MARK HALPERIN: Trump strategy super session plots midterm survival as history stalks GOP

Tuesday night at the Capitol Hill Club, just steps from the House office buildings and a world away from cable news hysteria, the senior Trump political command gathered its core team to talk midterms. It was not a rally. It was not a pep talk. It was a working session — about two hours, a chicken-and-steak buffet, roughly 75 to 100 people in the room, many of them Cabinet secretaries and their top aides, almost all political veterans.

The mood, according to one attendee, was not panicked.