Over the last few months, in the run-up to the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, the party’s official Instagram page has been a running feed of MAGA iconography. There are illustrations of a buff Donald Trump riding a stallion and waving an American flag; of Trump in a cowboy hat on a packet of Marlboro Reds. The president isn’t on the ballot in November, but the Republican National Committee made it explicit: This would be, in the words of chairman Joe Gruters, “Trumpapalooza.”
So you can imagine my confusion when I arrived at the convention in the blazing Texas heat—temperatures cracked 100° on Wednesday—to find no sign of the president on the jumbotron outside of the arena. Where was our leader’s mug? I was assured this function is being held in celebration of him. After all, Trump ordered up the convention, a first for the Republican Party, and commanded the party to build the two-day event around his accomplishments.
My nerves were eased upon entry. The media credentials—the card I had to wear around my neck to access the event—featured a large photo of the president. Inside was a glittering dedication to Trump that would have made Rafael Trujillo blush. The arena’s corridors were dotted with blow-up photos of the president in the Oval Office or pumping his fist in the air in Butler. The merchandise stand sold hats declaring “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING,” mousepads depicting Trump the cowboy straddling a dashing horse, and one book: Eric Trump’s Under Siege: My Family’s Fight to Save Our Nation. One elderly woman wore a mini-dress made entirely of printed-out photos of Trump taped together. We may have been in Texas, but the MAGA hats outnumbered the Stetsons. They called for making all manner of nouns great again, from “Farmers” to “Alabama.” A portly man with a handlebar mustache, wearing a loose golf polo and tight pants, wore a “Make America Hot Again” cap.
This is what Trump wanted. Typically, in a midterm election year when the president’s approval ratings are hovering in the low 30s as he wages an intractable war abroad that’s raising prices at home, a political party would urge its candidates to focus on their own races and put some distance between their campaigns and the White House. Trump rejected this approach, preferring to embrace the Democratic strategy of making the midterm election about him.
And so we got Trumpapalooza. “I’m asking you to pretend I’m on the ballot!” he told the crowd, between riffs mocking Democrats and referring to his second term as “the most successful two years, financially and every other way, in the history of the presidency.” Even calling this a convention is a bit of a misnomer. There is no platform being debated, or candidates being nominated. This was a tarted-up Trump rally.
The president was preceded by a series of conservative stars including Adam Carrola, the reactionary comedian, and Ken Paxton, the Republican fighting to keep the Senate seat in Texas red. The crowd, which didn’t quite fill the American Airlines Center—home of the Dallas Mavericks—gobbled up the familiar buzzwords. “Trump!” Loud cheers. “Trans!” Loud boos. James Talarico, Paxton’s challenger in Texas, was a recurring target, as was Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive physician running for a Senate seat in Michigan.
As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent delivered a somewhat stilted speech, a MAGA hat-clad woman sitting next to me started watching an animated video on her phone of bombs falling on a map of Iran. But it wasn’t until Trump took the stage as the last speaker of the night that I heard anyone mention his military excursion. Consider that: The defining policy of Trump’s second term, possibly his political career, an operation he has labeled a “total and complete victory,” was a non-event here. The fact that none in his party dared to mention this historic achievement—even in this room packed with MAGA faithful—is a good sign of just how toxic the war has become. These Republicans will show up to Trump’s big midterm rally. They’ll even speak at it, lavishing gooey praise on the soon-to-be lame duck with a 30% approval rating. But they draw the line at defending his war.
Trump himself has no such compunction. He mentioned Iran on several occasions, engaging in a call-and-response with the crowd. “Anyone here think that Iran should have a nuclear weapon?” Loud boos. Case closed. Trump spoke for more than an hour and a half, a marathon speech even for our loquacious president. He reveled in diverting from the written speech, riffing about Paxton’s looks (“bad,” he declared, before apologizing for having spoken a harsh truth). On multiple occasions, he reassured the crowd, and perhaps himself, that the arena was full and that no one was leaving, including as his speech crossed the hour mark. As he said it, multiple people could be seen walking out. He pivoted seamlessly from a monologue explaining that he calls Democrats “Dumocrats” now—and that there is a “b” in the word “dumb,” despite what some people believe—to a bit about transgender athletes. He mused about renaming the Strait of Hormuz “The Trump Strait,” and proposed rebranding both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans—though he allowed, in an uncharacteristic concession, that doing both might be excessive.
His most memorable riff centered on Talarico, whom he dubbed “Talafreako” to the delight of the crowd. “He was also somebody that hated eating meat,” Trump explained, “but he ran a campaign to beat meat. He called it ‘beat meat.’ I don’t know what the hell he meant by that. These people are gonna tell me, what the hell is he—he wants to beat meat? But it was bad for his image, so he started eating meat. And he recently—it’s getting worse; I’m getting myself in trouble. It’s getting worse. But he was recently seen having a barbecue and eating a lot of meat. But that’s what happened. He ate it, and then he was seen running backstage to a room and throwing up all over the place. He doesn’t like meat.” (For what it’s worth, Talarico insists he is not a vegan and comes from a long line of Lone Star carnivores.)
Whatever this was, it was hard to see how it would help his party in November. “He doesn’t care about Republicans winning the midterms,” grumbled one top Republican operative close to the White House, who declined to attend the convention. “You got a tax cut, which is great. But then all you’ve got is a ballroom and war with Iran. That’s all he’s talking about. The ballroom and the fucking Reflecting Pool. He just doesn’t give a shit anymore. He doesn’t care about Republicans. I don’t think he really wants JD or anyone else to win in 2028. That’s why you’re seeing him naming the Kennedy Center after him, naming an airport after him. It’s all legacy vanity. That’s all he cares about.”
It’s hard to argue with this conclusion when you consider just how unhelpful Trump has been thus far. His aides have warned since last year that the midterms required messaging discipline from the White House, a focus on voter concerns about the economy. Then Trump invaded Iran. When he wasn’t defending the war or declaring it over and won, Trump was musing about the $600 million ballroom he’s building at the White House and other construction projects around the capital. His latest in-kind contribution to the Democrats targeted Midwest battlegrounds like Ohio and Michigan: a trade war with Canada, which threatens to batter northern Midwest states already struggling to grapple with his previous trade spats. Days before the convention, Trump posted an animation that showed him pulverizing Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney with a hockey stick.
But the president did offer Republicans one particularly potent sweetener on Wednesday night: a $5,000 “dividend” payment to every American adult if Republicans retain control of the House and the Senate in November. Trump did not say where the money for this extraordinary payout would come from, which observers noted would cost more than $1 trillion. In an appearance on Fox News, Vice President JD Vance claimed the United States had raked in so much money from tariffs that the dividends would pay for themselves. (The veep’s reasoning here would give any economist an aneurysm.) The payouts, which critics have taken to calling a national bribe, are unlikely to happen. Trump has repeatedly promised checks to Americans in his second term, but none have been sent out, and even the thought has run into resistance from Trump’s own supporters. Joe Lonsdale, the Palantir cofounder who hosted a convention after-party on Wednesday night with Donald Trump Jr., was scathing in his assessment: “For the record, I am hugely in favor of winning the midterms, and love much about this admin,” he wrote on X, “but am strongly against bread and circus bribes.”
