President Donald Trump’s aides are urging him to replace departing U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley with another woman, hoping the move could help shore up support among female voters before the midterms, three people familiar with the matter told POLITICO.

Trump aides are fleshing out a list of female candidates with experience in the foreign policy arena after top pick Dina Powell, a Goldman Sachs executive and Trump administration alumna, withdrew her name from contention, citing her desire to remain close to her young kinds, according to two people familiar with Powell’s decision.

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The expanded list now includes Nancy Brinker, founder of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, according to one Republican close to the White House, as well as New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, whom two senators, including close Trump friend Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), suggested as a good fit for the job, said two people briefed on the matter.

The added duo joins Kelly Knight Craft, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, on the White House’s list of potential Haley replacements. Craft — who along with her husband, coal executive Joe Craft, are major Republican donors and are said to be close with Trump — was at the White House Thursday to discuss the job, according to an administration official. Outside advisers have also recommended Kay Bailey Hutchison, the current U.S. ambassador to NATO, although it’s unclear if she’s in contention for the job.

Staffers are especially keen to name a woman to the position with the midterms fast approaching and Trump polling at low levels among the female electorate, particularly after his second Supreme Court pick, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, faced allegations of sexual misconduct and assault.

“The political shop thinks it’s very important to announce a woman before Election Day because of the president’s approval rating and the Kavanaugh stuff,” said one source in regular contact with the president, although others added that pressure to appoint a woman is coming from across the White House.

GOP leaders say Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle energized the Republican base, but Trump’s current job approval rating among women, according to a Gallup survey released this month, stands at 30 percent. Twice as many women — 63 percent — disapprove of the president’s performance.

And while Trump bragged this week that “tremendous” amounts of women were pleased to see Kavanaugh confirmed, a CNN poll released Thursday showed a 20 percent increase since August in women who hold a negative view of the high court’s newest justice.

Republicans are already relying heavily on male voters to protect against major losses, but male turnout in previous midterm cycles suggests that losing large swaths of female voters would virtually hand the lower chamber to Democrats next month. In a study of voter turnout by gender in non-presidential elections, Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics found the percentage of female voters has exceeded men in every midterm cycle since 1986.

Still, Republicans aren’t convinced naming a female successor to Haley will have a meaningful impact on undecided women. One White House official said Trump “should pick the best person for the job because that’s what impresses Americans.”

“I don’t think anyone out there is going to be voting in 2018 based on the U.N. ambassador,” added a Senate GOP staffer.

Such skepticism, however, hasn’t stopped White House aides from stacking the president’s list of contenders with women. And selecting a nominee based on gender wouldn’t be the first time Trump has allowed criteria beyond experience and qualifications to guide his personnel decisions. The president reportedly wavered on hiring John Bolton as White House national security adviser earlier this year because he disliked his signature mustache. And Trump has regularly quipped about pulling aides and appointees, including Kavanaugh, straight from “central casting.”

When Haley resigned on Monday, Trump said she had made the U.N. ambassador job a “more glamorous position than it was two years ago.”

With Powell out of the running, it’s unclear who Trump thinks might be able to fill Haley’s shoes.

Brinker, who founded her breast cancer foundation in 1982, is a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, serving as the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary. Notably, she has also known the Trump family for 35 years. She first met with the president when her late husband Norman Brinker and Trump’s father, Fred, were joint recipients of the Horatio Alger Award in 1985.

Though Brinker would be no stranger to the Senate confirmation process required for the position, she’d likely have to answer questions about several controversies surrounding her foundation work. Brinker stepped down as CEO of her foundation in 2012, shortly after the group cut off grants to Planned Parenthood, lost millions of its annual revenue, and reversed the decision. She came under scrutiny again in October 2016 as the foundation, where she remained involved despite her resignation, prepared to host its sixth annual “Pink Party” for breast cancer survivors at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.

“All I really have to say is that there hopefully are plenty of women in the mix being considered,” Brinker told POLITICO on Thursday. Asked about Haley’s departure, she said she was unsure “what qualifies as conversations” about the position and “would not discuss it” if she had been approached.

She added: “There are so many competent women that I can think of and I’m sure they will select the right list of candidates. I loved my service and always want to be in a position — whether it’s in the private sector or not — to serve my country.”

