WASHINGTON-President Trump took French President Emmanuel Macron on a tour of his Manhattan penthouse on Monday night, grinning for photos, talking up the economy and offering an optimistic view of the coming midterm elections.

Republicans, Trump predicted, would overperform in November, according to people with knowledge of his private comments.

Few Republicans share the president's rosy outlook.

As Trump was feting his French counterpart in New York, 700 miles away in Michigan, Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers was trying to win over the increasing number of voters who have expressed deep frustration with the president. Rogers released a campaign video, set in a grocery store, in which he called for an end to the war in Iran, making him the latest Republican in a tight race to distance themselves from Trump's policies.

"We have to bring prices down," Rogers said. "The war with Iran needs to end, and end quickly."

Five weeks before the midterm elections, Republicans are panicking-and Trump is doing little to ease their minds.

Over a whirlwind seven days, the president has made a series of moves that have confounded Republican candidates, strategists and lawmakers.

He abruptly banned three media outlets from the White House, triggering a dayslong standoff that led major TV networks to limit their video coverage of his events. He praised New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic socialist who has long been a boogeyman for the right. At the United Nations, the president threatened to annihilate Iran and escalate the war.

Back in Washington, he threw an extravagant state dinner for China's Xi Jinping, an authoritarian who has been the subject of fierce Republican criticism for years. The same week he welcomed the Communist leader to the White House, Trump appeared in government-funded anti-communism ads that show clips of the president as a choir sings "Love Me."

"This is the week where it felt like the bottom started falling out in earnest," said Colin Reed, a Republican strategist. "President Trump is the Republican Party right now, and by virtue of his lower approval ratings, the entire party is dealing with that political reality."

Which party controls Congress during the final two years of Trump's second term could have major implications for the president's agenda, and it could shape the political landscape ahead of the 2028 presidential election, the first since 2012 that Trump won't be on the ballot.

Democrats need to gain a handful of seats to win the House in November. The GOP-controlled Senate is seen as a tossup, but some Republicans are concerned that the Senate map is shifting in Democrats' favor.

Trump has at times suggested that he expects Republicans to suffer significant losses in November, pointing to historic trends that show the party in power usually loses seats in midterm elections. But in public and in private in recent weeks, he has sought to project confidence that the GOP will defy expectations, dismissing polls and noting that he has often proven his doubters wrong.

"He thinks we're going to win, but it's going to be close," said John Catsimatidis, the New York grocery-store magnate and longtime Trump friend who was with the president when he met with Macron earlier this week.

A new Wall Street Journal poll shows that voters have soured on the president, portending trouble for members of his party in November. Just 37% of Americans approve of the job that Trump is doing, according to the poll, which was conducted earlier this month. It is the lowest approval rating of any president heading into a midterm election in Journal polls dating to 1990.

Among voters who backed Trump in the 2024 election, 11% said they now regret their vote. And among Republicans who say they don't consider themselves part of Trump's MAGA movement, 11% say they plan to vote for a Democrat for Congress this fall. These non-MAGA Republicans account for about one-third of GOP voters. The margin of error for the survey of 1,500 registered voters is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

"President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party, and he is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress," White House spokesman Davis Ingle said.

Over the past week, Republican candidates in critical races across the country have received new internal polling data that underscored the headwinds facing the GOP, setting off a fresh round of hand-wringing among campaign strategists, according to people familiar with the matter. Republican strategists are rushing to get more polling data ahead of the election, overwhelming the call centers that are tasked with canvassing voters about their views, according to a GOP campaign adviser.

Voters associate Trump with higher prices for food and gas, as well as higher mortgage rates and the proliferation of data centers across the country, according to a Republican strategist.

The White House this week began considering policy moves aimed at addressing voters' concerns-including a temporary export ban on diesel fuel. Those discussions prompted a backlash from the energy industry, which has been closely aligned with Trump. Energy Secretary Chris Wright later played down the prospect of a ban, saying the administration is considering voluntary export restrictions.

Inside the White House, the mood has been grim at times, according to people familiar with the matter. A senior White House official acknowledged that the president's political team is stressed about the coming election, but they also see a path where the party picks up seats in both the House and the Senate.

Some Trump allies have tried to convey to the president how bad the midterm environment is for Republicans. But Trump has at times cut off those conversations, according to a person familiar with the matter. The senior White House official said that Trump's political team regularly presents him with candid assessments of the midterm environment and polling.

Trump keeps track of the number of days until the midterms and is focused on the roughly 35 races that are the most competitive, asking questions in the Oval Office about the candidates, according to a person who has heard him talk about the races.

Several Republican lawmakers in must-win states broke with Trump policies this week. Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is running for Senate in Iowa, called for an end to the war in Iran and said lawmakers should go back to Washington to pause diesel exports and suspend the gas tax. GOP candidates in Ohio and Wisconsin also called for an end to the war.

A Trump adviser said the president understands that candidates must do what they need to do to win their races, even if that means backing away from the president or policies. Trump's political team has been in close touch with campaigns seeking to differentiate themselves from the president's views.

But Trump has privately expressed frustration that Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R., Fla.) publicly broke with him on immigration, according to people familiar with the matter. Salazar recently released a television ad filmed in front of the White House that criticizes Trump's immigration enforcement policies as excessive.

Even some lawmakers who aren't up for re-election criticized Trump this week. Sen. John Curtis (R., Utah)-who isn't up for re-election until 2030-called for an investigation of Donald Trump Jr., following the disclosure that the president's oldest son received a lavish afterparty as a wedding gift from a Russian businessman connected to the Kremlin. Sen. Roger Wicker (R., Miss.), who also won't face voters until 2030, went to the Senate floor to raise concerns about Trump's decision to invite Xi to the White House.

Some Republicans said they were privately aghast by the images that came out of the dinner, including Chinese flags on the roof of the White House and officials on their hands and knees dusting off a red carpet before Xi walked across it.

Trump's political operation-flush with cash-is investing tens of millions in races across the country. But some Republicans say they are now having to invest heavily in races in states such as Iowa and Ohio that were once seen as easy wins for GOP candidates.

Texas PAC-which is associated with the Senate Leadership Fund, the main outside group that works with Senate Majority Leader John Thune-has spent more than $100 million to boost attorney general Ken Paxton in the Senate race against Democrat James Talarico and could spend as much as $200 million by the election, a person familiar with the group's planning said. Polling has shown Talarico with a slim lead in a state Trump won in 2024 by 14 points.

White House and campaign officials said the president will be doing dozens of tele-rallies for GOP candidates, and he has plans to travel to battleground states. Next week, the president will go to deep red Oklahoma and Alabama for a pair of rallies.

Trump won both states in 2024 by more than 30 points.