Trump has apparently decided the thing America needs most right now is a nationwide sales pitch for Donald Trump.
The plan: with the midterms bearing down and his numbers in the basement, send Cabinet officials out to promote his “accomplishments,” farm some friendly local coverage, and remind voters how great everything supposedly is.
I love this strategy. Genuinely. Please keep doing it. Because every time one of these people leaves Washington to explain how successful the administration has been, they run smack into actual Americans who’d like to know why their own lives feel so much worse than the press release.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright went to New Hampshire to talk up natural gas pipelines and got peppered about four-dollar gasoline. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins went to Iowa to rally farmers and wound up defending Trump’s plan to import hundreds of thousands of tons of foreign beef while American ranchers are furious about it. RFK Jr. went to Florida to talk school nutrition and ended up in a fight with Governor Josh Shapiro over a Pennsylvania measles outbreak and whether it killed two people. Even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is reportedly catching skepticism from his old Wall Street crowd about pieces of the agenda.
See the pattern? They show up with a slideshow about how great Trump is, and somebody in the room raises a hand: okay, but what about this disaster?
The Rollins trip might be the funniest of the bunch. Trump spent a decade branding himself on “America First”: American workers, American products, American farmers, stop letting foreign countries screw us. Then he decides the way to bring down grocery prices is to import 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef and sell it at a discount. And American cattle ranchers, reasonably, want to know what the hell happened to America First.
So the America First president’s own Agriculture Secretary gets sent to Iowa to fire up farmers — and has to explain why the boss is flooding the market with foreign beef while the people who raise American cattle are livid. And Rollins didn’t exactly bear-hug the policy: she defended the goal of lower prices but admitted she hadn’t actually discussed the specific plan with the president. Hell of an endorsement.
Here’s the kicker. Trump’s also getting hammered by the people who think he isn’t going far enough. The White House keeps bragging about record ICE arrests — you’d figure immigration hard-liners were the one group he didn’t have to sell. Nope. Some are reportedly furious with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin because deportations and raids aren’t fast enough for them; Steve Bannon called Mullin a “squish” and said the administration should hide him.
So take inventory. Ranchers angry that America First now includes foreign beef. Consumers still angry about prices. Wall Street guys skeptical of the economics. And immigration hard-liners angry that the most aggressive deportation push in modern history still isn’t aggressive enough. Good luck with the bus tour.
This is the thing Trump has always been elite at: building his own reality. Everything’s the greatest, the biggest, the most successful. Anything that goes wrong was somebody else’s fault. Bad numbers are fake numbers. Critics are losers or RINOs or whatever the word is this week. And it works beautifully — behind a podium, into a camera.
It works a lot worse when your Cabinet secretary is standing in a field in front of a cattle rancher. You can tell that man he’s living in the greatest economy in the history of the universe, but he knows exactly what he’s getting per head. You can call energy policy a triumph, but he can read the number on the pump. You can insist everything’s affordable, and then people go buy groceries. You cannot bullshit somebody about their own life.
And remember — this is on purpose. These aren’t rogue officials who wandered into Iowa. It’s the actual midterm strategy. One Republican strategist from Trump’s own first term told Politico he’s not sure blanketing the country with Cabinet members helps at all — that instead of reassuring anyone, they keep surfacing the administration’s problems and creating new divisions.
I’m with him. Keep sending them. Send everybody. Matching jackets, a fleet of buses, get Eric and Don Jr. in the rotation. Let’s see how many states we can hit before Election Day.
That’s the joke at the center of this. Trump wanted his Cabinet crisscrossing the country telling people what he’s accomplished — and instead they’re getting a firsthand tour of what he’s accomplished.
Sure, some stops go fine. Hegseth got good reviews at a GOP event in Iowa. RFK still has his devotees. Strategists still like Bessent as a messenger. But that was never the problem. The problem is that no messenger, however slick, can make the contradictions vanish. You can’t run on America First and expect ranchers to cheer foreign beef. You can’t claim you fixed affordability while your Energy Secretary is getting grilled about gas prices. And you can’t build the harshest immigration regime in memory without discovering there’s a wing of your own movement that will always demand more.
Trump built a movement on anger. Now a good chunk of that anger is swinging back around at him.
So please, fellas — keep talking. Keep walking Cabinet secretaries into rooms full of people who can ask about prices, about ruined farms, about the America First promises that didn’t survive contact with reality. Because reality is the one thing Trump has never managed to control. He can call the polls fake, blame the Democrats, blame the media, fire off another list of his own accomplishments — but eventually people just look around at their own lives and decide whether they believe him.
And Trump has apparently concluded the smartest way to win the midterms is to send his Cabinet out and hand voters the chance to do exactly that.
Go with God, Donald.
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