DALLAS — President Donald Trump is getting a much warmer reception from his fellow Republicans during this election cycle than his predecessor did from Democrats this time two years ago.

Conventional political wisdom dictates that the party in power will suffer losses in Congress during a midterm election year. Americans who oppose the president’s party are typically more motivated to vote than people who support their agenda.

But the GOP is banking on the opposite effect. The first-ever GOP midterm convention featured back-to-back keynote addresses from the commander-in-chief, as well as speeches from his Cabinet officials, allies and members of Congress.

“I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” Trump told his audience on Wednesday. Republican incumbents and candidates running in battleground districts this November also took the stage, and all speakers projected confidence despite Trump’s own low approval numbers.

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“We ran together in 2024 on a ticket with President Trump, [Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa.] and myself — voters elected all of us to deliver real change and results, and we’ve actually been able to do that with securing the border and delivering historic tax relief,” Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, R-Pa., told Fox News Digital on the sidelines of the convention.

“Now what we’re seeing is in a midterm, we are actually going to defy the historic trends. Why is that? Because the Democrats are so far left they are totally out of touch.”

Republicans believe their warnings of Democrats’ socialist insurgency will help them keep their majorities in the House and Senate this year, along with touting Trump’s signature tax cuts in the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.

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Mackenzie is one of Democrats’ top targets in the election cycle, along with Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., in the suburbs outside New York City.

“He’s the President of the United States, and whether it was Joe Biden or Donald Trump, I’ve always shown up,” Lawler told Fox News Digital. “You have to be able to engage with the president, and, you know, frankly, this is where I think the Democrats have made a very big mistake. They could get a lot more in terms of what it is that they want if they would actually engage constructively.”

Lawler, Mackenzie and Rep. Rob Bresnahan, R-Pa., are the three vulnerable incumbents who took the stage during the convention last week.

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Lawler, for his part, introduced two residents from his district whose daughter was killed by an illegal immigrant in Chicago — a poignant symbol of what Republicans say could happen more often if Democrats win.

Trump has also campaigned in each of their districts in recent months as he crisscrosses the country in a bid to keep control of Congress for the latter half of his final term.

But it was not just vulnerable incumbents who appeared in Dallas alongside Trump. The two-day affair also brought candidates from across the country, even those running in tight races.

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“When people say that folks are running away from President Trump, I’ll tell you I’m certainly not doing that. And let me tell you why: because he has made promises to South Texas, and he has kept them, especially when we look at border security,” candidate Eric Flores told Fox News Digital.

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“My opponent, who said, you know, that the sleepy Joe Biden administration and the no-show border czar, Kamala Harris, were on the right track. Let me tell you firsthand, I was on Operation Guardian support, was a federal prosecutor on the border. It was a humanitarian crisis. President Trump, on day one, secured our border.”

Flores is running in a South Texas district currently represented by Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-Texas.

Time will tell if the strategy pays off, but Democrats are already seizing on it in hopes that associating with Trump will sink GOP candidates like it did in 2018.

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“Ryan Mackenzie, Rob Bresnahan and Scott Perry made their priorities clear tonight: they care more about Donald Trump’s cost-raising agenda than what’s best for the people of Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chair Eugene DePasquale said in a statement.

“After jetting all the way to Texas to champion an agenda of higher gas prices, cost-raising tariffs, and healthcare cuts, Mackenzie, Bresnahan, Perry and the entire PA GOP have proven that they’ll put Trump ahead of our Commonwealth every single time — and Pennsylvanians are ready to send them packing this November.”

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Fox News Digital did not see Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., who is also expected to run a close race, at the convention, but reached out to his campaign for comment.

MEXICO CITY — He’s been called the “MAGA man” of Latin America, a brash political provocateur whose social media assaults boosted right-wing campaigns from his native Argentina to Central America.

His career as political consultant and co-founder of an ultra-right online outlet made him a rich man and helped elect Trump-aligned politicians across the region. The Economist gave him the “MAGA Man” label, while political commentators gave him another nickname — the “Steve Bannon of Latin America” — a nod to the longtime Trump ally and advisor.

