As President-elect Trump begins his second term in the White House, his days as a candidate are numbered.
But even though he’s term limited and his name will no longer be on the ballot, Trump will play a “significant” role in supporting GOP candidates in the 2026 midterm elections, Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley says.
“President Trump is going to be a very significant part of this because at the end of the day, what we need to do is hold on to the House, hold on to the Senate so that we can finish his term and his agenda,” Whatley emphasized in a recent interview with Fox News Digital at the RNC headquarters in the nation’s capital.
Republicans enjoyed major victories in last month’s elections, with Trump defeating Vice President Kamala Harris to win back the White House, the GOP flipping control of the Senate from the Democrats, and Republicans holding on to their razor-thin majority in the House.
Whatley argued that “as we go forward into this next election cycle, the fundamentals are going to remain the same.”
“We need to make sure that we are building our state parties, that we’re building our ground game, we’re building our election integrity apparatus to be in place to make sure that when we get those candidates through those primaries in ‘26, that we’re going to be in a position to take them all the way to the finish line,” he emphasized.
But the party in power traditionally suffers setbacks in the ensuing midterm elections. And Trump, who was a magnet for voter turnout in this year’s elections, won’t be on the ballot in 2026.
Whatley predicted, “Donald Trump will be very active on the campaign trail for Republicans. And his agenda is the agenda that we’re going to be running on.”