Photographs by Joseph RushmorePresident Trump began his midterm-convention address last night by casting his spell on the crowd in Dallas. “This place is packed,” he announced from the stage, pointing to the back of the American Airlines Center, where everyone could see hundreds of empty seats. Those who looked up saw thousands more, whole sections without any people at all. But the crowd cheered anyway. A deal had been struck. Reality would be ignored. After more than a decade in politics, Trump is facing his last great electoral test—his popularity is waning, his party is down in the polls, Republicans could lose control in the U.S. House and maybe the Senate. He demanded greater complicity minutes later, seeming to invent a person in the back of the room. “He’s leaving for the bathroom. He’ll be back in two minutes,” he said, pointing. “They’ll take a picture of his seat while he’s gone. And they’ll say Trump did not fill up the arena.” Laughter joined with the cheers for their political wizard. It was working. Trump could say that he had passed “the largest tax cut in the history of our country,” even if that was not the case. He could claim to have won the presidency three times, when he’s actually done so twice. He could describe the recent past as “the most successful two years financially and every other way in the history of the presidency,” despite six in 10 voters saying he had made the economy worse. He could promise to pay every adult U.S. citizen $5,000 if Republicans held both legislative houses, as if that sum did not amount to about 80 percent of the federal discretionary budget. He might even be able to convince the country to embrace the big fantasy, a chance to defy history and seal victory for Republicans in November. “I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he said. “I’m on the ballot. I’m on the ballot. Just one more time.”Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic The night was all about Trump. He was the alpha and omega, the focus and the solution. Attendees wore pictures of the president on lanyards around their necks, the ticket for entry to the arena. VIP boxes were stocked with Trump was right about everything hats. Oversize photos of the president lined the hallways. Five hours before he arrived, he received his first standing ovation. A video montage played on the big screen, images of the president narrated by a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “If”— “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue.” When each speaker dropped Trump’s name, it was cause for riotous celebration. Until now, national political conventions have been held only during presidential-election years, when delegates from each state gather to select their nominee. In the 1970s, the gatherings shifted from smoke-filled rooms for party business to televised infomercials for the candidates. Trump this year created a simulation of a simulation. The balloon nets had no nominee to drop for. The state delegations, sitting under signs on the floor, had no procedural purpose. (The smart party leaders, one strategist told us, were selling their “delegate” tickets to donors.) The convention-in-name-only was for, by, and about one man—who, importantly, cannot be a candidate for president again, according to the U.S. Constitution. [Read: Trump plans to buy midterm ads about his own record]“The only way to keep dangerous, radical, weird out of the Senate is a united Republican Party standing with our president, Donald J. Trump,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, bellowed from the stage. “Stand for the president, Donald J. Trump. This is a battle for the heart of our nation. I said the heart of our nation.”Joseph Rushmore for The AtlanticSenator Tim Scott of South Carolina addresses the audience.No president has tried something like this before. None has had so much money to spend on themselves at this point in a presidency. None has chosen to make the midterms a referendum on themselves while polling so badly. But this is Trump, and Trump has come back from worse. For a decade, the GOP’s electoral success has risen and fallen on his energies. The strategist in chief has bet that turning out Trump voters, the ones who typically stay home when he is not on the ballot, is the only path forward. This is why the first ads he bought for the cycle were not about any candidates who are running this year, but about himself. This was why his latest show was a celebration of the unlimited possibility of his incantations.“Vote Republican, and we will leave the world in our dust for generations to come,” he told the crowd. “There’ll be nothing like it.”Joseph Rushmore for The AtlanticOutside Trump’s curated fantasy world, not everything has gone according to plan. Trump’s political strategist, James Blair, announced after the off-year elections in 2025 that the president would be “very, very focused on prices and cost of living.” White House aides told us in the new year that the pivot would come after Trump scratched his itch for another confrontation with Iran. By May, as that conflict dragged on, Trump advisers told us quietly that if it had not receded, along with gas prices, by Labor Day, there would be trouble. Two weeks ago, multiple Trump advisers told us they expected the kinetic part of the Iran war to mostly cease in September, clearing the way for lower gas prices.None of that has happened. Missiles are still flying in the Strait of Hormuz. Since the 2025 elections, gas prices have risen 39 percent, from $3.08 to $4.28; 30-year mortgage rates have increased 8 percent; electricity prices have gone up more than 4 percent. Charlie Cook, a political analyst and the dean emeritus of legislative-election handicapping, says that Republicans should brace themselves for a tough result. “The worst-case scenario for the GOP and best for Democrats today would have sounded ludicrous eight months ago,” he wrote recently. “The most plausible today resembles Republicans’ nightmare scenario at the beginning of the year.”