, summarizing the strategy. “Going on Fox News and reiterating what the president says every day—that is a problem.”
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Asked to comment for this story, the White House spokesperson Kush Desai sent me a statement that argued the economic benefits of Trump’s efforts are just beginning: “President Trump pledged to turn the page on Joe Biden’s inflation and affordability crisis, and the Trump administration is embarking on an ambitious agenda of reform across every sector of our economy to deliver.”
Strategists at the National Republican Congressional Committee have been making the case that tax refunds are up and more benefits will be felt late in the year. They have also pointed to low approval ratings for the Democratic Party, following the 2024 wipeout. “After inheriting Joe Biden’s economically disastrous spending spree, President Trump and Republicans are delivering real relief for the American people,” Mike Marinella, a NRCC spokesperson, told me. “The contrast is clear: Republicans are delivering relief where it counts while Democrats want to get back to their status quo of failures.”
Democrats, for their part, are counting on Trump to continue to bungle the economic messaging. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has for months summed up his party’s argument as a focused antidote to Trump’s more scattered priorities. “America is too expensive, and Donald Trump is doing nothing about it,” Jeffries said in a January interview with Jim Acosta. “He’s focused on Venezuela or Greenland or Iran or Syria.”
It’s a story that Democrats say resonates with voters. Just after Trump took office last year, Democratic polling by Navigator found that 59 percent of voters thought inflation, along with the cost of living, was the most important political issue. Only 29 percent thought this was the issue that Trump and Republicans in Congress were most focused on. Now, one year later, that 30-point gap has grown to 38 points, and voters report that Trump and his colleagues are far more focused on issues such as foreign conflicts and immigration than they are.
“His obsession is on everything other than what matters to people’s lives,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist, told me. “If Bill Clinton is ‘I feel your pain,’ Donald Trump is ‘I want you to feel my pain.’ He is all about what makes a ballroom and getting FIFA World Cup peace prizes.”
Republican strategists tell me they have seen similar warning signs. When a national GOP organization recently assembled a focus group of independent swing voters, those involved were alarmed by the number of people who described Trump as distracted or not caring about the right issues, including one voter who questioned why the president was so focused on gaining control of Greenland. Several Republicans told me they are worried about Trump’s continued obsession with unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud in the 2020 election, which they said is not only too far afield of voter concerns but could also backfire if it depresses turnout among Republican voters who don’t trust elections, increases turnout among Democrats, or alienates independents.
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A national Republican election strategist noted that the GOP lost the Senate in 2020 after Democrats flipped seats in Georgia and Arizona—the epicenter of the fraud claims—and then lost numerous House and Senate races in 2022 after candidates embraced the false theories. “President Trump was in large part elected again because he was disciplined enough to focus on issues that voters cared about—inflation, jobs, border security, and the economy,” the strategist told me, “but any efforts to relitigate the ‘stolen election’ would be a disaster for Republicans this fall.”
Democratic candidates are proceeding on the same assumptions. On the western edge of North Carolina, the farmer Jamie Ager hopes to push out Republican Representative Chuck Edwards from a district that Trump won by 10 points in 2024. The region is still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Helene, which blasted through the area that year, and waiting for federal compensation to rebuild.
“I met a woman still living in a camper, and she is not able to get her home rebuilt. I have an employee whose family house floated away in the river,” Ager told me, before making an argument that will be repeated hundreds of times by Democrats this year. “To hear that we want to give money to Argentina, to spend money on Greenland, and to build a ballroom all feels like, Wait a second. We were all promised a lot of money down here, and that is not coming.”Author: Michael Scherer. Source
