Newsweek Illustration/Getty Images/Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty
By Anna Rahmanan
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
President Donald Trump is riding into the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas this week as a cowboy, an image that captures a larger political gamble: whether the president can persuade supporters to judge his second term through the heroic persona that helped elect him rather than solely through the experience of his presidency.
A metaphor has never been this literal. The Republican Party is selling $16 drink cozies depicting the president on horseback, wearing a white Stetson beneath the word “Dallas” and graphics resembling the old Marlboro cigarette branding.
Trump, meanwhile, has told supporters to approach November’s congressional elections as if his own name were there: “Pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.” Cowboy Trump to the rescue.
Read More on News
Taken together, the cowboy and the instruction suggest a useful way to understand Trump’s increasingly fantastical political imagery. The memes can look like digital kitsch, but they may also serve a practical purpose for a president confronting one of the oldest problems in American politics: incumbency eventually turns a political promise into a measurable record.
...
From President to Character
This is Trump's bread and butter, a president who has never depended on ordinary political imagery even before entering the White House. His public persona was already partly constructed through television before he entered politics, and his second White House has pushed the technique much further.
Over Labor Day weekend, Trump and the White House circulated a burst of memes showing him as a Green Lantern-like superhero building a border wall and factories, a hockey player towering over Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and a commander aboard a warship attacking an enemy fleet. Earlier images have placed Trump alongside historical figures on horseback, while other posts have cast him in religious or military roles.
What has changed is the job those images have to do.
A candidate can ask voters to imagine what he will accomplish. An incumbent eventually has to compete with what voters think he actually accomplished. Trump enters this midterm season with a record attached to him: prices, tariffs, manufacturing, foreign conflicts and the other results of nearly two years back in office. The gap between Trump’s fantastical online persona and the pressures facing his administration has become especially pronounced as the midterms approach.
That gives the superhero, the commander, and now the cowboy, a political function beyond ordinary branding. Each returns Trump to a form hard to measure against an economic statistic or a grocery bill: the strongman who builds! Wins! Fights! Dominates! So Trump the character once existed mainly as a promise about what a Trump presidency could be and now exists alongside an actual Trump presidency.
The more complicated his record becomes, the more useful it may be to invite supporters to encounter him again as the character, moving Trump out of the ledger of incumbency and back into the realm of aspiration.
Related Story
RNC Dallas Puts the GOP’s Trump Paradox on Full Display
The Incumbency Escape Hatch
Presidents have good reason to want an escape from the conventional midterm referendum. The president’s party has lost House seats in 20 of the 22 midterm elections since 1938, and presidential approval is closely tied to the scale of those losses.
Do you blame Trump? He knows the problem personally; Democrats gained 41 House seats in 2018, taking control of the chamber during his first presidency.
His answer in 2026 appears to involve an unusual inversion: instead of distancing congressional Republicans from an unpopular incumbent, Trump is trying to make himself even more central. He conceived the Dallas convention, has been deeply involved in its planning and is scheduled to appear on both nights.
The Marlboro Man image fits that strategy perfectly. A cowboy is judged by toughness and swagger, while a president is judged by outcomes. The more Trump can collapse those two identities, the more a midterm vote can become an expression of loyalty to a political character rather than a straightforward performance review.
The Myth Has Limits
Perhaps we shouldn't think too deeply about this all. Maybe, Cowboy Trump is just about turnout.
Trump has always used spectacle to keep supporters emotionally invested. The Dallas convention is built around the same premise: make a congressional election feel as much as possible like another Trump election.
The problem, though, is that Trump may end up mobilizing both sides, a mark that would clearly become the limit of the Marlboro Man strategy. Symbolism may intensify loyalty, but it won't clear a governing record, so if voters approach November mainly as supporters and opponents of the sitting president, putting him at the center may help Republicans recreate presidential-year enthusiasm. But if persuadable voters remain focused on the economy and performance, the cowboy will have to compete with the president.
The Marlboro Man sold an idea of the West. Trump’s midterm challenge is whether an idea of a president can still sell once voters have spent nearly two years living with the real one.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines