Brooks and Atkins Stohr on GOP vulnerabilities in the midterms

David Brooks of The Atlantic and Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe join Geoff Bennett to discuss the week in politics, including President Trump hitting the campaign trail in a string of reliably Republican states, GOP vulnerabilities heading into the midterms and the administration's strategy on artificial intelligence.

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

President Trump is hitting the campaign trail in a string of reliably Republican states, including Oklahoma, Alabama, and Nebraska. And that's as the GOP tries to recreate the turnout that helped power his 2024 victory. But it's also raising questions about GOP vulnerabilities heading into the midterms.

So, David, what does it signal to you that, this close to the midterms, President Trump is spending valuable campaign time in states he comfortably won two years ago?

What strikes me, I think some of it is just like Trump's psychology management by the team, because he's today in Mobile, and the congressional district he's visiting, if it existed, they sort of refigured the lines, he would have won it by 50 points.

The one thing that strikes me, looking at the Trump approval numbers, is it's like a ski slope. It starts at Inauguration Day and it just goes down. There's very few events that actually mark a shift. It's just a steady decline. So, even when the Iran war started, not much.

And, Kimberly, given everything that David just said, Democrats would presumably love to make this an election, a referendum on Donald Trump. Is there a risk in that?

I think, at the moment, no, because everything that Donald Trump is running away from and what other Republicans in more competitive states are running away from can be tied directly to the president.

Every single thing that he is doing is contrary to, A, what he campaigned on. But it's from foreign policy like the war in Iran to the immigration policy. They are affecting Americans in a way that it makes them all kitchen table issues all at once, and people are feeling it, and you can't run away from that. Except, I guess to the very, very red states, you can.

And looking down the ballot, you have someone like Ken Paxton, the Texas Republican Senate candidate, who, as The New York Times first reported, he was caught on tape saying that Trump's midterm convention that they had a couple of weeks ago actually hurt Republican numbers.

And the ones who are running away from Trump right now, and there are some, and I give them credit, but it's way too late. You might as well just live with the guy.

And then it looks like the Senate is going to go. And this is the kind of climate where people you don't think will lose, lose. You get some stray people who seem safe and they lose. I have got a sneaking suspicion. In Kansas, a guy named Adam Hamilton, Democrat, is running for governor.