Why Trump put his ‘bad cop’ in charge of rescuing the GOP in the midterms

(CNN) — James Blair has six months to defend Republican power in Congress — but first he needed to send a message to his party.

Blair, the White House deputy chief of staff, spent weeks plotting to crush a group of Republican lawmakers in Indiana who defied the president’s demands for a more favorable congressional map. He personally helped recruit and vet their primary opponents while designing a strategy intended to end their political careers.

The night five of those Republican holdouts fell this month, a triumphant Blair thumped his chest on X with a gif of Russell Crowe in “Gladiator”: “Are you not entertained?”

“Sometimes you can vote your conscience, other times you have to vote with the boss,” Blair told CNN the day after the Indiana primaries, referring to President Donald Trump. “And he gets to decide when that is, because he’s elected party leader. My job is to implement that.”

Called “the Oracle” by colleagues and “ruthless” even by friends, 36-year-old Blair has become one of the most powerful and feared operators in Republican politics. Within the White House, he’s seen as a potential successor to chief of staff Susie Wiles if she ever stepped down. On Capitol Hill, he has kept the party’s fragile majorities in line. Across the country, he has put recalcitrant Republicans on notice, no target too small. The bruising mid-decade redistricting battle that’s reshaping the midterm map? That’s Blair’s brainchild.

Now, this millennial operative will embark on perhaps his most difficult assignment. In the coming weeks, he is expected to step away from his White House role to lead the GOP’s efforts to defend its congressional majorities — a challenging task further complicated by Trump’s sagging approval ratings, an unpopular war, persistent economic anxiety and early signs of fracture in the coalition that carried the president to victory in 2024.

A plan is taking shape. The most intense focus will fall on roughly 30 to 35 House races, according to people steeped in the data. Trump’s advisers privately acknowledge that some of the sporadic voters they activated two years ago to carry the president into the White House may not return, so they are running a large, sophisticated data operation to find new ones.

Fear, Blair said, will be a primary motivator. The pitch: Do you really want Democrats back in power?

The confidence stems in part from polling that shows Democrats are largely unpopular, too, as well as faith in a political operation that Trump advisers insist is more advanced than it was in 2018 and far superior to that of the Democratic Party.

Blair will have a massive war chest at his disposal — nearly $400 million between Trump-aligned super PACs — a financial advantage the GOP didn’t have during the president’s first term. Blair declined to say how much is earmarked for the fall, but insisted Republicans would have the necessary resources. He will oversee the coordination of spending across GOP groups, ensuring alignment that has historically been elusive.

Concerns within the GOP are mounting. Voices ranging from MAGA-aligned pollster Richard Baris to billionaire GOP megadonor Ken Griffin are bracing for widespread losses this November. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis recently warned in Politico that Republicans face a “voter enthusiasm gap that we need to address.” Some Republicans privately doubt Trump will spend freely to help GOP candidates.

Grumbling about Blair’s midterm tactics — including, at one point, from Trump himself — peaked earlier this year when the redistricting strategy seemed in danger of unraveling. Those in Blair’s corner see him as the party’s best, and perhaps only, hope to keep the House.

“I’m not totally black-pilled on the midterms because I know we have James,” said Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican who credits Blair with rescuing her first House campaign. “In case of fire, break glass, and they did by unleashing James.”

‘He’ll do anything’

From his earliest days in Republican politics, Blair’s intensity and loyalty stood out.

Shortly after Blair graduated in 2011 from Florida State University with a finance degree, his resume landed in front of then-Florida state Rep. Richard Corcoran. A future Florida House speaker and a combative conservative, Corcoran had a connection to Blair through their brothers, who were partners at a powerhouse Tallahassee lobbying firm.

Corcoran recalled sitting across from Blair at a Chili’s just outside Tampa and pressing him about a previous employer with a murky reputation. He expected the young applicant to unload. Blair declined to dish on his former boss. Corcoran hired him.

“If you make decisions in life based on your own personal convenience, there will be an opportunity where it’s convenient to betray everybody in your life,” Blair said. “I’m not one of those people.”

As Corcoran’s right-hand man, Blair had a front row seat as the Florida Republicans flexed their majorities in Tallahassee — and he quickly gained a reputation for carrying out marching orders with merciless efficiency.

For example, as the Florida GOP emerged from a previous spending scandal that threatened the political career of then-rising Marco Rubio, the party found a new approach to its finances: It routed many expenses through Blair’s personal credit card. Between 2015 and 2017, Blair, then in his mid-20s, racked up over $1.5 million in reimbursements, state campaign finance records show.

Corcoran said it was more efficient. It also made the expenditures harder for the public to trace.

“There was no job that James wouldn’t do,” Corcoran said. “You’re never going to outwork James, and he has no issue with humility. He’ll do anything.”

