Inside the White House, the Republican strategists devised a simple formula for reversing recent election disappointments and unnerving polling: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Roll out Trump. He may be a second term president and hurtling towards his 80th birthday but a Thursday event in Georgia was a forcible reminder that Donald Trump remains the irresistible force of the Maga movement. So he is going on tour again. Will it work?
Earlier this week, chief of staff Susie Wiles revealed in an interview that putting the president front and centre is the grand Republican plan for maintaining its precarious numerical advantage in the Senate and House when those elections come around in November.
“Typically, in the midterms it’s not about who’s sitting at the White House,” she acknowledged.
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“You localise 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.”
Wiles added: “I haven’t quite broken it to him yet, but he’s going to campaign like it’s 2024 again.”
So on Thursday, after the strange ceremonial unveiling of his new Board of Peace, which included Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, Trump flew to Rome, Georgia. It was a significant location: the bailiwick of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the disenchanted Maga congresswoman who resigned her seat late last year. The choreography was familiar – a visit by Trump to a steel plant, and then a makeshift theatre against a backdrop of steel cut-offs bearing the slogan: Rome, Georgia: Coosa Steel.
The choice of the family-owned processing plant that has been part of the local economy since 1972 was deliberate. In front of the cameras, the current owner told Trump a story of a local business brought to its knees by globalisation – or more specifically, by Chinese imports offering for $90 the same rack of steel for which they had to charge $150.
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The bottom fell out around 2015, with workers offered just one shift a week during the worst of it before business began flooding in after Trump’s imposition of tariffs on China and other trading partners across the world. “You levelled it. The business came back. We are so busy now, we don’t know what to do” the owner told the president, who nodded approvingly before taking up the story.
“Here’s a man virtually going out of business and now he has a thriving business,” Trump declared.
“And it’s happening all over the country. They were ripping us off, and to think we have to go before the supreme court for something like this. For more than 50 years the men and women at Coosa Steel have poured out blood, sweat and tears ... to turn out beautiful steel with those beautiful words, you don’t see it much any more: Made in the USA.”
As Wiles promised, all of this carried echoes of his campaign story from 2024. It was a reheat of the appealing fantasia of a Rust Belt reborn and gleaming again; of blue-collar prosperity redeemed and a return to values abandoned – or sold off – more than four decades ago.
However, it coincided with the release of contradictory Census Bureau statistics indicating the tariffs have failed to bring production back to the United States and that the country has lost more than 80,000 manufacturing jobs over the past year. While the trade deficit did decrease, it was marginal. It remains to be seen whether Trump can convince his base that the story of Coosa Steel has, as he contends, been replicated within “thousands” of other US businesses whose fortunes have been resuscitated by tariffs.
But what is clear is that the administration has not found anyone remotely capable of emulating Trump’s capacity to renew the sense of burning cause within the Maga Republican base.
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There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when an appearance by Trump in this part of Georgia would have meant an introduction by Taylor-Greene. The president avoided mentioning his former loyalist by name but was instead introduced to the stage by Clay Fuller, who described himself as a “cancer survivor, veteran, and a proud Maga warrior” and who is running for the seat vacated by Taylor-Greene in the 14th district.
Fuller has earned Trump’s endorsement in what is a hugely competitive Republican primary – and a potentially sticky election campaign – filled with 22 contenders.
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But the presence of an unknown face and name reinforced Taylor-Greene’s conspicuous absence. She has made the flip from volatile Trump devotee, who had acquired national recognition and infamy over her five years in Washington, to one of the administration’s most trenchant critics. On Wednesday, she took to social media in advance of Trump’s visit to remind her followers that 75,000 households in her former district watched their health insurance double after the lapse of Affordable Care Act tax credits. Many, she claimed, have simply been unable to renew their policies.
“Since you are all on the struggle bus, I’ll give you an America First tip,” she stated, addressing former colleagues.
“If you had put America FIRST from the start, instead of your rich donor class and foreign policy, you wouldn’t have to strategise on how to gaslight Americans.”
Trump steered away from the contentious issue of healthcare and although he mainly framed his delivery around selling the Republican economic message, he could not help air old grievances. Georgia remains the lost cause of his 2020 election campaign and he once again ruminated on the shortfall of votes in Fulton County, where the FBI recently seized ballot papers relating to that election – a raid which local election officials contend was a violation of the US constitution.
“And they found plenty of stuff. And now they have the ballots – and I think it goes before a judge tomorrow – the Democrats are fighting like hell to not let anybody see the ballots. Why don’t they want anyone to see the ballots after all these years? You know why? Because they cheated, that’s why.”
Also running through Trump’s mind was the storming campaign of Democratic senator Jon Ossoff, whose perceived vulnerability in his re-election campaign has faded in recent months. Trump reminisced about how his endorsements of Republican candidates had helped defeat Ossoff in his initial foray in national politics.
“Then Ossoff somehow got involved in the Senate race. I said, he’s a real stiff. You know what a stiff is? We don’t want people like that representing Georgia.”
But the only people Trump goes after are those he believes to be a threat. His afternoon in Rome was the first of what promises to be an arduous midterm campaign into headwinds that many – including Taylor Greene – believe to be of the administration’s own making.
And this return to the stumps highlights the dilemma the Maga movement has not resolved throughout the decade-long phenomenon of Trump.
They are as dependent on his personal appeal now as they were a decade ago.
As far as the Maga heartland is concerned, nobody does it better.
