DALLAS—President Donald Trump framed the stakes of the upcoming midterm elections in stark terms during his Wednesday keynote address at the Republican National Convention, arguing that America faces a choice between continued prosperity under Republican congressional majorities and a political setback if Democrats gain control.
Trump entered the stage to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” on the opening night of the unprecedented midterm Republican National Convention, held at the American Airlines Center, the Dallas home of the Mavericks and Stars. Traditionally, national party conventions have taken place only during presidential election years, when Republicans and Democrats formally choose their nominees for the White House.
He moved quickly to the central theme of his speech: the November elections, he said, would shape the country’s direction for years to come.
“In 55 days, Americans will be going to the polls in one of the most important elections in our country’s history. Your vote will decide whether our country stumbles at the starting gate of the next 250 years or surges forward and never ever looks back,” Trump told the crowd.
He warned that giving Democrats control would, in his view, slow the nation’s momentum. “We hand America’s future to the radical left Democrats, and our nation will spend the next decade just getting back on its feet. It will be a tragedy,” he said. “Vote Republican, and we will leave the world in our dust for generations to come. There’ll be nothing like it.”
Trump said 35 competitive races will determine which party controls Congress after November. Republicans currently hold a 53-47 edge in the Senate over Democrats and independents who caucus with them, while the GOP has a narrow 218-214 House majority. The party is defending Senate seats in Texas, North Carolina, Iowa, and Ohio, while targeting Democratic-held seats in Michigan, Maine, and Georgia. Trump carried each of those states except Maine in 2024, and he said he plans to campaign in every state where a race remains especially close.
“We have a very short period of time, and we really have 35 races,” Trump said, describing them as swing contests. He compared the map to the seven swing states he said Republicans won in 2024, joking about the pace of his post-election travel schedule. “I thought I won. What do I have to do? I’m campaigning,” he said. “But I am. We’re campaigning to make it incredible.”
Trump told supporters that the closest races—whether Republicans are narrowly ahead, slightly behind, or tied—remain winnable. “We can win every one of those races,” he said, adding that he intends to visit each of those states on behalf of Republican congressional candidates and senators. “We’re going to have rallies just like this.”
Democrats have worked for much of Trump’s second term to make “affordability” a key midterm issue, but Trump hammered Democrats on Wednesday for the nearly five-decade high inflation they sparked in the Biden years through immense spending and green energy policies.
“Our predecessors killed and buried the American dream with trillions of dollars in waste and green energy scams—the greatest scams in American history—green energy… Most of them had no idea what it was, they just said, ‘Let’s go green,’ And every country that’s gone green is down the tubes, you do know that, but it caused prices to skyrocket,” Trump said.
“They used the word affordability, right? They are so fake, because it was them that caused the affordability, to use their word, crisis, and I’m bringing the prices way down, way way down…We’re fixing it. We’re fixing it,” he added.
Trump also predicted that the Iranian regime is holding out on a deal in efforts to leverage a big win in favor of Democrats in November, who the president says the regime would rather deal with. He predicted the war would soon end after the elections and the Iranian regime would be quitting.
“And prices right after this very important election on November 3 will be plummeting. The war will be over very shortly after the election. They’re hanging on for dear life, hoping that we lose, so they can deal with dumb, weak Democrats, and they can have their bomb,” he said. “We’re not going to let that happen.”
“So they’re going to be quitting or dropping out or who knows what the hell, whatever it is, right after Election Day, because they…. desperately want to deal with Democrats like Obama, Barack Hussein Obama,” he added.
Republicans look to defy historical trends in the midterms this year. Only twice has a party that controls the presidency, the Senate ,and House kept both congressional majorities in a midterm election. It most recently happened in former President George W. Bush’s first term. Before that, Democrats held majorities in 1934 during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency.
