With Election Day just 61 days away and Republicans already feeling anxious about their chances, Donald Trump isn’t exactly helping his party. In fact, by all appearances, the president is making things harder for the GOP, not easier.

Between his war in Iran, his trade war with Canada, his enthusiastic support for data centers, his obsession with distractions and trivialities, and his apparent indifference to rising gas prices, among other things, it’s an open question as to whether Trump is deliberately trying to undermine his own party.

That said, the president apparently has a plan that he believes will give the GOP a boost as the election cycle enters the home stretch. It has three parts.

Part one is next week’s wildly unnecessary midterm convention in Dallas, which RNC Chairman Joe Gruters has said will be a “Trumpapalooza,” headlined by the president himself. Given the number of Republican officials who have no apparent interest in showing up for the gathering, there’s no reason to believe this will have much of an impact on the electorate.

Part two is an ad campaign, demanded by the president, that has little to do with vulnerable GOP incumbents and everything to do with Trump. In fact, a group called Securing American Greatness (the nonprofit arm of MAGA Inc., Trump’s super PAC) launched a new ad campaign this week, with commercials celebrating the president.

Part three is Trump’s plans for in-person campaign appearances. In fact, on Wednesday night, the president spoke to several GOP lawmakers in the Rose Garden, assuring them that he plans to campaign for them when it matters most.

According to Trump’s comments at the White House, he intends to focus on 35 races over the final month leading up to Election Day. He didn’t go into a lot of details, though he specifically mentioned plans for in-person appearances on behalf of Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running for the Senate. (The fact that the president intends to hit the stump in states he won by double digits two years ago is itself emblematic of the prevailing political winds.)

The details obviously matter — we don’t yet know whether the list of 35 races is real, for example, or whether any of the GOP candidates in those races actually want a presidential visit — but stepping back, it’s hard not to notice the broader goal: Trump wants the midterm election cycle to be all about himself.

The strategy is not without rather obvious risks. Given the circumstances, Democrats want to turn the 2026 elections into a referendum on the unpopular president, his flailing party and the discouraging status quo. Republicans, in contrast, want to make the midterms less of a referendum and more of a choice, with a focus on individual races and candidates.

In other words, Democrats want to nationalize the election cycle, while Republicans do not. With this in mind, as Labor Day weekend approaches, Trump is enthusiastically embracing a strategy that gives Democrats what they want.

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