I have been thinking that Trump is past caring much about electoral politics and therefore, doesn’t really care about public opinion. He can always lie to himself and his followers that the polls are wrong after all. But according to this, he still has one concern:
Throughout April, President Donald Trump’s sky-high tariffs on imports from China had rippled through the U.S. and global economies. But the president was reluctant to move too quickly to lower the penalties on Beijing, believing that the United States needed to stomach some short-term economic pain to achieve a major rebalancing in trade and that China had more to lose in the standoff.
By the end of the month, though, a growing number of blue-collar workers whom Trump saw as part of his political base — including longshoremen and truckers — began warning that tariffs and a near-total cessation of trade with China were hurting them.
Behind the scenes, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other aides told Trump that his own voters were in danger if the tariffs did not come down, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. That gave them a path to initiating negotiations with the Chinese, which culminated this past weekend in Geneva with a partial deal to reduce tariffs between the world’s two biggest economies. One White House official cautioned, however, that multiple factors contributed to the trade talks in Switzerland.
“The key argument was that this was beginning to hurt Trump’s supporters — Trump’s people,” one person briefed on the talks said. “It gave Susie a key window.”
He doesn’t really care about “his people.” But he does care about the midterms, apparently:
Early in Donald Trump’s first term, the president received what he now views as bad advice: Don’t worry about the midterms, some advisers whispered back then.
If Democrats won majorities in 2018, their thinking went, it would only help him politically — giving him a political foil down Pennsylvania Avenue and opportunity to triangulate in a gridlocked Washington ahead of a tough reelection — a la Bill Clinton.
That failed to pan out, spectacularly: Trump’s agenda ground to a halt as he instead dealt with two years of nonstop investigations and a pair of impeachments. He lost to Joe Biden anyway.
This time, Trump is taking a different approach.
Not even three months into his second term, the president is already hyper-engaged in the fight to keep the GOP’s majorities in Congress. Far from writing off the House or Senate, he’s bullish about defying history and keeping Democrats away from committee gavels and subpoena powers, according to five Republicans I’ve spoken to, including several close Trump confidants.
[…]
Part of Trump’s midterm infatuation is his love of the game — reading polls, making endorsements, playing kingmaker and otherwise moving pieces around on the political chess board. He ticks off his won-loss record in congressional races and loves to go deep on the details of his own campaigns.
This is the real reason:
But Trump is also deeply motivated by his desire to avoid suffering through dozens of new investigations and a third potential impeachment: “He knows what happens if we lose the House,” added the adviser, noting that there’s already several impeachment resolutions filed in the chamber.
Good. If the threat of investigations and impeachment are acting as a restraint on his lunacy, the Democrats should make sure he knows that they will torture him with them to the ends of the earth when they take the majority.