Earlier this week, chief of staff Susie Wiles<\/a> revealed in an interview that putting the president front and centre is the grand Republican plan for maintaining its precarious numerical advantage in the Senate and House when those elections<\/a> come around in November.<\/p>\n \u201cTypically, in the midterms it\u2019s not about who\u2019s sitting at the White House,\u201d she acknowledged. <\/p>\n \u201cYou localise the election, and you keep the federal officials out of it. We\u2019re actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot because so many of those low propensity voters are Trump voters. We saw a week ago Tuesday what happens when he\u2019s not on the ballot and not active,\u201d Wiles continued.<\/p>\n \u201cI haven\u2019t quite broken it to him yet, but he\u2019s going to campaign like it\u2019s 2024 again.\u201d<\/p>\n So on Thursday, after the strange ceremonial unveiling of his new Board of Peace<\/a>, which included Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, Trump flew to Rome, Georgia. It was a significant location: the bailiwick of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the disenchanted Maga congresswoman who resigned her seat late last year. The choreography was familiar \u2013 a visit by Trump to a steel plant, and then a makeshift theatre against a backdrop of steel cut-offs bearing the slogan: Rome, Georgia: Coosa Steel.<\/p>\n The choice of the family-owned processing plant that has been part of the local economy since 1972 was deliberate. In front of the cameras, the current owner told Trump a story of a local business brought to its knees by globalisation \u2013 or more specifically, by Chinese imports offering for $90 the same rack of steel for which they had to charge $150. <\/p>\n [\u00a0Why haven\u2019t Trump\u2019s tariffs caused a downturn in the US?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n The bottom fell out around 2015, with workers offered just one shift a week during the worst of it before business began flooding in after Trump\u2019s imposition of tariffs on China and other trading partners across the world. \u201cYou levelled it. The business came back. We are so busy now, we don\u2019t know what to do\u201d the owner told the president, who nodded approvingly before taking up the story.<\/p>\n \u201cHere\u2019s a man virtually going out of business and now he has a thriving business,\u201d Trump declared.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd it\u2019s happening all over the country. They were ripping us off, and to think we have to go before the Supreme Court for something like this. For more than 50 years the men and women at Coosa Steel have poured out blood, sweat and tears … to turn out beautiful steel with those beautiful words, you don\u2019t see it much any more: Made in the USA.\u201d <\/p>\n As Wiles promised, all of this carried echoes of his campaign story from 2024. It was a reheat of the appealing fantasia of a Rust Belt reborn and gleaming again; of blue-collar prosperity redeemed and a return to values abandoned \u2013 or sold off \u2013 over four decades ago. <\/p>\n However, it coincided with the release of contradictory Census Bureau statistics indicating the tariffs have failed<\/a> to bring production back to the United States and that the country has lost over 80,000 manufacturing jobs over the past year. While the trade deficit did decrease, it was marginal. It remains to be seen whether Trump can convince his base that the story of Coosa Steel has, as he contends, been replicated within \u201cthousands\u201d of other US businesses whose fortunes have been resuscitated by tariffs.<\/p>\n But what is clear is that the administration has not found anyone remotely capable of emulating Trump\u2019s capacity to renew the sense of burning cause within the Maga Republican base.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Trump says he will order Pentagon to release files on aliens and UFOsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n![\"US](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/3TA6XTX7OFT7RSQXYM4MOV6IBU.jpg\")
US president Donald Trump gives a speech at the Coosa Steel Corporation factory in Rome, Georgia, on February 19, 2026. Photograph: Saul Loeb\/ AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n![\""USA](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Y3YAAX2BYY6HCLOELJO7SJ3ZYY.jpg\")
“USA Steel Rome, Georgia” signage as US president Donald Trump speaks during an event at the Coosa Steel Corporation. Photograph: Megan Varner\/Bloomberg <\/p>\n