Republican strategist Mike Fragoso has identified a serious political problem for his party: Voters in red states are tiring of President Donald Trump’s antics as competitive races multiply. His proposed solution is essentially to make Trump behave like somebody else until the midterm elections are safely over.

Fragoso bills himself as the former legal counsel to former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. On X, he described what professionals have apparently been telling him about the Republican predicament.

“What I have heard from professionals explaining why we have so many competitive races in red states boils down to R voters thinking of the president’s antics, ‘it’s not funny anymore,’” Fragoso wrote. He added that voters are hurting financially while Trump focuses on memes, arches, and revenge.

That assessment is revealing because it suggests some Republican voters enjoyed Trump’s trolling until his conduct began affecting them personally. Now, with financial pain mounting and red state races becoming competitive, Fragoso sees a problem that is troubling but still solvable.

His advice to Republican candidates begins with gas prices. Fragoso urged them to fight Democrats to a draw on the issue and emphasize Republican support for energy dominance and maximum fossil fuel development.

“Republicans hate high gas prices!” Fragoso wrote. He proposed blaming foreign activity, Iran, and Russia while pointing to the opening of Venezuela’s oil fields.

That message runs into an inconvenient reality described in the source: The United States has been the world’s largest producer of crude oil since 2018. Oil still trades on a global market, so abundant domestic drilling does not guarantee cheap gasoline.

Democrats also do not need an abstract lecture about global oil markets to make their case. Voters see the prices whenever they pass a gas station, and they feel those prices whenever they fill their tanks.

Fragoso’s plan largely avoids connecting Trump to the war in Iran or its economic effects. Instead, it encourages Republicans to portray high prices as something caused by distant foreign actors while attacking Democrats with familiar culture war bait.

“Democrats want high gas prices. They want you driving electric cars or paying a carbon tax that goes into a remediation fund that pays their activists to teach your kids about how whales are gay or something,” Fragoso wrote.

He also suggested that Republicans should force Democrats to discuss climate change rather than Iran. The strategy assumes Democrats would willingly abandon attacks on Republican management of the war and economy to walk into a debate Republicans prefer.

Fragoso then turned to an obscure congressional maneuver involving California emissions rules. “If you’re a Senate incumbent vote on all available California-waiver CRAs next week,” he wrote.

California has emissions requirements for ocean traveling ships while they are docked at the state’s ports, and Republicans are trying to overturn the federal waiver allowing the state to enforce them. Fragoso argues that eliminating those requirements would reduce shipping costs and lower prices.

The political problem is obvious: Few voters know what the vessels at berth CRA is, and an obscure Senate vote is unlikely to erase what motorists are paying at the pump. Yet Fragoso presented the issue as a tangible action Republicans could take just five weeks before the election.

His advice for Trump was even more remarkable. “The President: Stop fighting about ballrooms and arches and whose name is where for a little while,” Fragoso wrote.

Fragoso also recommended removing tariffs that are raising prices in red states, declaring victory in Trump’s trade wars, and delivering a scripted televised address about Iran with no weaving. In that address, Trump would explain why he launched the conflict, claim he achieved his goals, and announce that he was ending it in victory.

The prescription amounts to asking Trump to temporarily stop acting like Trump. It also calls for declarations of success despite high prices and the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Fragoso’s closing advice exposed the whole game. “Make fun of *them* by serving tacos in the WH. You’ll have more than two years in which to settle scores starting on 11/5.”

So the strategist who began by warning that voters no longer find Trump’s antics funny finished by recommending more trolling and promising time for revenge after the election. The plan is simple: Hide the chaos for five weeks, declare victory everywhere, win, and then resume settling scores.