Trump commandeers Cabinet members to campaign in midterms, ordering them to drop or mute controversial stances

President Donald Trump is preparing his Cabinet members and top aides — at least those who haven’t been fired or are about to be fired — for a new strategy aimed squarely at the midterms.

Key members will crisscross the country, especially in Republican areas, to try to minimize the party’s losses in November.

Inside: The more popular parts of the Trump agenda.

Out: The more controversial aspects of the Trump agenda that have suddenly become politically inconvenient.

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It’s an uphill climb. Trump acknowledged that the president’s party has come under attack, often in its sixth year. Some Trump loyalists privately acknowledge that the GOP will almost certainly lose control of the House of Representatives and possibly even the Senate.

If Hakeem Jeffries becomes speaker, it will trigger endless investigations that will make Trump look even more like a lame duck than he already is under the Constitution.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the classic example of this. He has spent much of the past year fighting against vaccines, in line with his lifelong anti-vax campaign that is not supported by scientific evidence. Kennedy branded the Making America Healthy Again movement.

He fired the CDC director (he said RFK ordered him to approve his policies without evidence), fired other agency officials, and still hasn’t found a permanent director.

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But as Politico reported, Kennedy “was told by the White House to stay away from the more polarizing parts of the MAHA agenda, like vaccine skepticism, and focus instead on issues like nutrition.”

The website says the campaign should reactivate about half of MAHA supporters who say Trump and Kennedy aren’t doing enough to make America healthier. RFK is a lifelong Democrat, and his party sees a chance to sway voters interested in goals long associated with the left, such as unprocessed foods and reducing chemicals in the environment.

Trump is not the first president to use his cabinet as the midterm elections approach. Jimmy Carter fired his health secretary, treasury secretary, energy secretary, transportation secretary, and attorney general in 1979. It didn’t help. And that same year, Iran blushed when it took 52 Americans hostage.

The White House reportedly advised Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “stay away from the more polarizing parts of the MAHA agenda,” according to Politico. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

“Cabinet members will be asked to focus on various things Trump has done since taking office, including tax cuts.” Axios reports.

He is also considering firing FBI Director Kash Patel and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, according to media reports, but abandoned plans to fire national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard after meeting with her aides.

Yesterday the President dealt a harsh blow to one of our long-time allies:

“We rebuilt Germany. How about Germany telling us that, Germany telling us this is not their war. ‘We have nothing to do with it.’ They asked me to go and tell them everything I had done. ‘We didn’t know anything about it.’ Well, if I had told them they would have leaked it and we probably wouldn’t have been as successful, right?”

He also accused the media of revealing that a second crew member was missing on the F-15 that Iran shot down, although this was revealed almost immediately.

“We didn’t talk about the first one for an hour. Then someone leaked something, we’re hoping we’ll find it – that leaker. We’re trying hard to find the leaker. And they mentioned someone was missing. Basically we have one and they said someone was missing. So, they didn’t know someone was missing until this leaker gave the information. So whoever it is, we think we can find it because we’re going to go to the media company that published that information. We’re going to say national security, you either give up or you go to jail. We also know who it is, And you know who we’re talking about.”

Israeli Channel 12 correspondent Amit Segal posted on X at 11:19 a.m. Friday: “Western source: One of the American crew members was successfully rescued.”

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A. New York Times report Stephen Miller, the architect of the harsh mass deportation campaign, explains the deputy chief of staff:

“He faces questions about how aggressively he can continue to wage his deportation campaign and how willing his party and country are to engage in tactics that have proven successful in helping increase the detention of immigrants but have reignited a polarizing debate about what it means to be an American. Miller even backed off his public appearances for a time.”

So he applies the same policies even to immigrants without criminal records, but… quietly.

“Rather than see his power diminish, Mr. Miller has turned to enforcing it in other ways, seeking policies that would force undocumented immigrants to leave on their own.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “faces questions about how aggressively he can continue to pursue the deportation campaign,” according to the New York Times. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Oh, there’s one more thing.

You may get the impression that there will be a big blue wave in November.

However Charlie CookAn experienced and decidedly non-partisan political analyst explains why this is not the case.

While Democrats are all but certain to take the House, “only three Republicans were elected in districts won by Kamala Harris in 2024. Among independents nationally, Trump’s approval ratings are generally in the low 20s and 30s, but gerrymandering and political self-sorting by population have reduced the number of purple districts, thus diminishing the power of independents. There are very few Republican-held seats anywhere this much at stake.”

With the Republican endorsement of the president in the ’80s, “MAGA voters are so in love with him and so trusting in him that neither the Epstein files nor the attacks on Venezuela and Iran are robbing them. So the Democrats have their work cut out for them to flip a lot of red districts.”

This brings us to mathematics. “Only 17 GOP seats are rated Toss Up or worse. Adding the next level of competitive seats (‘Lean Republican’) brings only three more GOP seats to the competitive pile, well below the average post-World War II mid-term result of a 26-seat loss for the president’s party…Democrats could run the table, hold all of their own sensitive seats, and still fall short in the 2006 or 2018 pickups.”

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What’s more, says Charlie, over the past eight years, “the party that lost a seat in the House actually won in the Senate. With only a third of the Senate contested every two years and only a handful of seats contested in most years, the results in the upper chamber tend to be more idiosyncratic.”

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Trump is appointing the Cabinet because he expects serious losses in November. But this may not be the boom most forecasters were expecting.