Trump: Mid-term worries | Photo Credit: KENT NISHIMURA

The Republicans, or for that matter the Grand Old Party, must be extremely uncomfortable in the last several days seeing the ongoing spat between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV.

With six months to go for the mid-term elections and nervously looking at their chances in the House of Representatives and the Senate, Republicans cannot afford to slip especially at a time when their leader is not doing well at the ratings chart, with a lot of the misery being piled on by the Iran war.

“When somebody gets elected president, that party always loses the midterms. I don’t know why... Nobody can explain it…It doesn’t make sense to me. So we’re going to try turning it around”, Trump said in a recent interview. But what is frustrating to many in his Make America Great Again (MAGA) base is a leader wandering off the economic script and making it difficult for law makers seeing re-election.

Looming mid-terms

As it is there is a general feeling that the GOP may not be able to get 218 seats in the House; and now the fear is that the Senate is also in play on November 3.

What is pointed out is that at the start of the year only 33 per cent believed that Democrats had a chance of winning the Senate; now it has risen to 54 per cent. More troublesome are latest reports speaking of four key races slipping away: Georgia and North Carolina are now “Leaning” Democratic; Ohio a solid red state that Trump carried by some 20 points in 2024 is now seen as a “Toss Up” and Nebraska, a rock solid red state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 2006, has been moved to “likely GOP”.

And Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville’s comment that his party has not accomplished “anything” in spite of majorities in the House and Senate is making the rounds. “Everything that goes on up here … is about, ‘Oh, we got to get reelected. We got to keep the majority.’ Well, hell, we ain’t done anything in the majority. Why… would, should we keep majority?” the Alabama Senator remarked. Republican strategists shudder at the thought of the party losing control of both Houses on Capitol Hill, in spite of the $100-million cash advantage the Republican National Committee has over the Democrats in the November showdown.

Making matters worse is Trump’s spat with the Pope calling him weak on crime and foreign policy just because he opposes the Iran war and had disagreed with Trump’s comments of wiping out a civilisation.

If this was not galling enough, many Christian leaders were appalled that the President would post an AI-generated image of him resembling Jesus Christ; only later to be retracted on social media with an explanation that he believed the image depicted that of a doctor on a healing mission.

Political operatives have not forgotten a simple fact: Catholics comprise between 20 and 25 per cent of the vote and are a swing voting block; the vote is not monolithic with White Catholics favouring Republicans and Hispanic/ Latino Catholics favouring Democrats.

Catholic vote

In 2024 Trump got the Catholic vote and beat his Democratic rival 54 per cent to 44 per cent. Analysts have also maintained that Catholics played a critical role in John F Kennedy’s narrow win; and a shift in this vote in 2016 and 2024 helped Trump.

“President Trump does not understand how Catholicism works. The Pope is not merely a head of state, he is the Vicar of Christ. Attacks on him are received as attacks on the Church itself. The more he attacks the Pope the more his support will drop among his Catholic voters,” Peter Wolfgang, Executive Director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, has been quoted by the BBC.

The writer is a senior journalist who has reported from Washington DC on North America and United Nations.

Published on April 17, 2026