Trump Plans to Buy Midterm Ads About His Own Record

P resident Trump gathered his top political advisers in the Oval Office early this month to solve a problem of riches: how to spend his super PAC’s $400 million political war chest with fewer than 100 days to go before the midterm elections.

Republican strategists are concerned about Trump’s low approval ratings and voter anxiety about the economy.

One person familiar with the Oval Office strategy meeting put it this way: “When the issues that you typically campaign on don’t move voters—or voters are pissed off at you about those issues—the question becomes: What do you campaign on?” Some GOP strategists favor focusing entirely on specific races in an effort to convince voters of the merits of individual candidates and local issues.

But Trump himself has rejected that approach.

House and Senate Democrats, the president noted during the meeting, will make their fall campaigns a referendum on him.

His advisers told him that the poor polling reflects the fact that the voting public still does not know about many of his accomplishments—the dozens of new stock-market highs, a decline in fentanyl deaths, the “sealed” southern border, the increase in domestic-manufacturing production.

The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself.

The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests.

Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks.

“Go look at the clips,” the president told his team, according to this person.

“I cite accomplishments all the time.” That decision has resulted in a Trump midterm-election ad blitz that is set to be rolled out soon from MAGA Inc., the main repository of Trump’s political fundraising, according to people familiar with the discussions, all of whom insisted on anonymity to describe internal conversations.

Most of MAGA Inc.’s spending is still expected to go to targeted House and Senate races, for which the group has been establishing teams to review polling, voter modeling, and message testing.

“We are going to unload the guns on both chambers real soon,” one of the people said.

But another person told us that because Trump will inevitably be part of voters’ considerations, highlighting his achievements makes sense.