Fertel Observes: Mid-Term Elections Will Test Donald Trump’s Abilities to Improvise a Road to GOP Victory

Author Randy Fertel Offers Insight into the Trump Phenomenon as the 2026 Election Season Enters its Home Stretch

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, August 20, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The 2026 Midterm election season is rapidly unfolding for politicians, journalists, analysts and pundits alike. How are President Trump and the Republican Party strategizing to keep the Democrats from attaining new majority status in the House and Senate?

Randy Fertel has been studying the Trump phenomenon for years. His answer is that part of Trump’s power in controlling his base - and distracting everyone else - is that he’s “Winging It!”

Ever since Donald Trump descended his golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his 2016 presidential run, experts, rival politicians, societal observers and the world at large have been trying to determine, most particularly regarding Trump’s appeal and mystique, “How is he doing it?!”

And now, well into his second term, with gas and grocery prices still climbing, an ongoing war with Iran, political setbacks aplenty and countless legal defeats, the bewilderment continues. “How is he STILL doing it?!”

Author and former professor Randy Fertel has answers to these questions. He has identified a key element to Trump’s seemingly unchecked success: Unlike anyone else in the modern political pantheon, Trump has harnessed the unrelenting power of improvisation.

Fertel writes: “Trump is skilled at that same improvisational quality that makes Louis Armstrong’s work transcendent, with an instinctual freedom. Yet, in the wrong hands, it becomes something dangerous.”

In Fertel’s book “Winging It: Improv’s Power and Peril in the Age of Trump,” he reveals his thoughts and theories about improv as a rarified superpower with a shadowy, perilous side. And, he is now available to discuss his observations and conclusions to help usher in a new level of understanding about how it continues to work, 11 years into the Trump era.

“Winging It” has been re-released in 2026 as an audiobook and a follow-up book, “The Age of Improv: How Improvisation Created Global Popular Culture,” is currently in the works, with an anticipated 2027 publication date from LSU Press.

Fertel has serious, plausible and insightful explanations for the phenomenon that is President Donald Trump and his spearheading of the MAGA movement, especially as campaigning and messaging kicks into high gear ahead of the midterms.

Fertel classifies President Trump as an “improvisational trickster” and as Election Day on November 3rd fast approaches, he feels that Trump will continue to throw as many shiny objects into the air as possible to distract the public. Remember “They’re eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats!” from the 2024 Presidential debates? This flash-bang tactic has worked for Trump many times over, and in all likelihood might again, Fertel believes.

As a lifelong observer and a thought-leader, Randy Fertel may be the only mind to have cracked the real code of Trump’s thought patterns. There is a very real possibility, he believes, that Trump could use his unmatched power of improvisation to maintain power for his party in the midterms, snatching victory from what pundits, pollsters and political observers are saying could be a resounding November defeat.

Randy Fertel is a Harvard-educated academic, philanthropist and author. He has written six books, with the most recent being “Winging It: Improv’s Power and Peril in the Time of Trump.” He is also president of the Fertel Foundation, Co-Founder of the annual Ron Ridenhour Awards program for investigative journalism and truth-telling, and he administers the Ruth U. Fertel Foundation, named for his mother Ruth Fertel, founder of Ruth’s Chris Steak House. He lives in New Orleans and New York.

Randy can be contacted via Blue Highway Advisory for interviews and immediate comment regarding his research and theory on how President Trump has been continually able to flex his singular instincts for improvisation, and how he has the motivation and ability to do so yet again.

Andy Och
Blue Highway Advisory
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