(Editor’s note: Moments ago, The Atlantic published a politics piece by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker.)

Trump Plans to Buy Midterm Ads About His Own Record.  

President 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. “I think everybody does understand that the president and his agenda are on the ballot to some degree,” another person told us.

A spokesperson for MAGA Inc. told us that the group does not comment on internal deliberations or plans. Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, told us that Trump is committed to maintaining the Republican majorities in Congress. “President Trump is cleaning up Joe Biden’s mess,” she said in a statement. “There is a great story to tell because the United States of America has never been stronger than under his leadership.”

Trump’s decision to focus a portion of his spending on himself echoes President Biden’s decision in the fall of 2023 to launch a series of ads trumpeting his own legislative record, as he sought to increase his approval rating in advance of his reelection bid. But Trump is not on the ballot this fall, which presents new risks. A new strategy of touting Trump’s achievements could well backfire by aiding Democratic efforts to make each race about national issues at a time when Trump’s approval rating is at record lows. Yet given the midterm headwinds, Republicans may have little choice but to present their most effective communicator to voters.

The political climate—an economic election in which voters don’t feel that their life has gotten better, despite some positive indicators—is in many ways similar to what Democrats faced in 2010 and 2022, when the electorate blamed their party for the economic pain of the 2008 financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, respectively. But in other ways, the situation Trump faces is different. Polls show that voters aren’t just anxious about inflation; they are frustrated with Trump’s war of choice with Iran and concerned about government corruption. Before Trump’s first midterm election as president, in 2018, the Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of the country believed that the economy was doing well, including 13 percent who described the economy as excellent. By July of this year, only 22 percent felt that the economy was doing well, and only 3 percent described it as excellent. Trump’s economic approval rating hovered at about 50 percent in 2018 public polls. Most polls this year show that his standing has fallen into the 30s.

Republican political consultants have voiced concerns both publicly and privately in recent weeks about the triumphant tone of some of Trump’s economic messaging. Democrats see a familiar dilemma. “You’ve got to take voters from where they are to where you want to go, and the only way to do that is to not dismiss in any way what they know—and what I mean by that is, you can’t go in playing ‘It’s Christmas Time’ when that’s the last holiday they can afford,” Rahm Emanuel, who worked for the Obama and Biden administrations and is a potential contender in the 2028 presidential election, told us. “They’re going to put you on mute.”

In 2010, Barack Obama wrestled with this problem by alighting on a “car in the ditch” metaphor to explain why, after the 2008 financial crisis, the promised recovery still felt slow in coming. Yet even that formulation proved ineffective, Obama’s senior strategist David Axelrod told us. “We sort of abandoned it because what we found was even that was offensive to people, because it felt like we were trying to blame others,” he said. “What we learned very quickly is, you cannot jawbone people into feeling what they do not feel in their own lives, and Biden defied that to his own detriment.”

Trump has shown much more interest in hyperbole than in complicated metaphors, branding his second term in office as a new “Golden Age.” While stumping last Friday for Senator Darline Graham of South Carolina, Trump spoke glowingly about his second term. “You have record manufacturing and auto plants being built right now in the United States and in South Carolina,” he said. “We have the greatest economy in our history. Now, some people haven’t seen it yet, but they will.” Axelrod noted that Trump argued at the same rally that his own polling “should be at 100 percent on the economy.” “If you’re the average person out there, you’re seeing that and thinking What planet is he living on?” Axelrod said. “You have to acknowledge that people are struggling and this is a work in progress.”

David Winston, a Republican strategist who works with congressional leadership, told us that key to the midterms is whether voters, when they walk into a grocery store, feel that they can manage at least a little bit better than before Trump returned to office. “So Republicans need to be talking about what actions they took in terms of the economy to at least get things moving in the right direction, and what the outcome has been,” he said. “This is one where it can’t be a laundry list of 35 talking points. This has to be one or two key things.”

Trump’s advisers are hoping to drive home a discrete set of facts about his accomplishments over the past 19 months. The list is likely to include new tax breaks for certain workers and seniors, the stock market’s rise over the past two years, the military’s boat strikes purportedly targeting fentanyl, and his efforts to “seal” the U.S.-Mexico border, to name a few. Rather than distance himself from congressional elections—the preference of some Republican candidates in swing districts—Trump has argued that he can drive turnout in those races by making himself the center of the conversation. Next month, he will host the Republican Party for a two-day “midterm convention” rally in Dallas aimed at nationalizing the November races as a choice between extreme Democrats and Republican accomplishments. Trump has asked his supporters to treat November as though his name is on the ballot. “What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot. Just come and vote. It’s so important,” Trump said on Friday in South Carolina. “Just say that I’m on the ballot one more time.”

In other, important ways, Trump is better positioned than either Obama or Biden were at this point in their midterm races. He has a massive cash advantage, thanks to his aggressive fundraising over the first year of his term that collected tens of millions from crypto companies, AI entrepreneurs, and traditional Republican donors. He also enjoys a sharply gerrymandered political map in the House that has created a new cushion of Republican-leaning seats after mid-cycle redistricting. And the Senate majority will be decided by races in Republican-leaning states such as Texas, Alaska, Ohio, and Iowa.

Trump’s advisers have not yet indicated to Republican consultants how much money the president will spend on the midterms, according to people familiar with the matter. But the merits of Trump inserting himself into the election may be less important to some Republicans than the fact that MAGA Inc. is starting to spend. Some in the party have worried for months that Trump might hoard his fundraising for the 2028 presidential-election cycle—or for something else entirely.

MAGA Inc. has begun work on a number of campaigns about specific House and Senate races for the fall. Much of that advertising is expected to feature negative attacks on Democratic candidates, the traditional role of independent super PACs. MAGA Inc. has commissioned polling and research, along with modeling in the targeted House and Senate races. It has also shared information with other independent groups, including the Senate Leadership Fund and the Congressional Leadership Fund, which are affiliated with Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota and Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana.

In the early spring, Trump’s aides hoped to launch a disciplined sales pitch to voters focused on Trump’s accomplishments, only to have that effort largely derailed by the open-ended Iran conflict. Trump’s approval ratings have eroded further since then. Now is the president’s last chance for a do-over, and his team is projecting confidence that it can get it right. “Anybody that is saying we are headed for a shellacking absolutely can’t just read the numbers,” one of the people familiar with the Oval Office meeting told us. With early voting starting in the first weeks of October, Republicans are once again betting that more Trump is their best way to block Democratic hopes of a wave election.