Ayotte would likely enter the race with the odds stacked against her, as she was a vocal critic of candidate Trump during the “Access Hollywood” scandal. But she came to Trump via glowing recommendations from former colleagues and in 2017 served as the sherpa for Justice Neil Gorsuch’s successful Supreme Court confirmation battle, potentially helping to heal her fractured relationship with the president.

Ayotte “is not angling for and hasn’t been formally approached,” said one person familiar with the situation.

Another source familiar with the matter demurred when asked about Graham’s involvement in pushing Ayotte.

“Graham played golf with Trump this weekend,” the person said.“They talk a lot on the golf course, but it’s not like any kind of organized campaign pushing anyone.”

Andrew Restuccia and Ben White contributed to this report.

The universe threw together Donald Trump, Kanye West and the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon, a collision that resulted in what may be the Trump era’s greatest mashup yet.

Ahead of a planned lunch meeting, West embraced Trump in a hug at the Resolute Desk and expounded for 10 minutes straight on sleep deprivation, “male energy,” liberals, gun rights, alternate realities and much else while Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, football legend Jim Brown and a crowd of stunned journalists looked on.

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Officially, the purpose of Trump’s meeting with West, Brown, Kushner and the first daughter was to discuss prison reform, urban revitalization, violent crime in West’s hometown of Chicago and other priorities for black Americans. But its only sure result will be to briefly focus the attention of a confused nation on the awesome spectacle offered, free of charge, by its government.

As for policy, West did, at the prompting of a reporter, voice his opposition to stop-and-frisk. And Trump — who on Monday said police should implement the controversial tactic in Chicago — did say that he was “open” to looking at police reforms. West spoke repeatedly about bringing manufacturing operations back to the United States, and about police shootings, and he advocated land ownership for black Americans. “We want a brand more than we want land,” he said.

But the rapper also declared that “time is a myth,” making the prospect that Thursday’s meeting would have some future effect on governance appear remote, if not absurd.

“Let’s stop worrying about the future. All we have is today,” West said in response to a question about any future presidential ambitions. “Trump is on his hero’s journey right now. He might not have thought he’d have a crazy motherf—– like [me].”

West opined on Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan, saying that “I’m With Her” did not resonate with him as a man who did not see much of his father growing up. In contrast, donning a “Make America Great Again” hat, he said, “made me feel like Superman.”

“My dad and my mom separated, so there was not a lot of male energy in my home. And also I’m married to a family where, you know, there’s not a lot of male energy,” he said, referring to his in-laws, the Kardashians. “It’s beautiful, though.”

West meandered from topic to topic in a free-association monologue reminiscent of Trump’s extemporaneous stump speeches. “I don’t answer questions in simple sound bites,” West warned reporters. “You’re tasting a fine wine. It has multiple notes to it.”

Much of what he said was unintelligible, including a long discussion of his mental health.

“I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder,” he said. “I was connected with a neuropsychologist that works with the athletes in the NBA and the NFL. And he looked at my brain. I’m going to go ahead, drop some balls on you. 98 percentile IQ test. … I had sleep deprivation, which can cause dementia. Ten to 20 years from now, I wouldn’t even remember my son’s name. So all this power that I got, and I’m taking my son to the [Chicago White] Sox game and all that. I wouldn’t be able to remember his name from a misdiagnosis. What we need is, we can empower the pharmaceuticals and make more money.”

Late last month, West stoked controversy when, in a tweet, he called for abolishing the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery. He later clarified his comments to TMZ. “Abolish was the wrong language,” he told the outlet. “I misspoke by saying abolish. Amend is the right language.”

On Thursday, West again brought up the 13th Amendment, though it was difficult to follow his reasoning as he asked, rhetorically, “Would you build a trapdoor that if you mess up and you accidentally, something happens, you fall and you end up next to the Unabomber?”

At one point, West whipped out his iPhone, and in full view of cameras punched in his passcode, 0-0-0-0-0, in order to show Trump an image of a hydrogen-powered airplane.

At another point, Trump piped in to praise West’s performance. “I’ve never seen Jim Brown impressed before,” the president mused as he evaluated the reaction of the former Cleveland Browns fullback, who sat quietly next to West throughout the surreal scene.

During his remarks, West said he had met recently with Chicago financier Michael Sacks, a confidant of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, to talk about crime and policing.

West has also been discussing Chicago’s violent crime epidemic with Brown and Brown’s wife, Monique, in recent weeks, according to Bruce Zoldan, CEO of Phantom Fireworks, who works with Brown on the football legend’s philanthropic endeavors.

