Trump Is Letting the Bully Pulpit Go to Waste

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The week should have started pretty well for GOP candidates for whom good news has been in extremely short supply. On Monday, Donald Trump announced from the Oval Office that a new steel plant in Iowa would create a couple of thousand well-paying jobs in the Hawkeye State, the Senate passed a bill meant to save out-of-control college sports, and it seems as though the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz is slowly returning to pre-war levels.

Sure, Trump once again seemed to nod off during the Iowa announcement; the college athletics bill still has to clear the House, which won’t reconvene until after the midterms because Republican incumbents have to fight for their political lives back home; and tanker traffic in the Middle East is only picking up at great expense to the US military, the Strait was closed solely because of the American-Israeli attack on Iran, and exorbitant gasoline and diesel costs likely won’t go down sufficiently before the election to make voters feel good about the economy.

Still, you have to take your wins as they come, no matter how minor they might be.

And this is what Trump should be doing all day long: using the power of the presidency, the so-called bully pulpit, to benefit Republicans mired in tough races in order to limit their losses in the midterms and hold on to a Senate majority.

He should browbeat companies into announcing investments in battleground states and give the respective GOP lawmakers credit for these wins.

The president should also order ICE to ease off on operations in these states instead of stepping them up. This is especially true in places where there are a lot of Hispanic people and/or where these raids interfere with business interests.

For example, the cattle industry associations from Texas (which will have a tight Senate race and multiple close House races), Oklahoma, and Kansas (another state with a tight Senate race) felt compelled to release a statement last week saying that ICE’s activities in their states “are having a massive chilling effect on the legal, documented, skilled workers that put beef on the table and keep the cattle supply chain moving,” while also pointing out that they will lead to “higher beef prices for consumers.”

Most importantly, Trump should talk to voters, empathize with their struggles, and assure Americans that things will look up soon.

Oh, and he should also stop doing and saying controversial and unpopular things.

Therein, however, lies the problem. Trump is incapable of doing any of that.

Because telling Americans that he feels their pain would not only require empathy but also an acknowledgement that the US is not, in fact, in a golden age, as the president promised, and that his policies have not made things better.

And instead of giving others credit, Trump is demanding that others pay homage to him.

This exchange during the Oval Office event on Monday is symptomatic.

In that meeting, Rep. Ashley Hinson, the GOP’s Senate candidate in Iowa, was forced to pretend that the economy is doing great and to glaze Trump while the president talked about his own popularity and how he won the state three times.

Iowa Senate Candidate Ashley Hinson praising Trump on the economy

Trump responds: I’m going to come to Iowa. I got more votes than anybody in history during the last election. And I think I'm more popular now than I was then pic.twitter.com/WCaOcOIU9T

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 28, 2026

On Tuesday, at an event promoting a new government website, he opened his remarks by riffing on the fact that he is not taking a salary, which really only served as a reminder that he lined his own pockets with more than $2.2 billion in the first year of his second term.

Now, making it all about himself might be a good strategy if Americans liked their president, but they don’t.

In fact, Trump’s low approval ratings are a real drag on Republican candidates, in part because he keeps insisting that everything is great when voters know that it isn’t.

And hardly a day goes by without him doing or saying something controversial, ridiculous, or dumb – whether that’s promoting data centers, opposing guardrails on artificial intelligence, or using taxpayer funds for a propaganda campaign.

Finally, because he likes big rallies and the adulation of his core supporters, Trump is slated to do a lot of campaign events. But, once again, they are for his own benefit, just like the midterm convention that many Republican lawmakers dodged.

It remains to be seen how much of a drag on the GOP the president will be in the fall. In tight races, his unpopularity might make a difference.

What is clear already, however, is that Trump is incapable of making an election about anything but himself. This cost Republicans the Senate in 2021, when Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their respective Georgia runoffs, and it is very possible that it will cost them the Senate again this year.