Now, however, Fernando Cerimedo, 45, sits in a maximum-security prison in Bolivia, accused of masterminding a murder-for-hire plot: The attempted femicide of his pregnant mistress, Nadia Beller, 33, a Bolivian lawyer and activist.

It’s a stunning collapse for a onetime ad man with a dodgy reputation who rose to become the go-to digital campaign guru for Latin America’s ascendant right wing. Cerimedo’s signature boasts, exaggerations and peddling of false election-fraud narratives reflected those of his political model, President Trump.

Cerimedo also is another example of how right-wing political operatives outside the United States — as recently in Colombia and Germany — have adopted Trumpian tactics and messaging.

The fall of the “King Midas of the Latin American right,” said Daniel Matamala, a prominent Chilean journalist, stunned “the ecosystem of fake news, bots, trolls and disinformation that has taken this region by storm in recent years.” Speaking on his podcast, Matamala added, “The name of Cerimedo looms like a ghost over the summit of the radical right.”

The Aug. 17 attack on Beller was a seemingly well-planned ambush that was captured by security cameras, the grainy images widely disseminated on social media.

One of two would-be assassins dressed as fast-food deliverymen pulled out a pistol and shot Beller point blank outside a hotel in the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. She fell to the ground and, according to her account, feigned death. The next day, at dawn, Cerimedo was arrested as he was about to board a plane to Buenos Aires.

Cerimedo set up the hit, prosecutors charge, in a nefarious attempt at damage control. Beller had threatened to expose his alleged criminal behavior and physically abusive behavior toward her while revealing Cerimedo, a married man with two children, as the father of her unborn child.

Cerimedo is also under investigation for alleged illegal enrichment and potential links to cocaine trafficking.

He has denied any wrongdoing.

Even before Cerimedo’s arrest, Latin American journalists had begun unmasking Cerimedo as a prodigious purveyor of fake news — about himself. New reports revealed that his frequent boasts about U.S. connections — that he attended Harvard, trained with U.S. Navy SEALs, worked in the Obama White House — were fanciful.

“He certainly exaggerated things,” said Damian Merlo, a Miami-based consultant who worked with Cerimedo on the 2023 campaign of Argentine President Javier Milei, a Trump favorite. “I never really got the impression that Cerimedo was ‘MAGA’s man in Latin America.’ The guy could hardly speak English! But that’s how he sold himself.”

Many times, the sales pitch worked. It was Cerimedo who helped broker then-candidate Milei’s celebrated 2023 interview with Tucker Carlson, at the time a Trump confidant, an appearance that thrust Milei into the international spotlight.

Like Milei, Cerimedo seemed to relish any proximity to Trump-land.

In February, at the inaugural “Hispanic Prosperity Gala” — a right-wing pep rally held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — Cerimedo was honored as “Hispanic Political Consultant of the Year.’” From the podium, he spoke of Latin America’s “culture war” and the need to ensure that “the left never again returns” to governments that have elected conservative leaders.

Switching to heavily accented English, Cerimedo gave a shout-out to Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, whom Cerimedo thanked for “believing [in] me all the time and giving me your technology.”

Parscale declined to comment.

Both Cerimedo and Parscale were involved in last year’s campaign that resulted in the election of Honduran President Nasry Asfura, whom Trump backed publicly.

Last year, Cerimedo was a key player in the election of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, the center-right, U.S.-educated son of a former president who transitioned from Marxist firebrand to moderate. The ascension of Paz broke almost two decades of leftist rule by the Movement for Socialism party of ex-President Evo Morales.

Cerimedo had no official capacity in Paz’s government, but he enjoyed insider status. He accompanied Paz in March to Trump’s anti-narco “Shield of the Americas” summit, a confab of mostly conservative leaders at Trump’s Doral resort in south Florida.

Among the items found in searches of Cerimedo-linked properties, authorities say, was a business card listing him as Paz’s “chief adviser” — a nonexistent post.

“Mr. Cerimedo never had the authorization to represent … the presidency, the government or my family,” a deeply discomfited Paz said in Facebook message last month.

