President Donald Trump has a lot of reasons to be upset in the final stretch before the midterm elections: voters angry at rising prices, reasonable predictions that the GOP will lose the House — and maybe the Senate — and a stagnant war in Iran.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not on the list of things making voters angry — and yet over the past week, he has been catching strays from a frustrated Trump. Because Trump is incapable of blaming himself for anything, including Republicans’ current political predicament, Trump and his misguided sense of victimhood are once again targeting Ukraine.

After the United States launched a war against Iran in late February, energy prices surged worldwide. Americans have grudgingly shelled out more at gas stations and the price of diesel has hit farmers particularly hard. Trump announced earlier this month that he’d struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to import Russian diesel fuel to the U.S. to bring down prices.

Experts say this is a bum deal for the U.S, as it gives several billion dollars to Moscow to continue its war against Kyiv and is unlikely to affect global fuel prices. The diesel Russia would send is still needed by, well, Russians, which would keep demand — and prices — high. Zelenskyy rightly criticized the Trump-Putin diesel deal, which prompted Trump to lash out at him for Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries. He blamed Kyiv’s attacks for the high price of diesel.

“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal, because he could have made many deals, and for some reason, he never does,” Trump told reporters on Oct. 10. He added, “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.” The next day, he announced that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire” — but both countries quickly denied it. Zelenskyy, much to Trump’s ire, soon resumed retaliatory attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure. (Moscow had bombarded the Ukrainian electrical grid for months.)

The Trump administration has since taken several worrying actions that seem intent on punishing Ukraine, and Zelenskyy specifically, for a problem of Trump’s making.

Ukraine’s access to Starshield, SpaceX’s military-grade satellite internet service, was interrupted last week. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said any decision to shut off service came from the U.S. government, not his company. Reuters reported that the order came from inside the White House, though the administration pointedly denied that the president made the decision.

On Friday, Trump delayed implementation of a new round of sanctions against Russia. The executive order pausing the sanctions said this was “in the national interests of the United States,” but as of Monday evening, the White House had yet to clarify exactly how. Much like the Starshield disruption, the executive order prompted bipartisan outrage, but Trump has given no signal that he’s wavering.

All of the above is bad, but much more troubling is that none of it makes strategic sense to anyone but Trump, who has long demonstrated a willingness to use Ukraine as a political punching bag. Indeed, for the past decade, Trump has shown an outsized level of enmity toward Kyiv during periods of personal political stress.

Not long after the 2016 election swept Trump into the White House, the U.S. intelligence community determined that Russia had attempted to influence American voters in a wide-ranging operation. Investigations into Trump’s potential ties to that plot frustrated him to no end, leading him to embrace a conspiracy theory shifting the blame to Ukraine. In this debunked narrative, Ukraine framed Russia for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s email server and took one of the breached servers to hide the evidence.

This belief factored into the president’s first big scheme to rig the 2020 election on his own behalf. Trump had billions of dollars in military aid held back from Ukraine to try to force the newly elected Zelenskyy to find the supposed missing server and launch a bogus corruption investigation into Joe Biden, then the former vice president, and his son. The scandal led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Even after Ukraine’s bravery and resilience in the face of Russia’s aggression, Trump still sees Zelenskyy and his country as targets for his bullying

Since his return to the White House, Trump’s relationship with Zelenskyy has at times been lukewarm but has more often been frigid. Vice President JD Vance helped publicly berate Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last year. That was a lowlight in what was already a fraught dynamic. Meanwhile, Trump continues to slam Zelenskyy for refusing to make a deal with its invader Russia, but Putin is the greatest impediment to peace.

Even after Ukraine’s bravery and resilience in the face of Russia’s aggression, Trump still sees Zelenskyy and his country as targets for his bullying. He’s dropped more than 10 years of misplaced anger on the shoulders of a country struggling to survive an attempted imperial conquest.

