Republican Candidates Told to Distance From Trump to Save Midterms

The Republican Party no longer sees Donald Trump as its golden goose.

With midterms around the corner, the president’s allies are reportedly urging Republican candidates to break from Trump’s rhetoric on the Iran war in order to save their election odds.

“The understanding is pretty damn implicit: The president is going to say what the president is going to say,” a Republican operative working on the party’s midterm races told MS NOW on the condition of anonymity. “You’re not going to have candidates or lawmakers running out to defend the president’s handling of the economy or the war—polling shows that most people don’t agree with his handling.”

The Iran war has done nothing good for America in the 21 weeks since it began. The conflict has so far killed at least 18 U.S. service members and wounded more than 600 others. It has also taken an enormous toll on daily life in the U.S., inflaming the cost of practically everything as shipping companies contend with rising oil costs. As a result, Trump’s approval rating has plummeted, with trust and loyalty rattled even within his base, which is reportedly losing patience with the unyielding violence.

The White House is now basically cutting its losses, allowing midterm-bound Republicans the opportunity to save themselves from Trump’s sinking ship.

“There is less paranoia and more autonomy,” a Republican strategist in Michigan familiar with the national and regional communications of the party told MS NOW. “[Trump] is still doing the work for the incumbents, but giving them space without lashing out.”

Another Republican operative told the network that “nuance has been adopted in Trump 2.0 that wasn’t in 1.0,” noting that if a candidate is in a state “where he can get someone better and more loyal, he’ll do it,” but “if you’re in a state where you’re the best he can get, there’s a deeper comprehension of that reality.”

A fourth GOP operative familiar with the White House’s strategy referred to debates on Iran as a “Democrat trap.”

“If a candidate lets their race become a referendum on Iran, that’s a mistake,” they said.

President Trump spent his entire Sunday on a bender, posting nonstop AI images to his Truth Social page for more than six hours.

It started at 11:16 a.m. with an AI image of CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins as transgender model Dylan Mulvaney holding cans of Bud Light, and escalated from there. Bruce Springsteen, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Representative Jerry Nadler, and Trump’s longtime nemesis Rosie O’Donnell were among those targeted in his posting binge. He also posted several flattering photos of himself in mock-up movie posters and, in one instance, standing next to former President John F. Kennedy.

None of the images had any text attached to them, and they were interspersed with some of his campaign photos and pro-Iran war propaganda. At one point, he posted nine Iran war memes three times in a row in the span of just over an hour.

It’s pretty clear that the octogenarian president is experiencing cognitive decline and had some kind of episode Sunday. It’s been evident throughout his second term as president, but as of late, he’s thrown a tablet across a room after a bad phone call with world leaders, rambled about the history of paper clips in the middle of a speech, and zoned out in the middle of a photo op. It’s a terrifying thought to realize that we still have two years of Trump occupying the Oval Office with his mental state only growing worse.

In January, President Trump told the media that his deadly extrajudicial strikes on alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean had maritime drug flow “down 97 percent.” New reporting from The Washington Post shows that was a lie. After over 60 strikes, more than 200 people are dead with no trial, and the Drug Enforcement Administration has confirmed that the flow of cocaine into the U.S. has not been impeded at all.

Instead of stopping shipments, traffickers have just changed their strategies, taking larger vessels or even planes to circumvent international waters, the DEA found.

“The business is so extraordinarily profitable that the cartels do not mind paying freight costs that are five or even 10 times higher,” one naval intelligence official from Ecuador said. “They know that while the United States may destroy one speedboat, they will successfully get 10 semisubmersibles—or other speedboats that evade detection—through.”

“When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side,” an anonymous DEA official told the Post. “They always find the weak spots and exploit them.” While DEA officials noted that prices rose after the first two months of strikes, smugglers “adapted to the intensified pressure,” and neither supply nor price had “been noticeably affected.”

In April, just over seven months into the strikes, Trump wrote that “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” It’s unclear where he got that number from.

