Despite his claim that he does not care about the midterms, President Donald Trump has been focused on securing GOP majority control of both chambers of Congress in November.

His revenge campaign nearly over, Trump has managed to use the primaries to unseat House and Senate Republicans he deemed disloyal — largely despite their voting records. His plan to gain seats in the House appears likely to be successful, picking up roughly ten seats through his redistricting scheme.

“But primaries are not general elections, and winning in November is what really counts,” writes Keith Naughton at The Hill. “Trump could be setting himself up for trouble, and it could well come from a senator not even on the ballot.”

There could be trouble ahead for Senate Republicans who currently hold a 53-47 majority. The majority of “at-risk” seats belong to Republicans, several of which Democrats are poised to flip, including North Carolina and Maine.

That leaves Ohio, Texas, and Michigan, which are toss-ups, according to RealClearPolitics.

It’s Texas where “Trump may have just won the battle but lost the war,” explains Naughton. Many believe Trump’s 11th-hour decision to endorse MAGA Attorney General Ken Paxton over conservative Senator John Cornyn may have been a shot in the foot.

Democratic State Rep. James Talarico reported he took in more than $3 million in the first 24 hours after Paxton won the GOP primary runoff this week.

Naughton examines other races as well, but concludes there is one GOP senator who could upend the president’s plans.

U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) could decide to become an independent but vote with the Democrats — flipping control of the Senate to the Democrats.

Naughton says he thinks Murkowski leaving the GOP and conferencing with the Democrats is a “pretty strong bet.”

“Murkowski has already mused making a switch,” he writes. “Although she tried to dress up remaining a Republican in terms of public policy, the likely reality is that it makes no sense to move from the majority party to the minority — what is the profit in that? Turning the minority party into the majority party, however — that could be very profitable for Murkowski, and for Alaska in general.”

In 2022, Trump endorsed a Murkowski challenger, but she kept her seat. And in 2010, she was forced to run a write-in campaign, and still kept her seat.

“For Murkowski,” Naughton notes, “who voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges and has little loyalty to the Republican Party, switching gets easier as her longtime colleagues leave the Senate chamber — some due to Trump’s machinations.”

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President Donald Trump has had his eyes on Cuba, but while he reportedly is biding his time, there are plans in place.

“Iran’s not finished, and the president is not in a rush,” a senior administration official told Axios, according to a report in The Daily Beast. “Trump wants to exhaust all the levers that he can. But at this point, there aren’t as many levers as before.”

Noting that Trump wants a “peaceful transition to a free Cuba,” Axios calls his approach the “methodical squeezing of Cuba’s communist regime.”

“To bring Cuba to its knees this year,” Axios revealed, “the administration first focused on the island’s lifeline: Venezuela and its socialist leader, Nicolas Maduro, who kept Havana afloat with shipments of oil that helped power the country and gave it a source of export revenue.”

The Trump administration captured Maduro during a raid in early January.

A senior Trump administration official called the approach “accelerationism.” The Daily Beast reports they were “referring to the fringe philosophy of speeding up a perceived inevitable societal collapse.”

“But we don’t want to kill off the regime just yet. There’s a method to this. It’s in stages,” they said. That strategy allows the commander in chief to focus on his three-month-long war in Iran — something Senate Republicans reportedly prefer takes priority over any Cuba incursion.

The president’s approach to Cuba is “classic Trump,” a presidential advisor told Axios: “Push your enemy off balance. It’s pressure, watch the response, apply more pressure, watch the response, apply more pressure.”

While the administration says there is no immediate plan to invade the island nation of roughly 9.7 million people, the Defense Department is primed and has been performing “tabletop” exercises in preparation. Axios credits Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a “chief architect of Trump’s Latin America policy.”

But according to Axios, one Trump advisor said: “The president does not want boots on the ground for more than 48 hours. It’s a quagmire in the making. This could get messy.”

“Everything is on the table, but no invasion is planned or imminent,” a senior official told Axios. “When POTUS says go, we’re ready for anything.”

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President Donald Trump’s mission to build monuments to himself is growing, and there’s a real reason behind why the nation’s 47th president is defying tradition and putting his name on so many things while he’s still in office — and still alive.

“Donald Trump’s two favorite things are himself and money,” writes Windsor Mann at The Daily Beast. “Now he has decided to combine the two. Indeed, for the first time in history, the sitting president is adding his signature to our paper currency. Trump’s name will be on your money, which is his way of saying that he owns you.”

Mann notes that the “John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is now, albeit unofficially, the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

The U.S. Institute of Peace is now the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, and, “Trump reportedly floated the idea of renaming Penn Station after himself during negotiations over federal funds for a tunnel between New York and New Jersey.”

The president is not the only one naming things after himself.

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In 2024, House Republicans pushed legislation to rename Washington Dulles International Airport the “Donald J. Trump International Airport.”

“And last November,” Mann notes, “Florida State Rep. Meg Weinberger introduced a bill to rename the Palm Beach International Airport as another ‘Donald J. Trump International Airport.’ Sure, why not?”

Spending $300,000 on a two-story tall statue of Trump, a group of crypto investors installed it on Trump’s Doral, Florida golf course.

“It is, like the man it commemorates, vulgar and excessive,” says Mann. “But one thing it is not is unnecessary, at least not from the vantage point of these investors. The way to Trump’s heart is through his ego, and nothing satiates his ego as much as a graven image made in his image and at someone else’s expense.”

Pointing to the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Jefferson Memorial — all built years after their namesakes’ passing — Mann notes that “we memorialize presidents once public opinion and historians have had time to reach a consensus as to whether their contributions merit commemoration.”

Which, perhaps, is why Trump is rushing to do so now.

“After all, what if we built a statue of someone who turned out to be in the Epstein files or who, after losing an election, tried to overthrow our democracy?” Mann asks. “It would be costly and tedious to dismantle a statue of such a person after these revelations surfaced. Perhaps Trump realizes this, which is why he’s building not one monument to himself but scores of them.”

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