Category: Politics

DALLAS — In 2024, President Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination by promising to “lead America back to the summit of human achievement and greatness.”

In 2026, he closed out an unusual midterm convention organized in his honor by saying he was a little bored of politics. He seemed more interested in telling supporters to swear on something holy — which seemed to be himself — that they would go out and vote for Republican candidates in November.

“Please raise your right hand,” Trump instructed a rowdy crowd of thousands inside a Dallas arena on Thursday evening. Many of them complied. “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe that I will go out with my family, my friends, I will do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do.” (Trump usually frowns on election fraud.)

He added: “I am going to go out, and I’m going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November 3.”

Speaking for a grand total of nearly 2 1/2 hours over two days in Texas, Trump made it very clear, onstage and in interviews, that he would be relying on the strength of his political brand to see his party through what appear to be daunting midterm elections. He would not be straying much from his comfort zone to help vulnerable Republicans. In fact, the president said Thursday evening, he was kind of over this.

“We’re going to have a good time listening to music,” Trump said, name-checking Christopher Macchio, an opera singer who closed out the evening. “I’m getting a little bit tired of politics now.”

Before taking the stage for the second night in Dallas, Trump was asked by Laura Ingraham of Fox News whether he intended to campaign harder than he ever had before.

“No,” he replied bluntly. Asked by Ingraham whether or not he thought his legacy was on the line ahead of the midterm elections — “Isn’t this just as important, Mr. President?” — Trump seemed almost blasé about the possibility of Republicans losing one or both chambers of Congress. “I’ll block all their bad stuff for two years. It won’t be the same, but I’ll be a blocker, what can I tell you?”

The whole spectacle was a window into the mindset of Trump and his advisers, who point to recent history as proof that he is capable of beating long odds through brashness, sheer will and an intense connection with his supporters. That relationship is unmatched in modern politics. During his own speech, Vice President JD Vance, the perceived front-runner for the 2028 Republican nomination, asked the crowd to chant his name because it felt “pretty cool.”

Trump does not have to make such requests. But instead of focusing his energy on Republicans in difficult races — some of whom skipped the event completely — he directed the focus back to himself while he was in Texas. He pleaded with voters to engage in make-believe, and to “please pretend” that he was the one on the November ballot. That exercise might work against him in competitive races where the war with Iran is unpopular and where voters feel that their worries about the prices of gas and groceries are being ignored.

He put a new twist on an old tactic by offering free money — $5,000 to every American adult — if Republicans keep control of Congress. On his first night in Dallas, he asked voters for patience: The war with Iran, he assured supporters, “will be over very shortly after the election.” All of these promises and pleas amounted to a maximalist, midterm-era version of the “in two weeks” rhetorical tool he relies on when he is under pressure, to vow that something good will happen a few news cycles down the road.

“Food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down,” Trump told the crowd Wednesday. “And by the way, oil will be going down as soon as we win the war with Iran, which is taking place right now. We’ll win it. We’re winning it. We control the Hormuz Strait. I think we should call the Hormuz Strait, we should call it the Trump Strait.”

At moments, Trump almost seemed to be in conversation with himself about his endorsement style, which, in one crucial race at least, has featured a mix of insults and shrugging. On both nights, he defended the disparaging way he has talked about the appearance and character of Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general running for a Senate seat after Trump directed primary voters to oust Sen. John Cornyn. Those voters complied and put an otherwise reliable seat into play.

“I said, ‘I don’t really like the way he looks. I don’t like it,’” Trump said of Paxton on Wednesday. “But you know what I do like? He was the greatest attorney general in the history of Texas.”

By Thursday, he was basically saying to hell with it: “You better do me a big, the biggest favor you’ve ever done me,” Trump told supporters as Paxton watched from the sidelines and smiled through what was at least his third humiliation ritual of the Texas event. “You’ve got to do this for me. You’ve got to pretend I’m on the ticket.”

Again and again, Trump turned to other priorities, the most pressing of which seemed to be the crowd size in Dallas. There is a reason that political conventions are not held during the midterms. This expensive, two-day event, designed as a tribute to Trump, functioned more like a temperature check, and there were moments when interest seemed lukewarm. Rows of seats in the American Airlines Center stayed empty throughout the affair. Endangered Republicans, sensing a brush fire rather than a lit torch brightening the way forward, steered clear.

“No empty seats! Fake news,” Trump exclaimed Thursday, spending about three minutes affirming that the busy arena was packed when it wasn’t.

And so it went on in that vein in Texas, with little new except for a promise of free money, a pledge of allegiance gimmick, and a few glimpses of an 80-year-old president pondering a future in which he is not firmly in control.

“I want you to remember me in four or five years when this country’s rocketing,” Trump said Wednesday, somewhere near the beginning of a meandering and nearly two-hour speech. “Remember, I’m the one that got it started.”

By the time he was ready to depart Dallas, he didn’t seem too interested in the particulars of the future, the strength of Republican candidates or the validity of his promises. He suggested to his devoted supporters that he might be “standing with you one of these days.” But for now, he just wanted to chill out and listen to music. He sped through the last lines of a speech finale he knows by heart after a decade at the center of national politics.