Zoldan said Brown — who remained mostly silent during West’s Oval Office remarks — hoped the lunch would move the administration closer to finding funding for inner-city revitalization work.

“He’s going in a little bit concerned about it being just a publicity luncheon,” Zoldan said ahead of the meeting.

While it is unclear what policy outcomes might result from Thursday’s meeting, Darrell Scott, a Cleveland pastor close to Trump who is working with the White House on an urban revitalization initiative, said those plans were close to fruition.

Scott said a private-public partnership pushing the initiative was close to acquiring land for development in Cleveland; Bridgeport, Conn.; Louisville, Ky.; and South Carolina. Scott said the initiative would kick off with a tour of American cities sometime after the midterm elections, and that Trump had told him he intended to participate in some part of the tour. A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to questions about the initiative.

Scott also said West had expressed interest in the Urban Revitalization Initiative. Scott showed POLITICO a text message exchange from August in which he sent West a video about the initiative and asked the rapper to help with an aspect of the initiative called Youth Empowerment Centers. Scott said the centers would include music studios where inner-city youth could learn about music production.

“Let’s do this for the entire country,” West wrote to Scott via text. “I’m in full support. We can use my celebrity and voice for positive change. I’m here to listen to your ideas.”

Gabe Tesoriero, who has worked as a publicist for West, did not immediately respond to questions about the text exchange.

At one point in the Oval Office, West, who goes by the nickname Yeezy, said, “I think it would be cool to have Yeezy Ideation Centers, which would be a mix of education and empowers people and gives them modern information.” The idea may or may not be related to Scott’s youth empowerment centers.

Asked by a reporter about what Thursday’s meeting would lead to, Trump was noncommittal.

“From my standpoint, this was set up to be a lunch,” he said. “Two people that I like. And I guess they like me. We’re going to have lunch. We’re going to talk.”

Andrew Restuccia and Lorraine Woellert contributed to this report.

I hope @WWE and @TripleH are paying attention to what’s happening in Saudi Arabia with #JamalKhashoggi. If the reports are true, that he was killed by the Saudi Government then WWE should immediately sever all ties with Saudi Arabia and cancel #CrownJewel.

— Blaine Shores (@bdshores) October 10, 2018

Senator Chris Murphy of CT (home of WWE HQs) says if the Turkish allegation of murder is true, “it should represent a fundamental break in our relationship with Saudi Arabia.” This could end up being troublesome for WWE’s event deal with Saudi Arabia. https://t.co/nkUKoZDqMs

— Wade Keller (@thewadekeller) October 10, 2018

Everyone: “So, I guess all those puff pieces reporters wrote about Mohammad bin Salman were a bad idea considering the whole ‘he had a journalist brutally murdered’ thing, huh?”@TripleH: “Hold my Steveweiser.” https://t.co/we6iZYoCqb

— Nima Shirazi (@WideAsleepNima) October 11, 2018

It’s time for the WWE to show some guts and cancel the show in Saudi Arabia

— Evan Roberts (@EvanRobertsWFAN) October 11, 2018

WWE’s response to the “backlash” of The Greatest Royal Rumble, which is essentially “we respect women and the LGBT community , but since they paid us and we decided to perform here, we are gonna exclude those groups because of this countries culture”

— Wrestling LAD (@WrestlingLAD) April 29, 2018

Unpopular opinion, but it seems like they’re giving women WWE Evolution as compensation for Vince booking 2 PPVs in Saudi Arabia.

— sad bitch energy (@shxrk_dxd) September 28, 2018

.@POTUS says US is investigating disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi and repeated that he does not favor stopping arms sales in retaliation. “We don’t like it, we don’t like it a little bit. What happened is a terrible thing, assuming that happened.”

— Anita Kumar (@anitakumar01) October 11, 2018

“Go run the country,” Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy told President Donald Trump, wrapping up a 47-minute phone interview with the leader of the free world, which ended with Trump wishing a happy birthday to co-host Ainsley Earhardt’s father.

They had, it seemed, run out of new ground to cover.

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After all, it had been only a few hours since Fox News viewers heard from the president, who had also called in for an 11 p.m. interview with Fox News host Shannon Bream Wednesday night.

And Trump didn’t exactly go dark before his late-night caller, or disappear from view after his morning chat. On Thursday night, he spoke to supporters at a “MAGA” rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. After his Fox & Friends interview, he addressed reporters in the Oval Office, noting, among other things, that he has no plans to fire his chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, despite his comments criticizing the decision to hike interest rates.

