Everything Is Being Bent to Keep November's Losses Down
Watch where the levers are being pulled this month and one pattern emerges: the administration — and the capital behind it — is subordinating foreign policy, monetary timing, the courts and the party's own candidates to a single objective: holding down Republican losses in November. The midterms are the organizing principle. The people being governed are an afterthought.
Start with Ukraine. Trump has branded Kyiv's resumption of strikes on Russian oil refineries a “disgrace”, the latest salvo in a campaign to pressure a U.S. ally over rising gas prices that could cost Republicans next month. A war is being refereed by the price at American pumps. As the energy ceasefire collapsed, Trump turned on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling him more difficult to deal with than Putin — a strained relationship now clouding an EU summit convened to shore up Ukraine's defense. The ally resisting an invader is the villain; the price of gasoline is the national interest.
The same deferral runs through monetary policy. Ludovic Subran, chief investment officer and chief economist at Allianz, expects Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh to raise interest rates by as much as 75 basis points once the midterm elections are over. “The US is running hot, and I think he cannot ignore that,” Subran told Bloomberg. The economy is understood to need tightening now, but the cost is held back until the polls close — the pain scheduled, conveniently, for when it can no longer move a ballot.
That scheduling is the tell, and it is not the Republicans' alone. The Democrats, too, are signaling behind the scenes that their central priority should they win a majority will be the escalation of the war against Russia — queued, like the rate hikes, for the day after the votes are counted. The reckoning is always deferred past the ballot.
Where persuasion fails, the machinery of the state is turned on the vote directly. The administration's lawsuits demanding Americans' voter data have been thrown out again and again, with judges calling them “Devoid of Any Factual Basis”. These are not serious legal arguments; they are pressure on the electoral system itself, draining the time and money of election officials in the run-up to a vote. The courts keep dismissing them and they keep coming — proof the point was never to win in court.
And where the state's pressure runs out, capital pays cash. Elon Musk, the world's richest man, has donated over $150 million to a Senate GOP group, a nine-figure assist to Texas candidate Ken Paxton and a decisive return to large-scale political giving. It is the same logic by other means: a billionaire buying the seats the lawsuits and the gas-price theater are meant to protect.
Even the party's own candidates are caught in the vise. In purple Michigan, Republican Mike Rogers needs Trump's base to turn out for a Senate seat and at the same time needs the voters who have soured on the president. That tightrope is the whole strategy in miniature: hold the faithful, mask the damage, survive one more cycle.
And the damage is the thread that ties it together. The reason gas prices are a weapon, the reason rate hikes have to wait, the reason the base must be flattered and the doubters managed, is that working people are already underwater: for many workers, the raises won over the past couple of years have been wiped out by inflation. The paycheck went up and bought less. That is the fact the whole apparatus is built to obscure. It is a campaign to manage the appearance of the economy, not its substance — and the bill lands on the same workers whose eroded wages made the performance necessary. They pay now, in prices, and they pay later, in the rate hikes queued up for the day after the election — while the billionaires funding the show pay nothing at all.