“I just want to say, we will make America great again,” Trump said dutifully. “We will make it greater than ever before.”

Then the tenor took the stage. Red, blue, white and gold balloons began to fall from the ceiling. The president swayed to the music, lost in the moment.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

A loyalist prosecutor handpicked by the Justice Department to lead a contentious conspiracy investigation into several of President Donald Trump’s political opponents abruptly quit his job on Thursday, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The prosecutor, Joseph diGenova, had been in charge of what Trump’s allies have often referred to as the “grand conspiracy,” a sprawling inquiry based in the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida that has sought to implicate federal officials who have investigated Trump in a single plot to deprive him of his rights.

DiGenova’s resignation was the latest setback in the case that began last year and has dragged on for months. Even though members of his team have issued numerous grand jury subpoenas to federal law enforcement and intelligence officials who have sought over the past decade to hold Trump accountable in a series of criminal inquiries, diGenova had yet to obtain an indictment.

“It was an honor and privilege to serve the president and the department,” DiGenova told CNN and CBS during phone interviews on Thursday.

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Trump has repeatedly put pressure on prosecutors to bring criminal charges against his opponents, calling them out in private meetings and in social media posts. He has also expressed displeasure about the slow pace of the retributive investigations he has helped to set in motion.

But time and again, Trump’s desire for vengeance and his willingness to break through the walls of independence that have traditionally separated the White House and the Justice Department have resulted in failure. Judges and grand juries have repeatedly stymied his attempts to strong arm prosecutors into bringing charges.

Sometimes, as in the case of diGenova, prosecutors themselves have effectively reminded him that it is no simple matter to file indictments against people without real evidence or viable legal reasoning. The resignation was likely to cause consternation among far-right influencers who have long heralded the grand conspiracy case as the Trump administration’s most aggressive effort to go after the president’s critics.

From the beginning, the influencers pushed for charges to be brought against the widest array of Democrats possible, asserting that a cabal of “deep state” operatives — led by former President Barack Obama — had worked for years to destroy Trump and deserved to be punished.

With his move, diGenova became the second prosecutor who has either resigned or been removed from the case. The prosecutor in charge of an early phase of the investigation was forced to leave in the spring after telling her superiors that there was not sufficient evidence to bring charges against one of its first targets, John Brennan, a former CIA director who provoked Trump’s ire by helping to assemble an intelligence assessment that determined that Russia had sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign.

The grand conspiracy inquiry has long been the most fevered of the many revenge investigations that Trump has demanded the Justice Department undertake. It has involved prosecutors seeking to link disparate criminal inquiries into the president — including the Russia investigation and a separate investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents — as an overarching, multiyear scheme to damage his political prospects.

From the outset, diGenova faced an uphill battle in seeking to prove the basic theory of his case: that the various inquiries into Trump — conducted by different prosecutors and spanning nearly a decade — could be reasonably tied together in a single conspiracy. Those hurdles have led several current and former prosecutors in the office in southern Florida to wonder whether the investigation was largely a show put on to placate Trump.

DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney from the Ronald Reagan era who had not worked as a prosecutor in nearly 40 years, took control of the case in April after his predecessor, Maria Medetis Long, was kicked off the investigation. At 81, he was an unusual choice to oversee an inquiry involving multiple targets that quickly grew to include at least a dozen prosecutors, including his wife, Victoria Toensing.

Moreover, diGenova was a longtime ally of Trump’s who had publicly claimed that the Russia investigation was a plot by law enforcement to frame him and keep him out of the White House. DiGenova had also worked as a lawyer for Trump’s 2020 campaign, supporting his false assertions that the election that year had been rigged against him.

While Brennan was the initial focus of the inquiry, it has also involved an effort to implicate former FBI Director James Comey, who has been charged in a separate case in North Carolina. Late last month, diGenova’s office issued a subpoena demanding testimony from one of Comey’s close confidants.

More recently, subpoenas had been issued to federal agents who took part in the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, in the classified documents investigation.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Vice President JD Vance was billed as the headliner of the second night of the Republican convention, but President Donald Trump stole the show.

With a hug and a handshake, Vance exited stage right after his speech as Trump returned to the place he likes most — center stage — to make his final pitch of the convention to keep Republicans in power.

At one point Trump asked attendees to raise their right hands and pledge to him that he would vote with their family and friends. Dutifully, they did.

“You know what happens if you don’t vote?” Trump said. “You go to hell.”

The two-day rally in Dallas came as Trump’s approval has sagged below 40% and Republicans fear losing control of both the House and Senate. Republicans hoped the gathering would help energize a base beleaguered by high prices and the Iran war to turn out in droves. But the two days of red meat tossed from the stage seemed unlikely to satiate independent voters whose support has flagged.

Here are seven takeaways from the convention:

Vance makes his 2026 (and 2028) pitch

Vance arrived in Dallas widely considered the front-runner in the 2028 Republican presidential primary. His speech offered some early clues about how he might approach a campaign.

