‘Maybe we could get asylum in Israel,’ Trump strategists joke about fleeing country before midterms - report

Six days before the election, more than two dozen of President Donald Trump’s top strategists joined a private video call that began with talk of cyanide, The New York Times reported. “Do you want the white pill first, or the black pill first?” asked Tony Fabrizio, the president’s chief pollster.

Tim Saler, a top Republican data consultant, laid out two scenarios. In the first, the $400 million MAGA Inc. super PAC was reaching the voters it wanted and expected to vote. “That’s the optimistic scenario,” he said. The other was a wipeout. “I’m getting my affairs in order,” said James Blair, who left the White House to oversee the president’s midterm strategy, to laughter, according to four people on the call.

“I suggest everybody else do the same.”

For roughly 30 minutes, the call ran on gallows humor: funeral arrangements, prison food, presidential pardons and a brief riff on fleeing the country. “At least Bibi won. He’ll protect us,” Blair said sarcastically of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose country had voted the day before.

Netanyahu’s bloc fell short of a majority, and his party soon claimed the election had been stolen. “Maybe we could get asylum in Israel,” Fabrizio said.

The scope of the wreckage became clear a week after that conversation. Democrats won a huge House majority and control of the Senate, powered by victories in Republican strongholds such as Kansas, South Carolina and Texas.

The Republican Party is on track to lose the national popular congressional vote by about 13 points, according to the report’s estimates, the worst loss in half a century.

The war in Iran loomed over the collapse

A slide deck Blair circulated linked Republican polling numbers to an Iran war timeline. It showed the Democratic advantage ballooning during active hostilities, shrinking during talks over a memorandum of understanding and spiking again when the ceasefire collapsed.

By the end of July, Democrats held a 10-point edge on the congressional ballot. The slide warned that a result approaching that would “likely cost us the Senate.”

Trump had assembled a roughly $400 million war chest that he made clear to advisers he saw as “my money,” and he withheld approval of spending until the end of the summer. The delay was costly.

In one week in mid-October on a single Anchorage station, the Trump super PAC paid $30,000 for a slot that a leading Democratic super PAC bought for $2,700, and aired roughly 70 percent fewer commercials.

At a Republican midterm convention in Dallas in September, Trump announced a proposal to send $5,000 to every American adult, but only if Republicans won. Almost no one knew it was coming, including his senior political advisers, and it had not been polled.

Some advisers cringed, with one calling it a naked effort to “bribe” people for their votes.

Candidate choices added to the damage. Trump endorsed Paxton, the Texas attorney general, over Sen. John Cornyn, ignoring a year of warnings, and Republicans were forced to spend close to $300 million in the state. Paxton lost by 12 points.

Sen. Darline Graham of South Carolina, whom Trump supported for a full six-year term after Sen. Lindsey Graham died in July, also lost, in a state that had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1998.

A White House official said Trump “was not on the ballot, and it’s proven that Trump voters show up when he is on the ballot.”