Recent legislative election results offer more evidence of the coming of a “ blue wave” in November, producing a Democratic majority in the House (and possibly in the Senate), and the subsequent impeachment (again) of President Trump. Over the next nine months President Trump will have opportunities to shore up his public approval ratings and thereby reduce the damage the 2026 congressional elections may do to his presidency. But he will also have opportunities to make more mistakes which could produce more damage to his presidency as well. How he can help himself will be discussed this week, and how he can hurt himself may be discussed next week.
Two weeks ago I wrote that many signs point to Democratic victories in the upcoming congressional elections, and that should the Democrats win a majority of seats in the House of Representatives the House will once again impeach President Trump. Whether Republicans will vote to remove him from office will depend on his popularity—or lack thereof—with the public.
Additional evidence of impending disaster for President Trump and the GOP was supplied by the results of a special election to elect a state senator from Senate District 9 in the DFW metroplex. The district had consistently elected Republicans since 1991. President Trump carried it by 17% in 2024. Yet the Democrat just won election by about 14%.
Trying to explain their loss, Republicans have said turnout was low since the election was a runoff held on a Saturday, and that they’ll reclaim the district this November. Maybe. But what they won’t yet acknowledge is that a 31-point swing producing a Democratic victory in a presumably “safe” GOP stronghold means that the GOP is in deep trouble. Until the GOP acknowledges that seemingly self-evident fact, its chances of avoiding further electoral disasters are very small indeed.
So what’s to be done? Since off-year congressional elections are usually referenda on the incumbent president’s record, the main responsibility for helping the GOP minimize the damage likely to be caused by the Blue Wave rests with President Trump himself. He can begin by revisiting his two signature issues: The economy and immigration.
A major reason for Trump’s 2024 victory was his ability to successfully exploit public disapproval of President Biden’s spending-produced inflation and the chaos-producing border policy. So it’s ironic that President Trump’s approval ratings on these issues are now underwater, with only about 40% of the public supporting him as against over 50% in opposition.
Republican strategist Karl Rove has argued that to improve his public ratings on inflation, President Trump should spend less time boasting of lowering inflation rates, creating more jobs, etc., etc. Statistical evidence of his success may be accurate, but irrelevant to those who nonetheless see themselves as victims of his policies and feel no hope that things will get better for them anytime soon, A better course of action, says Rove, is to listen more to people’s concerns and explain how his policies are trying to help them. Ironically, this is the approach that the winner of the State Senate District 9 election says he took. Taylor Rehmet—a machinist, a union local president, and now Texas’s newest state senator—claimed to have concentrated on bread-and-butter “affordability” issues, rather than culture war issues, while talking directly to the voters, whether they were Democratic, Republican, or independent. It worked for him; President Trump ignores Rove’s advice and Mehmet’s example at his peril.
Karl Rove has also said that while President Trump won, and deserves, credit for his successful border-control policies, the public dislikes mass arrests of immigrants who entered America illegally, but who have since become hard-working, law-abiding, and productive residents. Rove recommends that that the President call attention to his success in closing he southern border with a well-publicized tour which will show how much safer border counties have become and thereby remind the public of his undeniable success with this issue. But he should dial back ICE’s current mass arrests in Minneapolis.
President Trump can help himself if he follows the lead of Tom Homan, his “border czar” who was also honored and decorated by former President Obama for his success in deporting illegals during the Obama Administration. Homan wants to end Operation MetroSurge in Minneapolis, shift ICE’s focus to arresting illegal immigrants with criminal records and histories of violence, and begin withdrawing ICE agents from Minneapolis’s streets, assuming ICE can get access to those already imprisoned by local law enforcement authorities. If Homan’s approach succeeds it may dial down the violence which has damaged President Trump’s public approval ratings.
It’s probable that taking these approaches won’t help President Trump gain enough popularity to prevent the Democrats from winning the House this fall and then impeach him in 2027. But they may help keep him popular enough to retain the loyalty of Senate Republicans, who will be his jurors in the chamber’s trial, and who might otherwise vote to remove him from office.
However, given President Trump’s continued belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, he may decide to divert his energies from shoring up himself and the GOP in 2026 to contesting, yet again, the 2020 election results. To that end, he has already ordered an FBI raid to seize ballots, voting machines, and other election-related materials held by the Fulton County, Georgia, officials. In a future column—possibly as early as next week—I’ll explain why this course of action, if pursued, may wipe out any benefits to be gained from new action on the economy and immigration.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville since 1987 and taught politics and government at Tarleton for 36 years, retiring in 2023. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990-2024). He was Mayor pro-tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Stephenville
Economic Development Authority since 2018, and as chair of the Erath County Appraisal District’s Appraisal Review Board since 2015. He is also a member of the Stephenville Rotary Club, the Board of Vestry of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and the Executive Committee of the Boy Scouts’ Pecan Valley District. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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