Vance focused on restoring the primacy of the traditional nuclear American family, a theme he has championed in the administration. He did not mention the war in Iran, an operation he has defended publicly but raised concerns about privately. But he issued a plea for conservatives not to abandon the White House over policy.

“Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” he urged.

Vance speaks in a far more scripted political style than Trump. He caught fire with the crowd when he snapped back at a protester who interrupted his remarks by waving Palestinian and Mexican flags. “My friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there,” he said.

But he failed to sustain the kind of enthusiasm that Trump commanded either night. Nor did he win anything beyond perfunctory praise from the president, who quickly ushered him off the stage.

As the balloons fell, it was the president alone, along with a tenor singing. Trump is not giving up his crown quite yet.

Trump throws an affordability Hail Mary

Trump has called affordability — a top buzzword for Democrats this year — a “hoax.” In his speech Wednesday night, the president claimed that prices are on their way down. At the same time, he rolled out an audacious plan to address people’s concerns about costs: a massive cash giveaway.

He branded his dubious and detail-free plan to send $5,000 to every American adult a “Trump Dividend.”

But Trump was virtually the only one talking about it.

A day later, the splashy $1 trillion-plus plan barely made a ripple on the convention stage.

The president’s own son, Donald Trump Jr., didn’t so much as mention it.

Neither did the speaker of the House.

Neither did the vice president.

Only Trump did.

If the president wants the dangled cash to be a major factor in the midterms, the rest of the Republican Party didn’t use the rest of the convention to sell it.

Republicans have a new rogues’ gallery of liberal villains

Forget about Nancy Pelosi.

In Dallas, Republicans made clear that the former House speaker has been dethroned from her decades-long position as the party’s favorite political villain.

Speaker after speaker assailed Hasan Piker, a leftist online streamer, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, for pushing what they described as an extreme and anti-American agenda. Their images, including Piker’s naked torso, were broadcast on the jumbotron over the stadium. Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who is a frequent target of the right, got less airtime.

At one point, Speaker Mike Johnson outlined the new rogues’ gallery of liberals — “Hasan Piker and Bernie Sanders and AOC and Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani” — while casting the rest of the Democratic Party as squishes who would succumb to them.

In their attacks on Piker and El-Sayed, several convention speakers embraced anti-Muslim rhetoric, including a promise popular among conservative activists to “ban Shariah law.”

“We must stand and defeat the Islamists,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said in his speech.

GOP frames the election as common sense versus crazy

Republicans know that Trump is unpopular. They are banking on making Democrats unpopular, too — or at least unappealing and unelectable.

Over and over, speakers cast Democrats as out of the mainstream, frequently calling them socialists, communists and even worse. At times they stretched the truth. Democratic socialists might have won a number of Democratic primary victories since 2024, but no serious figure in the party is promoting communism.

“You guys are going to trigger the commies,” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, said at one point as the crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!”

Vance, in the closing of his speech, summed up the message so many had delivered before him over two days: “It’s about the party of common sense beating the party of the crazies.”

Texas is a 2026 battleground

Six months ago, when it first emerged that Republicans were likely to pick Dallas for this convention, it was unclear whether Texas would wind up as a top midterm battleground.

It’s clear now.

A parade of speakers — from the president on down — used their precious time onstage to talk about Texas’ razor-close Senate race. They sought to boost Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general (even as Trump mocked his sartorial choices on back-to-back nights), and tear down James Talarico, the Democratic nominee. On the eve of the convention, Trump’s super political action committee had reserved $10 million in ads to help Paxton.

“Tala-freako maybe tops the list,” Vance said of Trump’s nickname for Talarico.

But it wasn’t just the Senate race. Republicans gerrymandered the state in 2025 to create as many as five new safely Republican House seats. But Republicans running in several of those seats appeared at the convention, seeking a boost in regions that Trump won handily.

Was it must-see TV? Early signs suggest no

Trump has long been known as a master of the television audience. Not this time. An average of 2.5 million people tuned in to watch his Wednesday night speech on Fox News, one of the few major TV networks that aired the remarks in full, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen. That was an average primetime audience for the network, based on the most recent quarterly statistics, and below the usual viewership for programs at that time.

In other words, no Trump bump.

To be fair, the president’s programming faced some steep competition. The first game of the National Football League season was on at the same time as his speech. The season’s second game was on Thursday during Vance’s and Trump’s speeches.

Republicans make their bid to buck history

Parties in power traditionally attempt to expand their appeal in midterm elections through targeted outreach to independent voters. That was not the strategy charted by Trump and his allies in Dallas.

Only a handful of speakers offered any kind of outreach to moderate voters (one of those exceptions was Rep. Mike Lawler of New York). Far more focused their remarks on stoking fears of Shariah, transgender athletes and Democratic candidates who were repeatedly described as communists. Again and again, Trump begged his supporters to “pretend” that he would be on the ballot — an attempt to get enough of them out to prevent the usual losses for the party in power.

Trump and his allies are staking their chances on their ability to drive their own voters to the polls. At the top of the list are Trump loyalists who typically skip midterm elections.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.