Does Donald Trump even care about the midterms?

Late last year, when some influential voices within the Republican Party were calling for a crackdown on antisemitism in its midst, Vice-President J.D. Vance tried to stifle them by ridiculing “endless, self-defeating purity tests”. Appearing at the annual conference of Turning Point USA, which organises young conservatives, Mr Vance said Republicans should devote themselves to sustaining a broad coalition for Donald Trump rather than waste their energy cancelling each other: “We don’t care if you’re white or black, rich or poor, young or old, rural or urban, controversial or a little bit boring.”

To his list of adjectives the vice-president can add “Islamophobic”. Mr Trump has courted anti-Muslim bigotry since he ran in 2015, but lately some Republican officials have been revelling in it. “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Andy Ogles, a member from Tennessee, posted on X on March 9th. Three days later Randy Fine, a congressman from Florida, wrote, “We need more Islamophobia, not less.” To caption an image of the burning Twin Towers juxtaposed with one of Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, a Muslim, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama wrote, “The enemy is inside our gates.”

Mr Trump, Mr Vance and other Republican leaders have not objected to any of this. In their commitment to a big tent they would deserve points for consistency were it not for the one category of hater, or disliker, or mere malcontent whom Mr Trump and his lieutenants have always stopped at nothing to silence: any Republican who has anything negative to say about Mr Trump or his policies. To preserve party comity—supposedly—antisemitism and Islamophobia get a pass. But when it comes to fealty to Mr Trump, the president is administering what Mr Vance ought to recognise as an endless purity test, one that, for the Republican Party as it approaches the midterms, is becoming self-defeating.

In any White House there is no more precious resource than the president’s time. Yet on March 11th, with the country at war, Mr Trump made a rare appearance on the campaign trail, in Kentucky. He was there not to defend a vulnerable Republican congressman or to undermine a vulnerable Democrat, but to attack Thomas Massie, a Republican incumbent in a seat so safe that he was not even challenged by a Democrat in 2024. Mr Massie, a libertarian, had the effrontery to defy Mr Trump over his initial reluctance to release the Epstein files, and more recently over the war. So Mr Trump, calling Mr Massie “disloyal to the United States”, sought to boost his opponent in what has become one of the most expensive House Republican primaries.

Mr Trump’s allies are also spending millions of dollars in solidly Republican Indiana, not to help congressional candidates but to back primary challengers to state legislators. Mr Trump wants retribution against the state senators who opposed his demand to gerrymander congressional districts there. Perhaps most damaging to the Republican cause has been Mr Trump’s dithering about endorsing Senator John Cornyn, a Republican senator from Texas now in a primary run-off against the state attorney-general, Ken Paxton. If Mr Cornyn makes it to the general election the Democrats would have far less chance of winning his seat, and the Republican Party could divert money to other races. But despite—or perhaps because of—his personal and professional transgressions, Mr Paxton is a MAGA darling, whereas Mr Cornyn, though long since truckled to Mr Trump, has at times broken with him.

Mr Trump has also tied congressional Republicans in knots by declaring he will not sign anything into law until they pass the so-called SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship and impose other burdensome regulations on voting. The bill, a MAGA grail, passed the House but lacks enough support in the Senate. Mr Trump is further impeding the legislation’s progress by demanding more MAGAfications to it, such as “NO TRANSGENDER MUTILATION FOR CHILDREN”.

Mr Trump has occasionally shown sensitivity to broader public opinion, such as by backing away from his most egregious mass-deportation tactics, but lately he has been demonstrating at least as much indifference. On March 16th he delighted in boasting to reporters about the “onyx and stones” in the jumbo ballroom he is building, even as cash-strapped Americans were fretting about spiking petrol prices.

What is going on? It is possible Mr Trump believes that the SAVE Act would, as he has said, “guarantee the midterms” and that his edifice complex will somehow help, too. But that would be delusional (in fact, the SAVE Act could disadvantage Republican candidates). Mr Trump may instead be planning some dramatic intervention in November to prevent votes from being counted fairly, as many Democrats fear. Yet, as is sometimes the case with Mr Trump, the very opposite is at least as plausible: he may have long since given up any hope Republicans will overcome historical patterns and his own dismal approval rating and retain their paper-thin majority in the House. Recognising he has little time left, he is playing for glory, and his own pleasure.

The most plausible scenario is that Mr Trump does not know what he will do this autumn. This is a president who was willing to commit America to war like a jazz musician settling down at a piano, confident he would find the right keys at the right moments. What is certain is that Mr Trump is sticking with his one guiding principle, securing the fierce loyalty of his MAGA base so that he can use it to intimidate other Republicans and keep them in line. Proving his own loyalty to MAGA has become only more important since he shook the faith of some supporters by going to war. This is probably bad news for the Republican Party, and America. ■