Last night, Republicans did something neither party has done in the modern era. They began a full convention in the middle of a midterm cycle, with Donald Trump and JD Vance headlining. Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters has taken to calling it “Trumpapalooza,” a nickname he clearly enjoys and can’t stop repeating in interviews. It offered a typical cast of the MAGA loyal and the usual rhetoric from Trump officials about what it will take to “Make America Great Again.”
Like a used car salesman trying to close a deal, Trump took the stage and made the absurd claim that Americans will receive a $5,000 check as a reward if the GOP retakes control of the House and Senate in the midterms. And in his attempt to extend his habit of renaming things, he made dogma his desire to change the name of a state, New Mexico, to “New America.”
Borrowing the name from Gruters, this “Trumpapalooza” lived up to its branding last night, but will not save the midterm elections for Republicans in November.
Midterm conventions aren’t really a thing, either. Democrats tried them briefly in the 1970s and abandoned the idea because, as Karl Rove put it this week, “they weren’t particularly helpful.” There’s no nominee to select, no platform being ratified, no procedural reason for the gathering to exist at all. This one exists because Trump wanted it to, because, in Gruters’ words, “this is a turnout race,” and because Republican strategists believe low-propensity MAGA voters only show up to the polls when Trump’s name feels present, even in an election where it isn’t.
Changing How You Read the News: Here’s Why It Matters
Americans aren’t just disagreeing; we’re being shown completely different stories.
Every day, news outlets decide what to publish. In polarized media environments, audience demographics can split coverage. If you rely on only one side of the media spectrum, you could miss stories entirely, not because it isn’t credible, but because it doesn’t align with certain editorial priorities.
That’s why I’m often asked where I go to do research for my reporting. One of the main research tools I use is called Ground News. Ground News shows me how stories are being covered from different political perspectives, and it highlights “blindspots” where only left-wing or right-wing media is covering a story.
That kind of visibility is rare right now, and it changes how you understand the news. I’ve worked out a deal with them; if you want that level of insight every day, head to GroundNews.com/AdamK and subscribe to get 40% off the Vantage plan, the one I use.
Ground News is subscriber-funded, so they don’t rely on ads that could introduce bias. By subscribing, you support both our channel and their independent team working to keep the media transparent.
Trump gave the game away at a rally last month when he told the crowd, “what I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.” He isn’t on the ballot. He can never be on one again. And a party throwing an unprecedented, expensive convention to make voters feel otherwise is not a party operating from strength.
I don’t doubt that turnout theory has some truth to it. But I think it’s incomplete. A party that had full confidence in its record wouldn’t need to manufacture an unprecedented, expensive, and desperate spectacle to remind voters it exists. You hold a rally like this when you’re worried the case on the merits isn’t enough on its own. House Speaker Mike Johnson gave away the real message when he described this fall’s elections as “a competition against communism,” a line meant to animate otherwise disheartened GOP voters.
Karl Rove said as much, more gently, on Fox News this week. “I’m a little bit nervous about it,” he admitted, “because, look, we’re in the final stages of the campaign. I’d be more comfortable if this had been held in June and July and set a thematic that could be pursued for four or five months rather than for 56 days.”
He described the White House’s strategy in more blunt terms saying “the White House is pushing a big bet, it’s like we’re at the tables, they’re pushing all the chips on saying if we make this about Donald Trump and if we make this about Donald Trump’s record and put him at the center of this then we have a shot to pull this thing off.”
To extend the poker analogy, that’s the language of a party going all in because it’s pot committed.
Doug Heye, a former RNC communications director, put the risk even more plainly: “If it’s Trumpapalooza and ‘America has never been hotter or richer,’ it will fall flat.” Gruters himself, touring conservative media in recent weeks, has used language that sits in tension with the celebratory branding of the event he’s running. “It’s a pending, looming disaster heading our way,” he told one interviewer. “We are facing almost certain defeat.”
You can see the hesitation in who didn’t show up last night or plans to today, and it’s not a handful of stragglers. A Politico survey of more than seventy Republican candidates and lawmakers found that more than half planned to skip the event entirely. CBS News reached out directly to Republicans in some of the closest races nationwide: five said flatly they weren’t coming, and fifty-one more wouldn’t even answer the question. By ABC’s count, roughly a hundred House Republicans and candidates are expected in Dallas, which is about half of the House GOP conference and this year’s slate of candidates combined. The New Republic wrote that the whole event “seems to have been created out of an eleventh-hour necessity rather than a nationalistic groundswell.”
The people staying home aren’t shy about why. Susan Collins and Dan Sullivan, both defending seats in states Trump has struggled in, are skipping it. So is Zach Nunn, an Iowa Republican in a toss-up district, who told reporters he’d rather be “in my district working” than in Dallas. Brian Fitzpatrick is defending a Pennsylvania seat that is always decided by slim margins and offered insight that “our bosses are back home” rather than at a convention.
Even the ticket price tells the story. House members were expected to pay at least $25,000 of their own campaign money just to attend. Meanwhile Trump’s own super PAC, MAGA Inc., is sitting on more than $400 million and has spent only a fraction of it. Some of the same Republicans skipping Dallas have grown skeptical that money will even move the needle for them this close to the election.
Here’s what I think is actually happening. Trump has spent his entire adult life needing to be the most important person in whatever room he occupies. The presidency was the ultimate expression of that need, and it is now, by constitutional design, a temporary one. He knows what tends to happen to people who leave that kind of power, especially people whose time in it was this controversial.
History does not linger kindly on presidents who leave office deeply unpopular, and Trump’s approval, by multiple measures, sits at the lowest point of his second term. To Trump, this convention is an insurance policy against being forgotten.
That combination, a man trying to outrun the waning of his relevance and a party that has hitched its midterm survival to his personal brand, is exactly the vulnerability Democrats have been waiting for. Every seat Republicans hold in the House and Senate right now was won in an environment nothing like this one. Democrats enter this fall more organized and more hopeful about retaking Congress than at any point in this administration.
If Trump goes down owning this election the way Gruters and Rove are already bracing for, he won’t just be leaving office unpopular. He’ll be leaving it having spent his final two years in the White House dragging his own party down with him.
Giving people $5k if republicans win??!! It’s our tax dollars. He’s such a loser, pathetic and more!!! 😝
Amazing that the tRUMP empire is releasing $5k to everyone to vote for the failing republican party. /S/ Nope, it's our tax money. I'll take it and donate all to more worthy causes in the NGO world like stopping the sale of OUR public lands so the Tech Bros. can build their data centers and drain our aquifers, destroy productive farm land, raise our utility rates, and leave eye sores scattered across the US. And I won't be voting for a single republican.