U.S. President Donald Trump puts his hands to his face, as he delivers remarks on the economy, at the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan, U.S. July 27, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Osorio
President Donald Trump is facing a huge problem in November, The Bulwark's Sam Stein told MS NOW's Jonathan Lemire on "The Moment" Wednesday.
The problem, he noted, is compounded by Trump's inability to course-correct in a simple way that most candidates facing a huge backlash for their party would.
The president is currently demanding Republicans cancel their Senate recess to force through the SAVE America Act, a voting restriction bill Trump has become obsessed with that has no path to passage in the upper chamber.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), Stein told Lemire, is "in a weird spot" since any attempt to follow Trump's command would end in the bill failing, making him look "feckless" and earning Trump's wrath anyway.
The fundamental issue, said Stein, is that "every party in power in the midterm has to deal with this type of equation. Usually you want to sort of downplay how great things are, because you don't want voters to feel like you're out of touch or leaving them behind. But Trump is incapable of doing that. He continuously talks about this being a 'golden age' and how everyone's 401k is skyrocketing. So there's crosscurrents there."
It further compounds the issue, Stein said, that Trump and his MAGA allies are sitting on a war chest of hundreds of millions of dollars and are doing nothing with it to save the party that polls warn is headed for doom.
"What you're seeing in the polls is that Republicans are, by and large, much less enthusiastic than Democrats to vote in this midterm election," said Stein — with some even threatening to vote for Democrats. "That is real poison for the Republican Party," he said, because the turnout they enjoy whenever Trump is on the ballot is set to vanish.
The upshot of all of this, he said, is that between Trump's refusal to message defensively, his lack of spending and the "general malaise," Democrats "could really run up the numbers."