Perhaps most troubling of all is the 221 people killed by the U.S. government without any kind of trial or legal process. There’s no way we even know for sure that they were “narcoterrorists”—these could have very well been innocent people. And if so, they’ve been killed for no reason, serving as fodder for Trump to drum up fear and resentment toward Latin America.

The White House has admitted in court that it deliberately canceled federal grants to states that didn’t vote for President Trump.

In court documents filed last week, and first reported on by The New York Times, Trump administration officials confirmed they terminated $7.5 billion in clean energy grants in October “based solely” on political criteria, focusing on states with Democratic leadership that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. The admission came in a lawsuit filed by California researchers challenging the cancellation of Biden-era funding in multiple federal agencies.

At the time, the White House said it was slashing the grants, passed during the Biden administration, to prevent tax dollars from being wasted. Office of Management and Budget director and Project 2025 architect Russ Vought called the money “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda,” and singled out projects in 16 blue states: “CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.”

Only one month ago, Energy Secretary Chris Wright angrily insisted to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the cuts “did not involve politics in the decision-making of our review process,” calling any accusation that the funding cancellations targeted certain states for political reasons “bullshit.”

But last week, a Department of Energy lawyer conceded the obvious.

“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators,” the attorney wrote in a court filing, confessing that the grants were not terminated “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

Similar green energy grants in Republican-led states that voted for Trump in 2024 were left untouched, despite the Department of Energy recommending their cancellation, the government said in the filing. The Trump administration is coming clean now, it said, because it wanted to avoid the government having to participate in the discovery process for the lawsuit.

That process could lead to the government having to hand over much more damaging internal documents to the lawyers representing the researchers. It’s not just about clean energy grants. The Trump administration has also held up other federal funding for states that didn’t support the president, such as FEMA disaster aid and childcare funding. While the court’s decision on this lawsuit is still pending, no matter how the judge rules, Trump is not likely to end his belligerent attempts to use federal funding as punishment.

Republicans are urging the president to sidestep negotiations with Tehran and instead pound Iran even harder.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker told The Hill Thursday that he encouraged the president to continue hitting the country through multiple conversations over the course of the week.

“I’ve expressed publicly and privately my approval of finishing the job, and realizing that negotiations were getting us nowhere,” Wicker said. “I’ve made it clear that Iran, in my judgment, has no intention of negotiating in good faith or keeping a promise and that it’s pointless to pretend that they are a trustworthy negotiating party.”

Wicker added that he believed the U.S. could “keep the [Strait of Hormuz] open on our terms” and that the strait is “the key to a successful conclusion of hostilities.”

Texas Representative Ronny Jackson, a close friend of Trump’s who also served as his first-term physician, told The Hill that the military needs to attack Iran “as hard as we possibly can right now.”

“I would do everything I possibly can right now to turn them around. So that’d be my thought,” said Jackson, who has positioned himself to be the next chair of the House Armed Services Committee.

“I just think maximum pressure from the air and maximum security of the strait—anything they have that they could possibly use to cause problems in the strait needs to be destroyed,” Jackson added.

Trump made clear this week that he intends to ramp up the unyielding conflict. In an ominous Truth Social post Thursday, Trump pledged to hold Tehran “responsible” for attacks carried out by Yemen’s Houthis the night before against Saudi Arabian ships. Hours later, Trump told Axios that he was “considering a massive attack.”

“Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it,” the president told the digital outlet.

The unending Iran war has deeply frustrated Trump, according to administration officials who spoke with The Wall Street Journal late Thursday. Trump has tried to find an off-ramp from the conflict in the months since he threatened to obliterate Iran’s “entire civilization,” but he has been repeatedly unsuccessful in doing so.

But while MAGA war hawks urge him on, some of Trump’s advisers are reportedly concerned that the ongoing hostilities could harm Republican election odds in November, a failure that could transform his final two years in office. Trump pursued war against Iran following an unusual Situation Room meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump then went to war without congressional approval, and without formally addressing the American public regarding his intent.

Americans, meanwhile, have suffered. The war has killed at least 18 U.S. service members, and taken an enormous toll on daily life in the U.S., inflaming the cost of practically everything as shipping companies contend with rising oil costs.