All of this occurred before his meeting with Kanye West, who told the president in a ten-minute Oval Office soliloquy that Trump “is on his hero’s journey right now” and that “he might not have thought he’d have a crazy mother-fucker like [me]” supporting him.

Earlier in the week, Trump gave an extended interview in the Oval Office to New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi, who described her surreal experience as a “private press conference,” during which the levers of the government seemed to pause as Trump, the vice president and his secretary of state, among others, gathered to convince her that there was nothing wrong with Trump’s relationship with his chief of staff.

Already lost in the shuffle was Trump’s surprise Q&A he staged with his departing U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley on Tuesday, where both took questions from the press to again, assure the public that there was nothing to see here except bonhomie.

Trump has never been one to cede the spotlight, but this week more than ever, the president appears to be virtually unavoidable for comment, spending most of his working hours either speaking in front of, or taking questions from, the press.

The ever-present president is part of a new media strategy, current and former White House officials said, driven by the president’s natural impulses, that the communications department has sought to institute for months. It is part of a move away from the set pieces of the daily briefing, which takes staff hours to prepare for and which Trump has never liked, the formal presidential press conference, and the stiff, sit down interviews on a straight news program like 60 Minutes — all tools that previous presidents have relied on to get their message out to supporters and detractors alike.

Instead, Trump is leaning into his preferred mode of communication: In staccato bursts of availability, he talks about the issues he wants to address, in his own words, for as long as he feels like talking, addressing, for the most part, the sole audience of his base.

It’s also strategy that appears more accessible than it really is: it allows Trump to dictate the terms of the interactions with the press, rather than vice versa.

Current and former aides attribute the strategy to Trump, himself, but also credit communications director Bill Shine with, as one former aide put it, “putting him in better situations and thinking through the production value.” They also credit the the successful confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the renegotiation of a new NAFTA trade deal for Trump’s upbeat mood.

Presidents in the past have been criticized for being overexposed at different moments in their terms. In the spring of 2009, for example, President Barack Obama was seemingly everywhere while trying to sell his economic agenda, hosting a town hall meeting on CNN, before popping up on late night television with Jay Leno, and then talking about out his college basketball picks on ESPN.

But even the former president’s critics said in the end, it worked for him, just as it seems to work for Trump. “President’s never get overexposed,” said Bryan Lanza, a former Trump campaign aide. “The more they’re out there, the more they’re engaging the specific electorate. It’s oxygen to their supporters.”

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders agreed. “The President is always the best messenger,” she said. “It’s a great thing when the American people get to hear directly from him.”

Other White House officials accused the press of wanting it both ways: complaining when there’s not enough access, and accusing the president of overexposure when there seems to be too much.

“You are right the press just wants to complain,” Sanders added in an email. “It’s either not enough or it’s too much. I think the bigger story is that the President is only one person and he has more energy and stamina than all the press combined! They can’t keep up!”

There are differences, however, in Obama’s media tour and Trump’s seeming omnipresence, that contrast how they view the tool of the communications office, and what audience they are trying to target. Trump does not appear to be tying his interviews and media appearances to any policy he is trying to sell — rather, the press and the spotlight appear to be the ends in and of themselves.

“Presidential communications are typically integrated with some discipline into the governing program,” said Robert Bauer, who served as White House counsel in the Obama administration. “Political capital is supposed to be dispensed with some care. The impression you have here is that he has an urgent need to be visible and control the public space. But as a governing matter, that is problematic because rather than the presidential communications serving government purposes, it’s the opposite.”

And while Obama’s media tours were driven by a desire to speak to the entire country by putting the president in front of different audiences, Trump’s is more about blotting out the sun with his base.

“Most of the stuff he’s doing is exposure to one audience and one audience alone and that is his base,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director in the Obama White House, who noted that it doesn’t appear to be backfiring. “I haven’t seen anything to suggest they want to see less of him.”

While many of Trump’s media hits are driven by impulse and muscle memory — in his pre-political life he developed a symbiotic relationship with the New York tabloids —

former aides said it all makes sense right now if the White House is viewing the midterms as a base turnout election that is framed as an up or down vote on Trump, himself.

“In order to do that,” said one former White House official, “he needs to make sure people are thinking about him on Election Day. The best way to do that is more exposure to him in the markets that his base watches.”