[Read: The YOLO presidency]Those Republican nightmares, both new and old, are unlikely to be worse than the 40-seat gain made by Democrats in the House of Representatives during Trump’s first term, in 2018, thanks to increased polarization and mid-decennial redistricting. But few Republicans still pretend off-camera that they will be able to maintain control of the House. Narrow Democratic control of the Senate, once outlandish, could be within reach. On the sidelines of the convention in Dallas, strategists muttered about recent polling in House races that shows jump balls where Trump won by double digits in 2024. The outstanding question is whether Democratic candidates can emerge from the dim shadow of President Biden. “While there is a lot of focus on the Republicans’ problems, Democrats have a real problem—they have a real party-image problem,” the Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio told us. Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist, depicts his party in PowerPoint presentations as a backpacker hiking up a steep mountain with gusts of wind at his back. The incline represents Trump’s financial advantages, and the challenge of winning seats in gerrymandered districts and Republican states such as Ohio, Iowa, Texas, and Alaska. The wind is voter sentiment and the enthusiasm advantage inside the Democratic Party. “Democrats have won the message fight. Republicans have lost the governance fight,” he told us. “The question is whether they can use structural advantages to overcome it.”On the whole, Democrats are delighted by Trump’s strategy—to put front and center a man whose unpopularity fires up their voters and further alienates the newly skeptical. “If the Democrats have a great year, it will be because they got their base out to vote in large numbers,” Rich Thau, the moderator of the Swing Voter Project, told us. “It won’t be because they magically converted these swing voters into Democratic senatorial and gubernatorial voters.”Joseph Rushmore for The AtlanticBut they may not be accounting for Trump’s magic. Two years ago, he bounced back from two impeachments and an attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol to win the presidency. Now the odds are against him again. By multiple measures, the president who appeared on the Dallas stage last night had lost a step. When he first won the White House, in 2016, he denounced the folly of distant wars of choice, promised to remedy the reigning economic turmoil of globalization, and boasted of his independence as someone who eschewed campaign donations. A decade later, he is managing a reescalating war in Iran that he started. He has positioned himself as a champion of data centers, the latest lightning rod for populist resentment. And he controls a massive $850 million slush fund he acquired in office through seemingly transactional demands of companies, lobbyists, and wealthy individuals seeking government favor.[Read: Trump is preparing for a long war]His economic approval rating this summer, according to Quinnipiac University, stood at 34 percent, down from 53 percent on the eve of the last midterm elections, in 2018. The 2024 presidential election hinged on the rising cost of living, and after Republicans won the trifecta—the White House and both chambers of Congress—the expectation was that Trump and his party would fix what many still view as Biden’s economy. “I want to emphasize that this wasn’t to just slightly improve things,” David Winston, a Republican strategist who works with congressional leadership, told us. “They viewed a substantive outcome as what they were looking for.” It has not come to pass. Trump has not lost his talent for showmanship. No longer tied to a single hit program in a single slot on NBC, he has spent much of the year creating television spectacles from the Oval Office—a Formula One race, a UFC fight, a Fourth of July party, a World Cup championship celebration where he lingered in the frame. This string of network debuts gave him the confidence to schedule his convention against the first two games of the NFL season. Only Trump would choose to go up against the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots.Joseph Rushmore for The AtlanticFor those who watched, the first night in Dallas had production quality that has escaped many recent Republican conventions. All the tropes and tricks were hit—the testimonials of a Pennsylvania steel worker and a Florida grandma about policy wins, the glitter reels of alleged Democratic bad behavior, the plea for campaign donations for Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate nominee from Texas. Multiple speakers gave mock “land acknowledgements” praising the national heritage of European colonizers. The comedian Adam Carolla did a bit about Trump’s hair: “You ever see underwater footage of a kelp bed?” There were “everyday Americans,” “American workers,” and Border Patrol agents who gathered onstage, many in work gear. “President Trump refuses to surrender,” Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania said, after a friendly video introduction from his Democratic colleague John Fetterman. “This November there can be no surrender.” Joseph Rushmore for The AtlanticThere was even a moment to lay out the core contrast that Trump’s advisers hope will frame the election, the sort of message that any other Republican president in his position would be entirely focused on delivering at this point. In a short video, his team spliced together clips from fringe voices on the left—the “woke,” the America-bashing, the revolutionary—before defining the decision on the ballot. “This is no longer simply Republican versus Democrat, or conservative versus liberal,” said the voice-over. “Today the choice is unmistakable: extreme versus mainstream.” But the centerpiece remained Trump. Speaker after speaker described him in near-messianic terms. “As it turns out, Washington wasn’t incapable of working for the American people; all we needed was a new president,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. T. W. Shannon, a candidate for lieutenant governor in Oklahoma, placed the entire GOP in the president’s shadow. “We’re also the party of the greatest president in American history, President Donald J. Trump,” he declared. But no comments mattered more than Trump’s. He talked for nearly two hours, a rolicking, weaving address that only occasionally stuck to the teleprompter. It ended where he began. “Please pretend that I’m running, and get out and vote on November 3 or sooner,” he said. “Because, in actuality, I really am running.” In actuality, he is not. Or maybe he is, in a way. His crowd remained in their seats to the end. The room, at times, felt packed to the rafters. Additional reporting by Jack Rodriguez-Vars.