TRUMP, VENEZUELA, AND THE MIDTERM PIVOT TO THE ECONOMY. President Donald Trump made a revealing statement a few days ago when he addressed House Republicans at the Trump-Kennedy Center. “You’ve got to win the midterms,” he told the lawmakers. “Because if we don’t win the midterms … they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached.”
Does anyone doubt that Trump is right? If Democrats win the House of Representatives, they will be able to try one more time to remove him from office. Remember, they impeached Trump twice in his first term. The odds that they will succeed are infinitesimal, but the odds that they will try are very good. Maybe the impeachment could be for something the president has already done, or maybe it will be for something that hasn’t happened yet. But it is very difficult to imagine a Democratic House majority not impeaching Donald Trump.
It all depends on the midterm elections. And the president and his party face daunting odds. First, there is history. Generally, the president’s party tends to lose seats in midterm elections. When that doesn’t happen, there’s usually an odd circumstance at work. For example, the last president not to lose seats was George W. Bush in 2002, which had an asterisk by it because it was in the aftermath of 9/11. Before that, Bill Clinton did it in 1998, which had the asterisk of the Lewinsky scandal, during which voters sent the message that they did not want Clinton to be impeached; Republicans did it anyway. Before Clinton, the last president to gain seats in a midterm election was Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934.
Another factor is the president’s job performance rating. It’s a key ingredient in midterm elections. Trump’s current rating is 44.3% approval, 52.6% disapproval, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. That’s not great, but also not terrible by Trump standards. And it’s not much different from Trump’s approval rating on the day of the 2018 midterm elections, which was 43.5% approval, 53.2% disapproval. The Republican Party lost 40 House seats that year. This year, the Republican margin of control is so narrow that if they lose even a handful of seats, they will lose the House.
The biggest factor, of course, is the economy. Everyone knows it is the voters’ most important issue. Despite some encouraging economic numbers of late — 4.3% annualized growth in the third quarter of 2025, plus inflation ticking downward to 2.7% in November — there’s no doubt that many voters, including some who voted for Trump in 2024, believe the president has not paid enough attention to the economy in his first year in office and, in particular, has not done enough to tackle the Biden-era inflation that is still such a terrible burden on American consumers.
Part of that feeling among voters came from Trump’s intense focus on foreign affairs, including but certainly not limited to the Israel-Gaza war, the Ukraine-Russia war, and other international issues. Trump is fond of noting that he has ended eight wars, characterizing himself as the “president of peace.”
The problem is that, unless the United States is directly involved in an overseas conflict, something that nobody wants, voters generally do not care about foreign policy. Has Trump resolved a fight between Armenia and Azerbaijan? Most American voters just don’t care.
The feeling that Trump was underperforming on the economy grew throughout his first year in office. Meanwhile, the midterm elections moved ever closer. So it was not a surprise a month ago when White House chief of staff Suzie Wiles said that the president would devote his energy moving forward to campaigning and winning the 2026 elections. “Typically in the midterms it’s not about who’s sitting in the White House,” Wiles said on The Mom View podcast. “You localize the election, and you keep the federal officials out of it. We’re actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot because so many of those low-propensity voters are Trump voters…I haven’t quite broken it to him yet, but he’s going to campaign like it’s 2024 again.”
Part of that effort would involve Trump traveling around the country to hold rallies, where he would tout his economic record. His first such appearances were in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Trump also delivered a televised prime-time speech on the economy. The message was: The president is focused on the economy.
Trump then ordered U.S. military action against Venezuela, and one news cycle after another has taken up with the aftermath of the president’s statement that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela going forward. Recently, Trump gave an interview to the New York Times, in which he was asked how long the United States would be in control of key aspects of Venezuela’s economy. “Would it be three months?” Times asked. “Six months? A year? Longer?” Trump’s response was, “I would say much longer.”
The open-ended Venezuelan campaign makes the pivot to the midterm elections seem like a long, long time ago. In reality, it’s been 30 days. Will voters see the Venezuela affair as Trump paying attention to the issues that mean most to them? Unlikely. If the president truly does not want to be impeached, he should focus more on the cost of living and less on foreign adventures.