It’s clear that many Republicans running for office in the 2026 midterm elections would prefer to keep President Donald Trump at arm’s length.
And Trump keeps reinforcing exactly why.
Not only is he a historically unpopular president heading into the midterms, but he and his team keep doubling down on the terrible political instincts that landed them in this mess.
Trump making puzzling political moves isn’t exactly new. But he’s reserved some of his most overwhelmingly unpopular ideas for late in the 2026 campaign.
It’s almost as if he’s trying to do the most unpopular things possible. And then he keeps citing them at his rallies, sometimes at length.
Two of the most telling examples are a pair of gambits that the administration now appears to have backed off of: using millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to run ads promoting Trump and live streaming the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Trump has since indicated that he would use campaign money to pay for the ads and said Thursday that the live stream will no longer happen.
The latter announcement came just hours after a new Washington Post-ABC News poll Thursday showed registered voters opposed live streaming Hasan’s execution by a stunning margin, 80%-19%.
A Reuters-Ipsos poll last week, meanwhile, showed they said the taxpayer-funded political ads were inappropriate by an 89%-9% margin.
Even in the pantheon of Trump’s many unpopular policies, there are few comparisons to those numbers. About the best analog appears to be pardoning violent January 6 defendants, which another Washington Post poll showed registered voters opposed, 83%-16%.
That anyone thought either of these now-abandoned plans were solid ideas — let alone in October of an election year — says a lot about how the GOP got to where it is right now. Not only is live-streaming Hasan’s death a gruesome idea that even many Republicans cautioned against, it would be a propaganda win for Islamic extremists by turning Hasan into a very public martyr.
But apparently nobody was willing to air doubts to Trump or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — or those doubts were too readily dismissed.
Lest you think these are isolated instances, take a look at what Trump was talking about at his rallies on Wednesday.
In Arizona, Trump played up his recently launched Canada trade war and his past proposals to make either Canada or Greenland the 51st US state.
“They are brutal, and we don’t take that crap anymore,” Trump said of Canadian trade policies towards the United States.
“They’ll end up being the 51st state, because it’s the only way it works,” Trump said, later adding: “Just like Greenland.” Then he riffed on Greenland, asserting he never actually intended to invade the territory — despite publicly reserving that option.
It was like a triple-decker sandwich of hugely unpopular initiatives.
Trump’s handling of Greenland? 72% disapproved of that in a February poll.
Making Canada the 51st state? Either 75% or 80% opposed that last year, depending on which poll you prefer.
Trump’s recent tariffs on Canada? Americans opposed that by a nearly 3-to-1 margin, 57%-20%, when Trump launched them.
Even alluding to tariffs right now is political malpractice. Polling from Fox News, AP-NORC and CNN in recent weeks all show about 7 in 10 Americans or registered voters disapproved of Trump on that issue. Each showed his worst numbers to date on the subject.
One could argue it’s better to explain the logic of the tariffs, but there’s a critical difference here from topics like the Iran war: The tariffs are a completely elective idea to pursue and promote with less than three weeks left in the campaign.
In both Arizona and Montana on Wednesday, Trump continued to argue that the economy is doing great. He said “tariffs don’t cause inflation” and claimed the US was getting richer because of both the tariffs and high oil prices.
“Our country is making more money than it’s ever made because of the fact that oil is so high,” Trump said in Bullhead City, Arizona. He added, “I care more about the little person than I care about the big person” but that, in oil-producing states, “we’re making a fortune.”
Trump has been barking up this tree for more than a year — basically telling people there is no inflation and that the economy is in a “golden age.”
And he keeps doing so even though the argument clearly doesn’t convince voters. One could even argue that it’s backfired.
A Pew Research Center poll last month showed 42% of Americans rated the economy “poor,” and 8 in 10 rated it either “fair” or “poor.” Both are new highs for Trump’s second term.
If anything, this happy talk appears to have only made Americans view Trump as out of touch and neglecting their affordability concerns. After all, just this week he’s gotten two straight days of bad inflation indicators, including data released Thursday that shows US wholesale inflation in September jumped to its highest level in more than four years.
It’s all rather stunning. Pundits often look for the secret political calculation in the things Trump does. But increasingly in his second term, there doesn’t seem to be a real political strategy guiding his actions. It’s seemingly all impulse and hubris, largely unchecked by electoral and political concerns.
And he only reverses course after polling comes out confirming that 8 in 10 people think a terrible idea is, in fact, a terrible idea.
