The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman said members of Donald Trump’s inner circle have privately acknowledged making a major mistake in the planning of the GOP’s first-ever midterm convention, which is set to take place next Wednesday and Thursday in Dallas.
On Tuesday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” host Jonathan Lemire noted that watching football is one of the “very few things that American culture, society agrees on right now” before pointing out that the first two games of the new NFL season will take place on the same days as the political event.
“So he’s not even going to get the eyeballs he wanted,” Lemire said.
“No, he is not,” Haberman acknowledged. “And that was an error that some people around him privately acknowledge was something they had not been paying attention to.”
The scheduling blunder speaks, Haberman said, “to how small his circle is” and “how tiny this group of people who are not just making decisions in the government, but who are advising him politically” has become.
“They’re not looking at broader pictures like this,” she continued. “They are in survival mode, and again, that’s fine for themselves, but you have all of these members of Congress, you have senators who are complaining privately.”
She said, “Some are fine doing this; some do not want to. They don’t want to come off the trail. They don’t want to give instant ad copy to Democrats of their faces, of them sitting in this crowd while the president says whatever he’s going to say.”
Trump himself does not appear to be “especially moved” by the threat Republicans may face in the 2026 midterms, Haberman added.
“But most people in his party,” she said, “and certainly his advisers are.”
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