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As Republicans face down tough midterm elections, President Trump has appeared out of step with the party on Iran, the economy and other issues.
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President Trump is poised to become far more visible outside of the White House than he has been for most of his term, starting with a Republican midterms convention in Texas and continuing with travel to boost candidates, according to his aides.
If the president expands his domestic travel after the two-day mini-convention in Dallas that begins on Wednesday, it will be a test of whether he still has the ability to connect to the concerns of voters, something that helped him win the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections.
Mr. Trump’s ability to harness voter anger over an eroded manufacturing base, or a lack of accountability after the 2008 fiscal crisis, or the toll of the so-called “forever wars” in the Middle East after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was part of how he was able to succeed. He loved the adulation he got at rallies in his 2016 campaign in particular, and threw himself into them again in the final stretch of his 2024 race against President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
But early in 2025, Mr. Trump made clear to several advisers that he did not want to keep holding rallies. The campaign portion of his political career was over, he suggested, as he settled back into the West Wing and worked day by day to remake it in a hue of gold.
His domestic travel in 2026 has included roughly two dozen events that were strictly about policy or a particular activity his administration had worked on. Some of those trips were tacked onto visits he was making to Florida or Sterling, Va., or Bedminster, N.J., to be at his private clubs and play golf. And so Mr. Trump has been living an unusually isolated existence, with an extremely small group of advisers and officials helping him arrive at decisions, and a small group of aides providing him with constant positive feedback.
That information ecosystem tends to override what the president absorbs from polling and focus groups conducted by his own team, reactions that show voters frustrated by ongoing inflation, a spike in gas prices after a war he helped start in Iran, and a mistrust among some who cast ballots for him over how he handled the release of investigative material related to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
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