The Oracle meets the Ice Maiden

Blair first encountered Wiles during this period. Wiles had just delivered Florida for Trump in the 2016 election and Blair was preparing to run Corcoran’s gubernatorial campaign. They recognized something in each other immediately.

“I knew he was super smart,” Wiles told CNN of her initial impression of Blair, “I like to get those people.”

Corcoran made early waves with a provocative ad built around Trump’s anti-immigrant messaging: a scripted scene portraying an undocumented man pointing a gun straight into a camera lens and shooting a young White woman. Blair helped produce it. But Corcoran dropped out before formally entering the race, and Blair moved to the campaign of then-Rep. Ron DeSantis.

Trump’s endorsement carried DeSantis through the primary, but when he struggled as the GOP nominee, the president dispatched Wiles to steady the operation. Together, she and Blair steered DeSantis to one of the narrowest victories in state history.

Both briefly stayed in DeSantis’ orbit — Blair as deputy chief of staff while Wiles ran his political operation — before the two were pushed out in his first year. The rupture reverberated through Republican politics for years and continues to dog DeSantis to this day. Wiles and Blair remained close throughout.

When Covid-19 forced Trump to abandon plans for the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte, Nortj Carolina, Wiles tapped Blair to organize a replacement in Jacksonville (which was ultimately canceled as well). Later that year, he helped Wiles win Florida for Trump a second time.

The following April, with Trump in political exile, Wiles assembled a small group at Mar-a-Lago. It was Blair’s first meeting with Trump, who wanted to know why the Florida turnout model worked when other battleground states fell to Joe Biden. Blair walked him through their unique approach to reaching nontraditional Republican voters — including Jewish voters, Latinos and socially conservative Black people. The conversation ran two-and-a-half hours, according to a person there, and it was clear to everyone that Trump was running again.

Blair had a young family and planned to join Trump’s third presidential campaign after his wife gave birth to their third child, around Super Tuesday. Wiles had other ideas. In September 2023, she convinced Blair to move to West Palm Beach and help lock up the Iowa caucuses.

He stayed through Election Day, turning the Florida model into a nationalized turnout operation targeting people who don’t typically vote in elections, like young men, while making inroads into minority groups that had historically voted Democrat.

“I don’t do a lot of things well, but I am a good former of teams,” Wiles said. “And he, almost immediately, fit into the way I was looking at races or challenges generally. He’s just such a proven performer, it’s actually kind of easy, if you’re me.”

Before Indiana, a test drive in Florida

The hardball tactics Blair would eventually bring to Washington were first tested in Florida primaries that left bruised candidates and at least one lawsuit in their wake.

“We often say of James: There’s no better friend, but there’s no worse enemy,” said Florida Republican strategist Brad Herold, a close friend who rose through the state party with Blair. “People in our business sometimes don’t have the stomach to do what it takes to win political battles. James is not one of these people.”

In 2022, Elizabeth Cornell, a financial planner from Central Florida, filed to run for state House against a candidate Blair was working to elect. She was attacked throughout the primary by Jacob Engels, a local blogger and conservative provocateur who published a string of posts focused on her personal life, her business and her voting record. Those posts were then promoted by a political committee paying Blair’s firm.

In a defamation lawsuit she first filed before she lost the primary, Cornell’s lawyers said the attacks were false and harmed her professional reputation. Their complaint pointed to communications and invoices they said showed Blair’s firm hired a private investigator to find damaging material on her, fed the findings to Engels, paid him to publish them, and then drove the posts to voters through texts and mailers.

One exchange included in the complaint showed Blair reviewing Cornell’s favorability numbers and writing, “l think we will have made a solid dent in reversing that by end of next week.” Mailers went out the next day featuring one of Engels’ posts, the lawsuit said.

After first arguing the texts and mailers were protected speech under the First Amendment, Blair and his firm settled with Cornell confidentially during the 2024 presidential campaign. Reached by phone, Cornell declined to comment. Her lawyer told CNN that Blair signed a statement requesting the posts be removed but declined to provide a copy. A judge later ruled against Engels — in part because he stopped responding — and ordered him to pay Cornell $200,000. He has yet to do so, her lawyer said.

Engels noted to CNN that he had successfully defended himself against several defamation lawsuits in the past, but by settling with Cornell, Blair had hurt Engels’ case. Blair, Engels said, “left me holding the bag.”

Blair declined to discuss the Cornell case, citing the settlement, but he defended his no-holds-barred approach to politics.

“Half measures never work in life,” Blair said. “You just come to regret them.”

Democrats, too, have leaned into the image of Blair as a fearsome adversary and avatar of today’s combative politics. Last month, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced plans to respond to Republican redistricting with “maximum warfare.”

