White House Lawyers Secretly Prep Trump Team for Brutal Midterms

The White House is forecasting a rough November for congressional Republicans.

In private briefings, attorneys at the White House Counsel’s Office are preparing executive branch staff for a blue wave in the 2026 elections, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The 30-minute briefings feature a PowerPoint presentation detailing how congressional oversight works and best practices for handling it, reported the Post. Other components of the past-due education involve guidance on how to respond to congressional inquiries in a timely manner.

“It’s obvious to everyone that it’s very likely,” one attending official told the Post. “It was a sober-eyed conversation.”

A White House official said that the meetings were “nothing new” and that the counsel’s office has provided oversight guidance to relevant stakeholders since Donald Trump returned to office.

Yet multiple sources that spoke with the Post explained that recent meetings with the office were acutely focused on the midterms and their fallout.

Trump, who was once a golden ticket for the Republican Party at the ballot box, has in his second term cooked up a litany of issues, any one of which could be a death knell for conservatives come November.

In the 15 months since he returned to America’s highest office, Trump has launched the U.S. into a war with Iran, sparking a global energy crisis that has raised the cost of living pretty much everywhere. He also invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its leader, Nicolás Maduro, axed thousands of staffers from the federal government and crippled some government agencies, and used his office to target his political opponents.

He has hobbled America’s press, sowed doubt and distrust in the country’s democratic elections, undermined the judiciary system, pardoned hundreds of people who served his personal interests—such as those who attacked Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021—imposed nonsensical tariffs on U.S. trading partners, aggressed America’s international alliances, abused the purpose of executive orders, and endorsed violent immigration policies and detention centers that have been compared to concentration camps, among other issues.

His lagging popularity has been reflected in nationwide polls: 62 percent of Americans disapprove of the president, according to an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll published Friday, a growth of two percentage points since the poll was previously conducted in February.

Despite the cost of his own influence, the president has placed enormous pressure on his party to win, well aware of the consequences that await him if they don’t.

“You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump said in January. “I’ll get impeached.”

President Donald Trump derailed his own speech Monday to insist how mentally healthy he is, following new poll data showing that a record high of Americans think he’s lost his mind.

“I feel the same as I felt 50 years ago, I don’t know,” Trump told the audience at a small-business summit at the White House.

“I’ll say, ‘I’m not feeling well’—well, someday, I might say that to you, and you’ll be the first to know. Actually I won’t have to say it, because you’ll be able to see it, just like you did in the last administration,” Trump said.

Americans have already been seeing Trump’s apparent cognitive decline: A recent poll found that 59 percent of Americans don’t think Trump has the mental acuity to serve as president, and 55 percent think he is not in physical shape to do so.

Trump continued ranting about his pitch to require candidates for office to take cognitive tests. “No president has ever taken one except me, and I’ve taken three of them. And I’ve aced each one,” he said.

Trump went on to describe the test, which sounds a lot like the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a 10-minute assessment designed to identify signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s. It is not a test for intelligence.

“You know the first question is very easy. They always show the first question, it’s: You have a lion, a bear, an alligator, and a—what’s another good—a squirrel, OK? Which is the squirrel?” Trump said, claiming the questions got increasingly complex.

He then veered into a tirade against California Governor Gavin Newsom before resuming his point. “I think everyone in this room is brilliant, but nobody’s gonna get all 30 questions correct. Nobody. ’Cause when you get to those last questions they’re pretty hard, you got to be pretty sharp.

“One doctor said, ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone get all questions right.’ That’s a doctor, who does this stuff for a living. And I did it three times. So, I don’t know. I think I’m done with those days, I’m tired of taking those tests,” Trump said.

Trump segued again, insisting on the importance of picking an intelligent leader during times of war. He went on to claim that his military campaign in Iran only lasted six weeks, though the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for more than two months; that the Vietnam War lasted 19 years, even though the U.S. was only really involved for eight; and that the war in Iraq was 10 or 12 years long, when, again, it was really only eight.

A federal judge on Monday apologized to Cole Allen, the alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter, for what his lawyers described as “excessive restrictions on his liberty that serve no justifiable purpose.”

