President Donald Trump upended a planned strategy by House Republicans when he accepted an invitation to visit New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, according to a new report.
The Wall Street Journal’s blow-by-blow account of the Republican collapse in Tuesday’s midterms revealed the GOP had planned to make Mamdani, the 35-year-old democratic socialist elected mayor last year, “the face of a party they would paint as out of touch with most Americans.”
But the mayor made a surprise announcement in late September, when the 80-year-old president – a native New Yorker – was in the city ahead of the United Nations General Assembly, that he had invited Trump to meet.
"Republicans in the House were apoplectic, House Speaker Mike Johnson told White House officials," the Journal reported. "An image of Trump being friendly with Mamdani would hurt Republican House candidates in New York who were running on an anti-Mamdani message. Trump aides didn’t like the idea either, according to people familiar with the matter."
"Trump and Mamdani met at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence, just as the president wanted," the report added. "Johnson later told others it was an unforced error in a difficult election year."
It wasn’t the only time Trump ignored his advisers on optics. According to the report, he also hosted a lavish state dinner for Chinese leader Xi Jinping against the advice of some aides, who joked among themselves that the extensive construction of Trump’s White House ballroom might give them an excuse to cancel the communist leader's visit.
Through the year, Trump largely blew off suggestions that he moderate his positions or stay on message, at times reminding his team that he was the president. He called unfavorable polling “fake,” told aides at times that he didn’t care about the midterms, and kept returning to pet projects like his ballroom and a proposed 250-foot triumphal arch.
Inside Trump’s orbit, nothing was going wrong. At a summer fundraiser in Texas, his loyal personal aide Natalie Harp told donors about a poll that, she said, showed Trump was the most popular Republican president in history, an attendee told the Journal.
Outside that bubble, the president’s own internal polling told a different story – voters overwhelmingly blamed Trump for inflation, and his numbers fell every time gas prices rose. Within weeks, in the last week of September, a GOP pollster was warning that “the bottom fell out.”
Republicans paid the price on Tuesday. The Journal called the losses “one of the most decisive repudiations of a president in modern history.” Democrats won Senate races in states where Trump had pushed aside stronger GOP candidates, and they competed for House seats Trump had carried by double digits in 2024.
“It really didn’t have to be this way,” said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), who lost the South Carolina GOP nomination to Sen. Darline Graham after Trump got involved. “Pride goeth before the fall.”