Trump’s flip-flop and freakout over weekend rallies expose a president in panic mode

With days to go until what polls indicate will be a brutal midterm election for President Donald Trump and his Republican Party, the man who has implored MAGA voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot” is starting to panic.

On Friday, White House sources let it be known that the president would indeed be traveling to Kansas and Iowa for a pair of his signature MAGA rallies in support of Senate candidates Roger Marshall and Ashley Hinson, marking a sudden U-turn in strategy after having scrapped those plans for a relatively leisurely weekend at his Palm Beach, Florida getaway.

It was an uncharacteristic reversal of a decision he’d made less than a day earlier, when he cancelled plans for the midwestern campaign swing, with aides instead arguing that he would be equally effective doing “tele-rallies” — effectively large-scale campaign conference calls for supporters who sign up and dial in to hear him and other speakers by phone — in hopes of getting out the vote before Tuesday’s balloting.

Trump, 80, has spent all or part of 23 days this month on the road in what has become a panicked barnstorm of formerly safe, reliably Republican states where his preferred (and in some cases, hand-picked) Senate candidates are in real danger of embarrassing losses next week.

He’s visited the nominal GOP stronghold of Texas for three rallies to boost embattled candidate Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued state attorney general Trump pushed and prodded to victory in a primary over the incumbent John Cornyn — who had committed the cardinal sin of affirming the 2020 election results. Now Paxton looks set to become the first Republican to lose a statewide contest in the Lone Star State since the Clinton administration.

He’s similarly held a trio of rallies in Ohio, which has been a reliably red state since his first campaign in 2016. It was there where he first began his bizarre habit of riffing on the aesthetics of incumbent Sen. Jon Husted’s posterior — where the Republican appears in danger of being bested on Tuesday by Democrat Sherrod Brown just two years after Brown lost his own re-election bid to Bernie Moreno.

And with his approval ratings sinking dangerously close to 30 percent, he has even ventured to unthinkable destinations such as Mississippi, where incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith has at least some chance of becoming the first Republican to lose a Senate election to a Democrat there since 1982.

Trump insiders tell The Independent that the president’s rally schedule has been calibrated to boost turnout in places where enthusiasm among the MAGA base may have waned amid the economic chaos he’s wrought over his first two years back in office.

The thinking, they say, is that Trump remains the most popular figure in the party, with a unique ability to mobilize voters and connect with them on the stump.

And Trump himself has gone all-in on this theory, boasting on Truth Social that the latest set of rallies have drawn the “BIGGEST CROWDS” in midterm history while suggesting that his appearances have single-handedly revived flagging campaigns.

But Republican operatives outside of the White House’s orbit tell a different story.

Among those working in the trenches on Senate campaigns, there is a very real sense that the president’s presence hasn’t done much at all to help — and it may have even hurt candidates by energizing Democrats, who are already quite enthusiastic about next week’s elections.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the presumptive next Speaker of the House should Democrats take control of that chamber in the new Congress, posted a blunt assessment to X, writing that Iowa and Kansas Republicans had been “scrambling to keep Donald Trump as far away … as possible.”

That dynamic, plus quiet pressure behind the scenes from embattled campaigns, was why Trump initially planned to stay at home in Florida and instead do a series of telephonic rally appearances this weekend, which the White House said would give him “the opportunity to highlight his accomplishments and expand his reach across the country.”

Republican campaigns breathed a sigh of relief, seemingly free to run through the tape without having their final news cycles hijacked by the president’s stump speech “weave” — let alone any talk about younger men nd women’s rear ends.

But that was before the president’s ego got in the way.

As he prepared to board Air Force One to return from a rally in South Carolina on Thursday, a reporter from Reuters asked him to explain the rally cancellations that had just been announced and pressed specifically on whether he was “sick” of the road.

Trump, 80, only appeared to hear the reporter ask if he was “sick” and lashed out.

“You know what the reason is? I don’t feel I have to go to Kansas,” Trump said, as the rage clearly started to manifest in his reddening face.

“I feel perfect. You are disgusting,” he lashed out at the reporter.

Less than 24 hours later, and with his outburst over the rally cancelations dominating headlines, Trump reversed course agin, with a source familiar with the situation only confirming to The Independent that the rallies were “back on” because Trump “loves his supporters.”

“In addition to nearly 20 tele-rallies, he will hold back-to-back rallies in Kansas and Iowa on Sunday. No one works harder, fights harder, or loves the American people more than President Donald J. Trump,” they insisted.

The source also claimed that the canceled and revived rallies in Iowa and Kansas had merely been “rearranged for scheduling purposes to accommodate dozens of additional tele-rallies.”

But another person in the president’s orbit, a former White House official who remains close to members of his team, said the reason for the about-face is more simple.

The president’s team had prevailed on him to cancel his remaining appearances on behalf of Marshall and Hinson by telling him they either — or both — might lose, making the photographs of them on the eve of that loss potentially humiliating.

There had also been a true sense of unease at the number of protesters at Trump’s rallies compared with the smaller crowd sizes requiring the use of correspondingly smaller venues.

But because of a reporter’s honest query, all that planning went out the window.

“He canceled the rallies because the candidates didn’t want them but he couldn’t handle a simple question about why. So now he’s doing them anyway rather than admit what everyone else already knows,” they said.