Early voting is underway for the midterm elections, and the picture inside Donald Trump’s White House is getting messier by the day. A press secretary’s rocky first week on the job has given way to a stream of unflattering leaks. The president is reportedly sounding out allies about replacing his chief of staff. Two senior figures are feuding over a multimillion-dollar donation to the Kennedy Center. And the polling averages, by the president’s own standard, are not what a White House wants to see with ballots already being cast.
None of this decides an election on its own. But together, the turbulence lands at the worst possible moment for a president asking voters to treat the midterms as a referendum on him.
The numbers behind the unease
An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll published on 1 October found that 71 percent of American adults disapprove of how Trump is handling the war with Iran, and 65 percent believe his policies have caused the high prices behind what the poll describes as an affordability crisis. The New York Times’ latest average of polls puts approval of Trump’s overall performance below 40 percent of voters.
Trump has rejected those numbers outright. “Everyone thinks the prices are high because of me, but they’re not,” he said on 1 October, adding that the country has “the greatest [economic] numbers of any president in the history of our country” and that “the only thing we’re doing badly at is public relations.” When a Time magazine journalist told him his polls had never been lower, he replied: “They’re fake numbers. … The pollsters are corrupt.”
The record on fact-checking is long. CNN’s Daniel Dale, who has tracked Trump’s statements for a decade, wrote that by September 2020 he had recorded more than 8,500 false claims since September 2016, and that he stopped counting every statement because he was, in his words, physically unable to look into all of them. The Washington Post’s fact-checking team counted 30,573 false or misleading statements during Trump’s first term, peaking at 503 in a single day before the 2020 election.
A press secretary debut that went sideways
The week’s most visible stumble belonged to Katie Zacharia, the 41-year-old appointed to the press secretary position. According to reporting by The Daily Beast, her first briefing on Tuesday saw her stumble through talking points and, at one point, appear to confuse her husband with the president. Things deteriorated from there: it emerged that Zacharia, who has described herself as a lawyer and worked as a legal analyst on Fox News and Newsmax, never passed the bar exam. She had also described herself as having been a shill for “a sort of pyramid scheme,” and was fined after failing to complete a traffic school order she had once criticized dangerous drivers for ignoring.
Trump was reportedly unhappy with her on-camera performance and her failure to shift the narrative away from herself and onto the president ahead of the midterms. Politico cited an unnamed White House official saying Trump had complained privately that Zacharia had no talent. Speaking to reporters on Friday before boarding Air Force One for a rally in Georgia, the president said he had suggested she reconsider the position.
Reached for comment, White House spokesman Davis Ingle called Daily Beast reporters “idiots” and said the outlet “constantly peddles baseless and deranged conspiracy theories about President Trump and his Administration.”
Susie Wiles, the ‘Ice Maiden,’ under pressure
The appointment itself is part of the story. Chief of staff Susie Wiles — the 69-year-old whom Trump has nicknamed his “Ice Maiden” for her ruthless pursuit of his agenda — was reportedly unhappy that Zacharia was installed without her consultation or approval. The disagreement caused friction between the president and his top adviser, with rumors circulating that Wiles might not remain in the White House much longer.
Politico reported on Thursday that Trump has been calling his MAGA allies and asking who might replace Wiles, soliciting allies’ views of his chief of staff and musing about replacements, according to four people with direct knowledge of the conversations. “She’s burned a lot of people,” a Republican operative close to the White House told Politico. Some of those pushing against Wiles have shared unfavorable coverage of her and her family with the president.
Publicly, Trump backed her without reservation. “I could not be more happy with Susie. She’s done a great job from day one,” he told reporters on Friday, citing her recent recovery from cancer. Wiles was seen grinning alongside executive assistant Natalie Harp as she accompanied the president on Friday afternoon — a notable sight for an adviser whose future was, at that moment, the subject of active speculation.