The message was delivered beside a giant image of Trump — and looming just over his left shoulder was a cutout of Blair’s unmistakable bald head.

The Wilson problem

In Washington, Blair has operated in a similar fashion. One person close to the president’s team described him as the White House’s “enforcer,” and he has called himself one of Trump’s “junkyard dogs.”

Officials credit Blair with shepherding Trump’s sweeping tax and spending package, the “Big Beautiful Bill,” through a fractious Congress. One top adviser said Blair acts as the White House “bad cop,” so Trump doesn’t have to be — a departure from the president’s first term, when he served as his own strongman and burned bridges in the process.

“Everyone knows he’s a serious person and not to mess with him,” Luna said of Blair.

Not all Republican lawmakers appreciate the approach. One, speaking anonymously due to fears of retaliation, called Blair a “bully.” Others have bristled at what they describe as barely veiled threats — reminders of Trump’s popularity and suggestions that more loyal Republicans are waiting to take their seats. Blair has denied that he’s leveling threats, insisting he is just stating facts.

More often than not, Blair delivers for Trump. The Indiana redistricting fight offered a rare exception.

Earlier this year, Trump backed Barbara Wilson, a local official, in a primary against Indiana state Sen. Greg Goode, one of the Republican holdouts. When another Republican named Alexandra Wilson filed for the same seat, the White House scrambled to avoid duplicative surnames on the ballot. Blair called Alexandra Wilson directly in mid-February, warning her that a past charge of resisting arrest and her husband’s more recent DUI would be weaponized. He predicted a “really nasty race” if she didn’t get out.

“They’re going to tell every voter in the district about this kind of stuff,” Blair said, according to a recording made by Wilson and shared with CNN. “Because they don’t have to tell your side of the story. They will tell the side of the story they want people to hear.”

Alexandra Wilson, six months pregnant at the time of the call, wouldn’t budge. A Trump-aligned PAC ran the ad Blair had described.

“It’s upsetting how far they took it and what they put me through,” she told CNN. “But I’ve had quite a few people say, ‘Good for you for not letting them do that to you. This isn’t how politics should be.’”

Blair called it “a perfect phone call” — borrowing a phrase Trump has used to describe his own controversial calls.

Both Wilsons lost. Goode survived.

Asked whether Blair has ever gone too far, Wiles responded, “In another decade, maybe.”

“But not with what we’re up against and what has happened to the president so far,” she added. “You can’t go to a fight with one hand tied behind your back. It’s not responsible. And when it’s coming at you, it’s such a river. You have to respond in kind.”

From bad cop to traffic cop

Inside the White House, Blair has become Wiles’ go-to on almost any topic despite his limited background in federal policy. He handles a portfolio that spans marijuana policy, food safety, crypto legislation, surveillance law, healthcare and trade.

At one point, as the fallout from Trump’s handling of the Epstein files threatened the administration’s agenda, Blair was briefly put in charge of messaging around the issue. Notably, Blair accompanied Trump to China last week for high-stakes talks with leader Xi Jinping, while Wiles stayed back.

“I’m a little bit on the slow-to-trust side, and I’m persnickety,” Wiles said. “And when it’s something I can’t do, James is my go-to to get it done right. I don’t even worry.”

If Wiles were to leave her post, Blair would be on the short list to replace her, multiple people told CNN. Asked directly whether she believed Blair could do her job, Wiles said “I do,” though she added that she intended to remain for the rest of Trump’s term.

His temporary departure from the White House to run the midterms effort reflects how much Trump prioritizes keeping Republicans in power. After reviewing the 2018 cycle, when the GOP lost 40 House seats, Trump’s team concluded a dedicated outside operation, free from the daily machinery of governing, was essential.

“The president has raised a lot of money, and we’ll spend a lot of money,” Wiles said. “To the extent the law allows it, we’re going to coordinate all of that. And I can’t do that. Neither can James sitting here.”

She added: “Somebody has got to be a traffic cop.”

Fortune has turned Blair’s way in recent weeks as he prepares to fully step into his new role.

He and his wife — a former Tampa Bay Buccaneers cheerleader-turned-political consultant — welcomed their fourth child in late March. Court rulings have broken sharply in favor of his redistricting strategy: One decision invalidated a Democratic-drawn congressional map in Virginia; another opened the door for Republican-controlled states across the South to redraw boundaries in ways that dilute minority-heavy districts long favorable to Democrats.

The wins have quieted a difficult winter and early spring, when Blair’s redistricting plan appeared on thin ice. When Indiana Republicans balked at the White House’s demands in December, Trump lashed out and blamed Blair for the embarrassment, according to multiple people.

Blair brushed it off: “Trump loves this war.”

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CNN’s Dugald McConnell contributed to this report.