Damned if they Trump; damned if they don’t … That’s the Republican quandary in midterms homestretch

Donald Trump wants you to “pretend” he’s on the ballot. Republicans don’t want his baggage, but without him, they run the risk of losing support from the single-issue base that turns out the vote.

With just one month before Election Day, facing the prospect of losing control of Congress and having Democrats derail his final years in office, the president is back on the campaign trail while desperate candidates try to recapture the 2024 campaign energy that put him back in the White House.

And Trump is more than happy to spend time in friendly territory to dig up familiar grievances to bored crowds if it means he can avoid Washington, D.C. for a few weeks. But his record unpopularity and the chaos of his second term are an albatross that could sink both his remaining years in office and the party’s future in Congress.

But that is the quandary here: Trump might be Republicans’ only hope to avoid a total blowout on Nov. 3, or at least a public flogging from a president who demands loyalty at their own expense. They can either lose, in the president’s words, “by a lot,” or go down without being named in an embarrassing Truth Social post.

Trump’s approval ratings hit career lows this week, with fewer than one-third of surveyed Americans supporting his job performance, according to Associated Press-NORC polling, and The Wall Street Journal recording the lowest-ever approval rating for an incumbent president heading into midterm elections in decades. The president remains in denial, insisting they’re all “fake numbers” and that the “pollsters are corrupt.”

Instead, he wants Americans to vote like he’s the one who’s on the ballot, not the Republican candidates who are either weighed down by their loyalty to the president or desperate to move the party away from him.

“What I want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” Trump told a crowd of supporters in South Carolina in August. In an interview with Trey Gowdy on Fox News days later, the president claimed that “when Trump’s on the ballot, they win.”

“When he’s out of the ballot, the people don’t go to vote, and I’m asking the people … to get out and vote,” he said. “Pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Trump’s former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also told Fox News viewers to “vote like President Trump is on the ballot,” and House Speaker Mike Johnson told supporters that Trump’s “legacy” will be on ballots, even if Trump’s name isn’t.

The president has even turned to the airwaves with a multimillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded TV campaign that he’s calling public service “ads for the country” despite lifting the same material he used for social media videos in 2024. The White House is calling them “public service announcements.”

“I’m not running for office,” the president told reporters Wednesday.

“When I’m talking about making America great, making our country great, that’s a countrywide ad,” he said from the Oval Office. “That’s an ad for the spirit of our country.”

Trump has said the White House is struggling with “public relations,” and he griped in a recently published interview with TIME that he can’t get any positive press coverage even if he has “done a lot of good stuff.”

The president sees himself as the best messenger to deliver a winning message that only he knows how to give, even if nobody in his party wants to hear it. “That’s why I’m doing it myself,” Trump told supporters at the White House on Wednesday as he touted a campaign blitz into red states. “We’re doing an extremely poor job of promotion and an extremely great job of running the country.”

He’s reportedly planning to hold up to seven rallies a week before Election Day. “They like to say, ‘Oh, nobody wants him,’” Trump said Wednesday. “Well, everybody that has me wins.”

“These guys are in a pickle,” a national Republican operative told Politico. “They may not want Trump to come to the district, but there are still things that Trump can do to help.”

Another operative working in a district that Trump safely won in 2024 told the outlet that the president’s team called four times to see whether he should come. “I’ve said no,” the person said. Another strategist, bracing for Trump’s potential visit to New York to support Republicans in competitive House races, said the president’s tour stop could be “the final nail in the coffin for New York Republicans.”

Trump, sitting on a massive pile of cash in his campaign-connected MAGA Inc. PAC, plans to “spend a lot of money” on Republican candidates in the coming days. But congressional Republicans are being forced to pump resources into districts that the president won handily not even two years ago, while cash-strapped Democrats are racking up some of their biggest online fund-raising days since 2024.

The president stumped in two states in one night on Thursday, once again pleading with his supporters to “pretend I’m running” before letting it slip why he needs their vote: “If we don’t win, they’ll end up impeaching me.”

“I feel a little foolish, you know? I’m saying, ‘Go out and vote, go out and vote,’” he told supporters in deep-red Oklahoma. “But they’re going to win in a landslide.”