Guilfoyle, Habba and a missing Kennedy Center donation
The press office is not the only front. Esquire’s politics column described the administration as “coming unstrung all at once,” pointing to the bungled dismissal of Kimberly Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece, followed by nervous leaks inside the administration about whether Guilfoyle might disclose unflattering details about the Trump family.
Then there is the feud between former Trump attorney Alina Habba and Ric Grenell, the former Kennedy Center leader. According to an Axios report cited by Esquire, Habba told the president that Grenell failed to deposit a multimillion-dollar donation that her billionaire husband, Turhan Mildon, made to the center a year ago. Four senior administration officials and three insiders briefed on the controversy backed that account, per Axios. Grenell denied the accusations as “absurd” and a “lie.” Habba and Mildon declined to comment through a spokesperson.
On the campaign trail, with promises in tow
Amid the internal turbulence, Trump has been barnstorming for Republican candidates. In Ohio, he appeared on behalf of GOP senatorial candidate Jon Husted, delivering an extended, unscripted assessment of the candidate’s physique and hands that drew attention more for its oddity than its content. Esquire’s column, surveying the week — including the president’s retreat on Thursday from the idea of live-streaming the execution of Nidal Hasan, a move that left Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth exposed — ended on a simple question: two more years of this?
The campaign pitch itself is carrying baggage. Trump has repeatedly told Americans to “pretend I’m on the ballot” as he campaigns for Republicans. But voters appear skeptical of at least one marquee promise: an Economist-YouGov poll in September found that only 21 percent of Americans believe Trump will keep his pledge to send every adult U.S. citizen $5,000 if Republicans keep control of the House and Senate.
There is also the matter of promises made in 2024 that have not materialized. Trump campaigned on cutting the cost of a new home in half, bringing gasoline below $2 per gallon, cutting energy and electricity prices by at least half, ending Russia’s war against Ukraine “in 24 hours,” and declaring “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” None of those things happened as described. Instead, the columnist A. Scott Bolden, writing in an opinion piece carried by Yahoo News, notes the war with Iran has lasted more than seven months despite Trump saying it would last less than eight weeks.
On the war’s future, voters are not buying the optimistic timeline either. An Economist-YouGov poll in August found 50 percent of Americans believed the war with Iran would last another year or more — even after Trump claimed in September that it would end “immediately after the [midterm] election” and that “oil prices are going to be tumbling downward.”
What it means for the midterms
The political math is straightforward. Trump wants Republicans to hold both chambers of Congress, and he is framing the election as a personal test. Democrats, and Bolden’s column is explicit about this, want voters to take him at his word and treat the midterms as a verdict on his record — the tariffs, the Iran war, cuts to healthcare and government services, and the deportations that his critics argue have created worker shortages.
Whether the administration’s internal chaos moves voters is an open question. What is not open is the timing: with early voting already underway, every briefing-room misstep, every leak about the chief of staff’s future and every feud that spills into print lands while ballots are being filled in. For a White House whose president insists the only problem is “public relations,” the past week has been a masterclass in generating the wrong kind of coverage — at the exact moment it can least afford it.
FAQ
Who is Katie Zacharia, and why is she in the news?
Katie Zacharia, 41, was appointed White House press secretary without chief of staff Susie Wiles’ consultation. Her first briefing on Tuesday went poorly, and it subsequently emerged that she never passed the bar exam despite describing herself as a lawyer and working as a legal analyst on Fox News and Newsmax. President Trump reportedly complained privately that she had “no talent” and suggested she reconsider the position.
Is Susie Wiles still Trump's chief of staff?
Yes. Politico reported on Thursday that Trump has been calling allies and asking who might replace Wiles, but the president publicly backed her on Friday, saying: “I could not be more happy with Susie. She’s done a great job from day one.”
What do recent polls say about Trump ahead of the midterms?
An AP-NORC poll published 1 October found 71 percent of adults disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war with Iran and 65 percent blame his policies for high prices. The New York Times’ polling average puts his overall approval below 40 percent.