How exactly Cerimedo got into politics — and how he became a right-wing rabble-rouser — remains somewhat opaque. According to media accounts, he worked a series of uninspiring jobs — including stints as a taxi driver, a schoolteacher and an employee of insurance and computer firms — before veering into advertising. In 2019, he assisted the campaigns of several leftist Peronist candidates in provincial races in Argentina, and later founded his own consultancy, Numen.

Cerimedo first gained prominence in neighboring Brazil. That’s where he championed false election-fraud narratives following the narrow reelection defeat in 2022 of President Jair Bolsonaro — a MAGA stalwart — in his reelection bid against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist. Cerimedo’s “Brazil Was Stolen” livestream exacerbated the sense of outrage among Bolsonaro loyalists, who took to the streets in mass protests.

The Brazil exposure helped catapult Cerimedo into successful presidential campaigns in Argentina (Milei), Honduras (Asfura) and Bolivia (Paz). His arrest prompted Chilean lawmakers to create a commission to investigate Cerimedo’s possible role in that nation’s recent electoral shift to the right.

With Cerimedo’s name now toxic, Paz, Milei and other former allies have distanced themselves.

Also ditching Cerimedo was his close partner, Javier Negre, a right-wing Spanish media entrepreneur who, in 2024, purchased 50% ownership of Cerimedo’s La Derecha Diario (The Daily Right), an online, Spanish-language MAGA megaphone. The site strongly backed Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella — who had Trump’s support — during his tight campaign this summer.

Following Cerimedo’s arrest, Negre announced that he had bought out his former partner in La Derecha Diario.

In Bolivia, the Cerimedo scandal has taken on the character of a Latin American telenovela.

A recovering Beller, shot three times in her upper body, granted interviews from her hospital bed, dishing on her lover’s alleged brutality and criminality.

According to Beller’s testimony to authorities, Cerimedo tricked her into the near-fatal rendezvous outside the hotel. He told her that a source was waiting to share details about the purported rape of a 13-year-old, she said. The supposed rapist? Bolivian ex-President Morales — a despised figure on the Latin American right.

The case has seen the once high-flying Cerimedo reduced to a slumping presence in a hoodie as authorities have shuffled the baldish, heavyset figure to hearings and lockups. Last week, he was transferred while awaiting trial to Bolivia’s maximum-security Chonchocoro prison, infamous for its high-altitude, ill-heated confines.

“I want to see my children!” a sobbing Cerimedo declared at one point in earshot of the media.

His legal team has pushed back. A defense lawyer, Margarita Arce, questioned whether Cerimedo had impregnated Beller and asserted to reporters that Beller staged a “self-inflicted attack” to smear Cerimedo and undermine the Bolivian government.

But prosecutors have sided with Beller, who told the Argentine daily Clarín: “Fernando Cerimedo wanted to kill me because I can tell everything that I know.”

Times staff writer Ana Ceballos in Washington and special correspondents Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires and Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.

Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies responded to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ home in Malibu Friday night after a woman showed up uninvited twice, according to multiple outlets.

After the woman was dropped off by an Uber, she attempted to contact security at the $8 million home and was told she needed to leave, according to the California Post.

But the unidentified woman came back again, prompting Harris’ security to call the authorities after 10 p.m.

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The woman was not arrested, FOX 11 reported.

President Donald Trump ended Harris’ Secret Service detail a year ago after former President Joe Biden had extended a year beyond the traditional six months for former vice presidents.

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Lt. Jason Duron, a watch commander at the Malibu/Lost Hills sheriff’s station, told the Los Angeles Times: “We are stepping up patrols of the property to be safe.

Eduardo Negrón, a Harris spokesman, told The Times: “Last night, security personnel stopped an individual who illegally entered Vice President Harris and Second Gentleman [Doug] Emhoff’s property before the individual reached the home. They are grateful to the security and law enforcement personnel who responded swiftly.”

Negrón said neither Harris nor former second gentleman Emhoff were home at the time.

The couple bought the ritzy property last January.

The former vice president is a native of the Golden State, and she served as District Attorney of San Francisco, Attorney General of California and as a senator representing the state before she joined Biden’s presidential ticket.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the sheriff’s department and reps for Harris for comment.

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A man who broke into former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and attacked her husband with a hammer in 2022 was later sentenced to life in prison without parole.