Conservatives are livid at President Donald Trump for undoing whatever little good last week's Dallas Republican convention actually achieved, according to Politico.
"Trump-a-palooza" was supposed to hand the GOP a "unified message" to energize his MAGA supporters who "typically stay home in a midterm year," Politico reported. Instead, the president has spent the week bouncing between "unrelated storylines" like his White House ballroom construction and the Kennedy Center takeover, leaving candidates fielding questions about whether they agree with him that AI concerns are a "hoax" and defending the administration's embrace of Flock surveillance cameras.
"It's incumbent on the White House and others to drive the message from the top down — but we've demonstrated, for a while, that that's not a strong suit," a GOP strategist working on multiple battleground races told Politico. "We come out of the convention, and this week we're talking about anything but what we said we'd talk about last week."
A former Trump campaign official put it more bluntly, saying the headlines Trump is generating "are not helpful," and urged candidates to break from the White House script when it serves them.
Kevin Madden, a veteran GOP strategist who worked on Mitt Romney's and George W. Bush's presidential campaigns, said the scattered storylines risk erasing the convention from voters' memories entirely.
He chalked it up partly to "the always Trump news cycle" and partly to candidates needing to run "hyper localized, hyper personalized contests" in their own districts rather than leaning on a national message.
One GOP fundraiser summed up the real stakes bluntly: "The issue hurting the GOP is the price of gas and, [to a] lesser extent, the price of food. None of the other stuff, including AI, matters."