But for all of Trump’s efforts to shift blame for his own ineptitude onto a country fighting for survival more than 5,000 miles away, very few Americans seem to be buying his spin. In hopes of improving his own domestic standing, Trump is once again exacerbating Ukrainian hardship and strife. It doesn’t seem to be working this time, either.

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A sense of deja vu is likely washing over Republican lawmakers. Many of the struggles GOP candidates are facing in 2026 eerily mirror their plight in 2018. Ahead of that year’s midterms, voters were similarly unhappy with President Donald Trump and unimpressed by the massive tax cuts passed the previous year. The conditions this time around, however, are much more dire, emphasizing how few lessons Republicans learned from their last midterm defeat.

Eight years ago, GOP candidates under House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had hoped to campaign hard on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, also known as the Trump tax cuts. The $1.5 trillion bill was the biggest legislative package passed by that Congress, with the GOP trifecta having failed to repeal and replace Obamacare as promised. But voters weren’t very interested in hearing about the bill once it passed, and its popularity cratered as 2018 continued.

Many of the struggles GOP candidates are facing in 2026 eerily mirror their plight in 2018.

Things aren’t faring much better this time around. As previously mentioned, lawmakers have been having a tough time selling the megabill that Trump dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill. The White House briefed House Republicans last year on rebranding the package as the “working families tax cut.” A new poll from Politico released Wednesday confirmed that while respondents prefer the new name, taxes are near the bottom of voters’ list of top issues.

The congressional Republicans of yesteryear originally planned to follow up their tax cuts with another round in 2018. (Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who insisted that a third reconciliation bill was possible long after it seemed plausible, must relate.) Those goals swiftly fell apart in the face of a fractured caucus and no real vision for what a new middle-class tax cut would look like. By September, the GOP was far behind in the general ballot against Democrats and looking for a way to catch up.

As The Washington Post reported at the time, Trump led the way in Republicans making “a hard pivot away from economics and into nationalism, a debate with heavy racial overtones meant to energize the conservative base.” In the weeks leading up to the midterms, the president, Fox News and many GOP candidates flooded the airwaves with warnings about a caravan of migrants making its way from Central America to Mexico. But the GOP’s caravan-forward strategy didn’t work. Democrats still gained a net of 40 seats, more than a dozen more than needed to win the majority. Republicans held control of the Senate, but the odds of that happening again are less certain.

Which brings us to the biggest differences weighing down the GOP this time around, presaging what could be an even more brutal potential loss. In short, the party’s lack of interest in any policy beyond tax cuts and nationalism has caught up with it. MAGA has hollowed out the Republican Party to place Trump at its center, leaving it intensely vulnerable without his coattails support its candidates. But Trump was already a hindrance in 2018 to more moderate Republicans trying to brace themselves against the oncoming blue wave. Today, he’s an anchor dragging down everyone with an “R” next to their name, prompting the “red undertow” effect that has conservatives prepared to stay home on Election Day.

It is only right that in failing to learn from the past, Republicans seem doomed to repeat it.

The president already wasn’t very keen on selling the 2017 tax cuts to voters himself. At a May 2018 tax roundtable, Trump instead spent time talking about “China, North Korea, Syria, immigration, the mayor of Oakland, Calif., Congress’s budget deal, his own poll numbers and the media’s coverage of his presidency.” He’s grown much worse at staying on topic in the intervening years, preventing him from providing a coherent message for rank-and-file members to rally around.

A repeat of the anti-immigrant play would also likely backfire in 2026. Democrats have mobilized heavily around Trump’s detention strategy and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tactics. Conservative voters poised to stay home are unlikely to find a sudden burst of enthusiasm, not when more pressing matters are weighing on them.

Rising prices, inflation and other economic concerns have become the focal point of this year’s midterms. There is no avoiding how much the blame for each falls at Trump’s feat, try as candidates might to split the difference. And blame for Trump’s return to the White House — a choice the GOP had every opportunity to avoid — falls at the feet of all those who backed him when his stock was higher. It is only right that in failing to learn from the past, Republicans seem doomed to repeat it.

