WASHINGTON — In the earliest days of this election cycle, the U.S. wasn’t at war with Iran. The East Wing of the White House was still standing and the Kennedy Center wasn’t threatened with demolition. Artificial intelligence data centers weren’t bipartisan shorthand for the tech sector’s excess. Democratic socialists were largely confined to the outer edges of political discourse. Lake Ontario’s name wasn’t in question. Since President Donald Trump entered politics more than a decade ago, he’s had a knack for dominating the national conversation so thoroughly that it can be hard to keep up. But as the final midterm of his presidency rapidly approaches, the landscape is proving especially volatile, with Trump often stirring the tumult. “Some of these things are out of our control,” House Speaker Mike Johnson , a Louisiana Republican, told reporters last week when pressed on whether the frenzy will hurt his party’s election prospects. Even the map itself has been in flux, with Texas, California and Florida among the states that have redrawn congressional districts . Missouri’s Rep