Cole Allen, who stormed into the Washington Hilton last month, was placed on temporary suicide watch upon arriving in jail in Washington, D.C.—even as he did not appear to be suicidal. He was also placed in a “safe cell,” a padded enclosure extremely similar to solitary confinement, made to wear a restrictive vest, and was only allowed out of his cell to speak to lawyers or receive medical attention.

His treatment in jail has been worse than that of the January 6 rioters, warned Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, who oversaw many of their cases.

“The Jan. 6 defendants all were moved to the [Central Treatment Facility],” Faruqui said. “Pardons may erase convictions but they do not erase history.… He’s being treated differently than anyone I’ve ever observed.

“He can be both kept safe and treated with dignity. Right now, it’s not working. I think it’s legally deficient and ultimately if the DOC can’t do it, I’ll speak to the U.S. attorney’s office,” Faruqui continued. “I know they have other facilities they can contract with. If you all cannot handle it, we’re going to have to reassess that with the marshals and the Department of Justice.”

Insecurity about the midterms is rising—and Republicans are shoving some of the blame onto House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Concern is spreading that Johnson has “lost control of his conference,” creating an environment that is unlikely to pass meaningful legislation before the November elections, The Hill reported Monday.

North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer warned that the caucus’s relentless infighting has hurt the GOP brand, potentially sinking both chambers of Congress.

“It’s not like these things are hard. That’s the thing,” Cramer told The Hill. “I feel like the Senate has teed up things fairly easily for them, even to the point where if they don’t like it, they can blame us. And they still haven’t taken the opportunity to actually govern, and I do think it’s hurting the brand. The House is rowdy.”

Johnson barely kept the party afloat last week amid what Texas Representative Troy Nehls aptly dubbed “hell week.” “We can’t really agree on much of anything,” Nehls said on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

Republicans in the lower chamber struggled to tackle high-priority GOP issues such as extending the government’s warrantless spying powers, passing the farm bill, and funding the Department of Homeland Security. Votes stretched on for hours, and committee hearings flew off the rails. But the squabbles—and the dissent—persisted.

“We’re moving from one fire drill to the next every single week, and then half the time it feels like, why are we even here?” one House Republican told MS NOW on Friday.

Some of the bluster followed weeks of intraparty protests, in which members of the House GOP adamantly opposed bills introduced and passed by their Senate colleagues. Yet House Republicans were all too willing to bend as the clock ticked down to deadline on various policy issues, prompting scorn and criticism from the upper chamber.

“It’s like a wreck over there,” one Republican senator told The Hill on the condition of anonymity, noting that their mainstream GOP colleagues in the House shared their frustration.

“They don’t know if they’re coming or going. Everybody is fighting,” the senator said.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has tapped a top New York Democrat to lead redistricting efforts in the state after the Supreme Court handed the Republican Party a major advantage for the upcoming midterms.

Jeffries directed Representative Joe Morelle, the former majority leader in the New York state assembly, to meet with state leaders in order to redraw congressional districts “for the balance of the decade,” the two said in a joint statement Monday. New York currently has 19 Democrats and seven Republicans in the House of Representatives.

This directive comes less than a week after the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 along party lines in Louisiana v. Callais to effectively dismantle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race. The court’s conservative majority raised new hurdles for those seeking to prove a racial gerrymandering claim, and gave its blessing to those who would claim partisan gerrymandering as a legal defense.

Within hours of the decision, New York Governor Kathy Hochul had already signaled that she supported a redistricting effort in her state. “The Supreme Court has been chipping away at our elections for years. It is clearly carrying out Donald Trump’s will with this decision,” she wrote on X Wednesday. “New York has always led the fight for voting rights and we’ll lead again. I’m working with the Legislature to change New York’s redistricting process so we can fight back against Washington’s attempts to rig our democracy.”

Jeffries’s order was also given in response to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis implementing a map that his own office specifically drew in order to capture four more Republican seats in time for November’s midterm elections. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to threaten red states that refuse to rig their elections in his favor.