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Congressional Republicans on the campaign trail have struggled to sell voters on last year’s massive tax cut bill, one of their signature achievements. In most cases, candidates would want data to share on who benefited from that legislation. But the IRS is months behind on sharing key data about how the new law affected taxpayers. It’s an absence that raises important questions about why the IRS hasn’t shared what it has learned.

The One Big Beautiful Bill contained all kinds of changes to the tax code, including new deductions for workers on their tips and overtime wages. The IRS was due to release a set of data detailing the overall tax landscape at the end of the 2026 filing season in July, with an updated version in September. According to Politico, this would have included vital findings on “the uptake of individual provisions in the code as well as things like how much more people in different income groups reported earning, and how many people still owed money to the IRS at the time of filing.”

These figures could show that the tax bill was a huge success — or provide more proof that the tax burden has shifted away from the rich and onto Americans already angry at President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy.

These figures could show that the tax bill was a huge success — or provide more proof that the tax burden has shifted away from the rich and onto Americans already angry at President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy. Per Politico, the IRS “said it is awaiting approval from the Treasury Department to publish the figures.” While the agency does sit under Treasury’s broader umbrella, this isn’t a call Secretary Scott Bessent would normally be making. But the IRS has been the center of an outsized share of drama since January.

The agency went through eight leaders last year, and the commissioner seat is still currently vacant. Bessent stepped in as acting commissioner last year, but his window to legally run the agency closed. The Treasury said in a statement that while he “oversees the operations of all Treasury offices and bureaus, including the Internal Revenue Service,” by March, his service “has expired, and he has not served in that capacity since that time.” Bessent clarified to the Senate in July that while he was no longer the acting commissioner, he was still “performing the duties of the commissioner.”

Day-to-day operations at the IRS, though, are being handled by Social Security Administration chief Frank Bisignano, who has been serving as the IRS’ “chief executive officer” since last October. The role didn’t exist before Bessent created it and it seems like a way to get around having to get a new commissioner confirmed after the last one, Billy Long, was fired two months into the gig. Whether it’s Bessent making the call to withhold the data or Bisignano passing the buck, the outcome is the same: the suppression of public data that could be potentially embarrassing to the administration.

The most plausible alternate, less nefarious, possibility: The IRS simply lacks the personnel to have successfully parsed this year’s tax data. The aforementioned drama included major cuts at the IRS, both in funding and in staffers. Congressional Republicans have clawed back millions of dollars meant to ease the burden on already overworked auditors. The upheaval of mass layoffs, early retirements and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to worm its way into the system prompted a mass exodus of staffers. More than 31,000 employees had left the IRS as of this January, according to its inspector general.

The departures were enough for the IRS to petition the Treasury, in a February memo, for an immediate hiring spree, warning that “ongoing staffing shortages put the 2026 Filing Season at risk,” according to a Washington Sun report in June. CNBC reported in July that Senate Democrats were curious about the discrepancy between that memo and Bisignano previously telling Congress that there were no staffing issues at the agency. (“The IRS delivered a historically successful filing season, efficiently processing returns and issuing average refunds that were 11 percent higher than last year as Americans benefited from the President’s Working Families Tax Cuts,” an IRS spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC.)

What can be said for certain is that the longer the IRS delays in releasing this data, the worse it will look when it finally comes to light.

Whatever the cause, the full consequences of the most consequential law this outgoing Congress passed remain a mystery. It’s hard to say more about the withholding though given the absence of, well, data. We don’t know how much of the delay is due to incompetence, negligence or ill-intent — or a combination of the three.

What can be said for certain is that the longer the IRS delays in releasing this data, the worse it will look when it finally comes to light. If it vindicates the GOP with positive news, it will be too late to have made an effect on the election. If it damns the tax bill’s effects, Bessent and Bisignano will have a lot of questions to answer about why that information was kept from voters until many their ballots had already been cast.

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