From the ex-loyalists to the reporters who covered him, everyone who saw Donald Trump up close has the same prediction for next month’s midterm elections: Maga will lose — and Trump will lose it.
In deep red Kansas, Maga diehards have started walking up to Stephanie Grisham in the grocery store to tell her that she was right.
Grisham was Donald Trump’s White House press secretary. Ever since she quit — saying she rejected our former boss’s voter fraud narrative — she’s been considered the town traitor. One man, in particular, has glared at her for years. A few weeks ago, he finally walked up to her, and she braced for the worst.
“Trump’s an idiot,” he said. “I’ll give you that.” Then he walked away.
In the same month, two more of her neighbours (who’d voted for Trump three times), told her it was time for him to go. This is a state where a Democrat has not flipped a Senate seat in nearly 100 years, yet this year, polls show that it might happen because people are so fed up with the president and his party.
I’ve spent years warning about Donald Trump. But this week I’m not going to ask you to read my forecasts. Instead, I want you to read what other people are saying, including a hyper-loyalist who stood by his side, reporters who sat in the front row and asked him questions to his face, and a lawyer whose job it was to tell him “no”.
I had put questions to these folks amid reports that the midterms look grim for Republicans and that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has a supposed plan to turn the election around.
Stephanie Grisham, former Trump press secretary turned critic, says Maga diehards have been telling her she was right (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)Analysts think the GOP will lose its majority in the House of Representatives and will be lucky to hold the Senate. What the people who know him best will tell you is that Wiles may have a plan, but Trump doesn’t. He’s already moved on to something else: the havoc he’s going to wreak in the aftermath.
I want to go back to Grisham, because nobody can say she wasn’t a true believer. She was there from the first campaign, rose to become press secretary, and stayed until the day after January 6th. She attacked me when I quit the first Trump administration in protest and spoke out against the President, calling me a “coward” who was peddling “nothing but lies”. Later, she recanted and described the danger that she felt Trump posed to the nation if he returned to the presidency.
When I asked her whether the President understands what he’s doing to Republican candidates this autumn, she didn’t hesitate. “He doesn’t care,” she told me. “If the House or the Senate flip, or both, he gets to spend the next two years playing the victim. He does not care if we win the midterms.”
The party is fighting for its life, and its leader is already trying to weaponise the loss. For him, a hostile Congress is an excuse to let it rip, and Trump has never met an excuse he didn’t like, especially if it gives him licence to cause chaos.
This month, commercials began airing touting the President’s toughness on cable television only weeks before the election, ending with a disclaimer: paid for by the US government. Every federal employee — including me, in every job I held in government — gets a day-one briefing on what’s called the Hatch Act. It’s the law that makes it illegal to use government resources or taxpayer money for political purposes. Richard Painter, the former White House ethics lawyer, said the ads were a potentially impeachable offence.
A White House official said the ads were “clearly not political. The president is not on the ballot, and the ads don’t have a call to action”, with a spokesperson pointing to past examples of ads released by former administrations, including George W. Bush’s Department of Health and Human Services and Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, and Joe Biden’s administration (to encourage Covid-19 vaccination).
A White House spokesman added: “These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad. The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country.”
A demonstration against Trump in Medinah, Illinois, this week (Photo: Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)Grisham’s seen this movie before. In the first term, the White House counsel’s office told her to take down a tweet, because it broke the Hatch Act. Trump overruled them. “You know who the boss of the Hatch Act is?” he told her. “It’s me.”
There’s something else striking about these adverts. They’re not about Republican candidates. They’re about him. “You are struggling to buy groceries and gas,” Grisham told me, “and he’s using your taxpayer money to put ads up that make him look good.” A man actually fighting for his party to win would be touting his candidates, she said, but a man trying to distance himself ahead of their expected losses (and trying to secure his own legacy) spends the ad dollars on himself.
The biggest change, she says, is who is left in the room. “He’s got no one around him telling him no.” In the first term, people would at least push back; he would get angry, say fine, and the next morning we’d find that he’d done the ill-advised thing anyway. Then would begin the hard work of walking it back. Now nobody bothers with the first step. Indeed, the recent White House ban on CNN, MSNOW and Politico went into place while gatekeeper Susie Wiles was on holiday.
I also queried several reporters who’ve covered Trump up close for years about what they’re expecting. Brian Karem has reported from every White House since Ronald Reagan, including Trump. (He’s currently suing to get his White House press pass back.) “I’m not convinced Donald Trump reads anything, much less a playbook,” he told me when I asked him whether the President’s recent moves showed he was becoming more despotic. “Call him authoritarian, call him a spoiled brat, call him a bully. That’s who Donald Trump is.” Karem sees the man becoming more unhinged if he loses control of either chamber of Congress.
Jim Acosta shares a similar view. He also had his credentials pulled by this president in 2018 for asking tough questions and won them back in court. He’s covered Trump for a decade, and he’s blunter still. “We’re in the throes… of a wannabe dictator who cannot handle negative coverage,” he said. Like the others, he predicts an even more unpredictable Trump, partly because of a staff who won’t stop him. “They’re just placating him and letting him do these things without any pushback. It’s a signal that he will do just about anything at this point.”
Acosta says this about the run-up to the vote: “The next 45 days, and probably the 45 days after that, are going to be pure hell in this country.”
Which brings me to Ty Cobb. He was a White House lawyer in the first term, a careful conservative whose job was to keep the President inside the lines. With a grey handlebar mustache and a visage that evokes another time, he’s not given to hyperbole, which is why his words were the most jarring of the people I spoke with.
Former White House lawyer and conservative Ty Cobb says Trump will ‘try to be like an emperor’ (Photo: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg via Getty Images)“The Constitution was simply not written for somebody as evil as Trump,” he said. “The founders never contemplated that America would elect a convicted felon to be their president. But we did.”
Cobb’s worry is not so much the election itself. It’s what a man with no restraint does when the election goes against him. “All he knows is what he wants, and he grabs it. And he’s got people who facilitate that.” He points to the new White House counsel, Will Scharf, who spent his 2024 run for attorney general in Missouri calling the 2020 election stolen. Until Democrats take the House and use the power of the purse, Cobb expects “atrocity after atrocity”.
Grisham concurs. “I really think he’s going to do things like, ‘hey, guy in a tractor, go to the Kennedy Center and knock it down. And don’t worry, I’ll pardon you,’” she said, referencing Trump’s ongoing fury at the refusal of the courts to let him plaster his name on the performing arts centre in DC named after a deceased president. She explained why Trump is barely phoning it in for GOP candidates: “He doesn’t need anyone’s votes. He’s going to try to be like an emperor.”
So here’s the strange part. Each of these people is frightened about what comes next, yet every one of them is more hopeful than they’ve been in years. Not because of the Democrats. Because of people like the man in the grocery store.
In the past month, Republicans have scrubbed Trump’s name from their websites. Senators have called for an investigation into his son. The Vice President has been dispatched to defend candidates in states the party never expected to worry about. And Trump’s approval rating is hovering in the twenties, which is almost unprecedented.
Grisham’s bet is that when the losses come, it will be Republicans, not just Democrats, who finally take votes to rein in the President. “The next two years will be bad. He’ll act crazy. But I think he will be stopped. I really do believe we’re about to be on the downside of this horrible mountain.”
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