After months of subdued pessimism about the midterm elections—traditionally difficult for the president’s party—and concerns about Republicans’ ability to mobilize voters without Donald Trump’s name on the ballot, the tycoon finally sent a noticeably more optimistic message. “We will win the midterm elections and save America!” he wrote on Truth Social in a Labor Day post. The change in tone comes days after MAGA Inc.’s Super PAC made its first substantial expenditure in this campaign—$10 million on TV and digital ads for the tight Texas Senate race—and on the eve of an unprecedented Republican convention in Dallas, organized by Trump to frame the November 3 vote as a referendum on his presidency. “Please pretend, for the sake of this election, that I am on the ballot,” he asked his supporters.
Long convinced he is the main engine of Republican turnout, and with less than two months until a vote that could cost the GOP control of Congress and heavily shape the last two years of his term, Trump has decided to recreate the spectacle of presidential conventions during the midterm campaign. In Dallas there will be no candidates to nominate and no formal platform to adopt: the event at the American Airlines Center—the roughly 20,000-seat arena that hosts the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks—will be open to the public and is set to function as a massive rally, with more than 50 appearances or presentations per evening, entertainment segments, and a large balloon drop at the close. Deeply involved in organizing the event, Trump will be the central figure both days: he will deliver the main address on Wednesday and close the convention on Thursday, immediately after Vice President JD Vance. Organizers expect about 30,000 attendees in total for an event financed by Republican donors and costing over $40 million.
The stage will feature several senior administration and party figures: in addition to Vance, expected participants include House Speaker Mike Johnson, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Attorney General Todd Blanche, Donald Trump Jr., and former White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt. The program will also highlight candidates involved in the decisive races for control of Congress, including Ken Paxton in Texas and Mike Rogers in Michigan, along with numerous House contenders. Not everyone will be in Dallas: several Republicans running in highly competitive districts have chosen to stay and campaign in their own districts. Johnson himself acknowledged that, with early voting about to begin, it is a delicate time for many members to leave their constituencies.
The agenda is intended mainly to refocus attention on the issues Trump views as strengths of the first two years of his second term: tougher immigration controls at the Mexican border, tax cuts, boosting American manufacturing, tariffs, lowering drug prices, and the “Make America Healthy Again” initiative.
Ordinary citizens will be invited onstage to describe benefits they attribute to the administration’s policies, while Republican candidates will seek to contrast their platforms with what they call the Democrats’ “extreme positions.” On Thursday, the day before the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, there will also be a commemorative moment with families of first responders, and young Republicans will mark, one year on, the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Given these premises, the convention remains a high-stakes gamble. Trump arrives in Dallas with an approval rating stuck at 33 percent according to Reuters/Ipsos—the low point of his second term—after months marked by rising living costs and the conflict with Iran. Several Republican strategists worry that turning the midterms into a personal referendum on the president could mobilize Democrats about as much as the MAGA base. That dilemma will hang over the entire event: in 2018, during Trump’s first term, Democrats captured the House, and historically the party occupying the White House tends to lose ground in midterm elections. The last president to see his party gain seats in both chambers was George W. Bush in 2002, in the exceptional national unity following the September 11, 2001 attacks. This time Trump is attempting to break that pattern by placing himself, symbolically though not as a candidate, at the center of the ballot.