Donald Trump is not on the November 3rd ballot, a fact he has spent the fall asking his supporters to ignore. He is nonetheless already laying the groundwork for blaming others if Republicans lose when the votes are counted.
Reuters reported Saturday that Trump is blaming senior aides and political operatives for a faltering midterm strategy, according to three people familiar with internal discussions. The White House dismissed the sourcing as baseless speculation. The grievance list is specific:
Spending: MAGA Inc. has put roughly $200 million into the cycle, per public records, and Trump wants to know why polling in the pivotal races has not improved.
Maps: Trump has pressed aides to explain why the redistricting push he personally drove has not produced cleaner gains. Texas is the particular worry, since the new lines lean partly on Hispanic voters turning out the way they did in 2024, which the polling suggests will be hard to repeat.
Candidates: Trump is second-guessing picks, including ones Reuters says were shaped by his own loyalties and grievances.
Staff: Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and James Blair, the longtime aide who runs MAGA Inc., whose handling of the money Trump has faulted.
The Blair situation is the best part, and the part where Trump has a point. Blair and Chris LaCivita, who co-managed the 2024 campaign, spent part of early October in Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb entity, where the New York Times reported they took substantial payments to advise the regional government ahead of its local elections. Blair was supposed to be minding the final stretch of the Republican campaign at home. Trump’s answer, in an October 7 Truth Social post, was to describe the two as outside consultants and promise to fire them immediately if he found a conflict of interest.
Trump is right to be irritated. Trump is also the one who hired them. “Outside” is a generous word for the two men who were in the room for 2024, and two sources now say Blair, whom Trump had called a short-term leave of absence, is not coming back after the midterms. One person told Reuters that Wiles approved the trip without telling Trump, an allegation that has not been independently established.1
Meanwhile, Wiles has pointed at Blair, Blair has pointed at the White House legislative affairs shop, and one source summed it all up as a “circular firing squad.”
None of this is new. Before the 2022 results came in, Trump said he deserved all the credit if Republicans won and should not be blamed at all if they lost. When they underperformed, he blamed Republicans who had mishandled abortion, and reports at the time had him fuming at aides who backed losing candidates, including reportedly blaming Melania Trump for encouraging his endorsement of Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. In 2020 he declined to accept the result at all. The details rotate. The rule does not.
Notice who is missing from the 2026 list. Reuters says Trump has largely avoided acknowledging his own role in shaping the strategy, or how his unpopularity is dragging on candidates in competitive races. His approval is at the lowest point of his presidency, weighed down by prices and the Iran war, which has now stretched into its eighth month. His aides have privately conceded he has little chance of salvaging the party’s prospects, the Daily Beast reported (relaying CNN’s reporting), and the plan is now to turn out the committed base rather than persuade anyone new.
That is the inside track. The outside one is running in parallel. On Sunday, October 4, Trump declared that slow vote counts in Detroit, Philadelphia and California proved American elections are rigged and corrupt, without offering evidence that the delays reflected fraud. States have different ballot-processing rules, and some legally count mail ballots received after Election Day. The next day he told reporters there is a lot of cheating in vote by mail.2 Newsweek reported that Republican strategists see Trump preparing a narrative in which Republican victories validate the election system while defeats become evidence of fraud.3
This matters because Democrats are heavily favored to take the House. Polling and election forecasts point toward a Republican defeat, and Thom Tillis, a sitting Republican senator, has warned of a potential electoral bloodbath.
The two tracks serve different audiences and undermine each other. The staff blame is for donors, operatives and Politico readers, and it protects the picture of a winner surrounded by incompetents. The count blame is for the base, and it protects the idea that voters could never have actually done this. Trump can criticize his staff’s performance while alleging election fraud, but the difference is that the former concerns decisions and conduct documented by reporting, while the latter rests on accusations unsupported by evidence. Trump will manage to advance both anyway.
Here is who made the calls. Trump picked Blair. Trump picked Wiles. Trump pushed the maps, and his loyalties shaped the candidate field. If Republicans lose the House on November 3rd, the firing squad can aim wherever it likes, but only one name is on every one of those decisions.
Trump publicly backed Wiles on Friday, calling her smart and tough and saying she will be there a long time. Read it the way you would a chairman’s vote of confidence in a Premier League manager
Trump has voted by mail himself, repeatedly, and on Saturday, October 3, he told Republicans in a Truth Social post to use every appropriate tool to win, mail ballots included. The rigging is apparently seasonal.
For the first time since international observation of U.S. federal elections began in 2002, the United States did not invite OSCE observers to monitor the midterms, according to the organization’s September 23 statement. The Justice Department says it is sending approximately a thousand federal election monitors of its own, although federal monitors and independent international observers serve different functions.