President Donald Trump's aides are privately bracing for Republicans to lose both chambers of Congress and preparing to shield themselves from Democratic-led investigations.
Wired reported Wednesday that White House officials are now weighing, for the first time, the possibility that Republicans lose control of both the House and Senate in the midterms. Aides conceded in private that Trump's standing in national polls has cratered, even as the president has told them he thinks Republicans could still beat expectations in November.
One longtime Trump political operative who correctly predicted weeks before the 2024 election that Trump would sweep the battleground states offered a blunt assessment.
"Oh, yeah, we're going to get creamed," the anonymous operative said.
A recent Wall Street Journal poll put Trump's approval rating at 37 percent. That's the lowest of any president heading into a midterm since those polls began in 1990, Wired noted. Sources told Wired that Trump's sunnier outlook is shaped partly by internal polling showing Republicans trailing by smaller margins in individual House races.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle defended the president's standing.
"No one can dispute the fact that President Trump has created one of the most robust coalitions in political history with the MAGA movement," Ingle told Wired. "The choice has never been more clear: doubling down on President Trump's winning, commonsense agenda or the Democrats' extreme liberal policies and obstruction."
With its electoral prospects dimming, Trump's team is now more focused on responding to the flood of congressional subpoenas it expects if Democrats take power, according to Wired. The White House plans to lean on both executive privilege and attorney-client privilege to protect senior aides from oversight.
The strategy draws strength from the Supreme Court's 2024 immunity ruling, which held that federal courts could not "peel back the curtain" on deliberations central to the presidency, according to Wired.
It's also bolstered by Trump's practice of moving his personal lawyers into government roles. His former defense attorney Todd Blanche is now attorney general, and his former appellate lawyer Will Scharf recently became White House counsel, Wired noted.
According to Wired, aides hope those overlapping protections will tie up investigators for years, pointing to Trump's first-term White House counsel Don McGahn, who testified to Congress about the Mueller probe only after Trump left office.