FILE – Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump sits with Susie Wiles as he attends the New York Jets football game against the Pittsburgh Steelers at Acrisure Stadium, Oct. 20, 2024, in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said President Donald Trump will be campaigning frequently ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, coming weeks after Democrats won in several statewide elections.
“Typically, in the midterms, it’s not about who’s sitting at the White House. You localize the election, and you keep the federal officials out of it,” Wiles told “The Mom View,” in an interview uploaded to YouTube on Dec. 8.
Wiles suggested that Republicans may face headwinds when Trump is “not on the ballot and not active,” adding: “I haven’t quite broken it to him yet, but he’s going to campaign like it’s 2024 again.”
Republicans posted losses in the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia in November, while the GOP candidate underperformed Trump in Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District during the Dec. 2 special election.
Wiles, who helped manage Trump’s 2024 campaign, said that most administrations try to localize midterm elections and keep the president out of the race but that she intends to do the opposite.
“We’re actually going to turn that on its head,” Wiles said, “and put him on the ballot because so many of those low-propensity voters are Trump voters.”
Ahead of the November elections, Trump was frequently traveling overseas on foreign policy trips. On Dec. 9, Trump is traveling to Pennsylvania to tout his administration’s policies regarding lowering the cost of goods.
Trump is holding his rally in a congressional district held by freshman Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.), who will likely be targeted by Democrats after he won his 2024 race by about 1.5 percentage points, among the nation’s closest. Scranton, Pennsylvania, Mayor Paige Cognetti, a Democrat, is running for the nomination to challenge him.
“What you have to understand, the word affordability, I inherited a mess. I inherited a total mess. Prices were at an all-time high when I came in. Prices are coming down substantially,” Trump said in an interview with Politico that was released on Dec. 9.
“Prices are all coming down. It’s been 10 months. It’s amazing what we’ve done.”
Voters in the Virginia and New Jersey governor races, the New York City mayoral contest, and the California ballot proposition all cited economic concerns as a top issue in exit polls. The president largely stayed away from those contests, held in November.
Instead, Trump focused on foreign policy issues, including traveling in October to Egypt and Israel to oversee a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas. He also traveled to Alaska to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in August, and he met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea in late October.
Meanwhile, Trump has said he’s giving consumers relief by relaxing auto fuel-efficiency standards and signing agreements to reduce list prices for prescription drugs.
The president has also advocated cuts to the Federal Reserve’s benchmark interest rate that influences the supply of money in the U.S. economy. He says that this would reduce the cost of mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, and other goods and services.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
