At a rally, he spoke highly of the backside of John Husted, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Ohio. He has posted one video after another of big cats attacking real people before sharing one — created with artificial intelligence — in which he is seen fending off a fearsome lion, dressed in a suit and with his bare hands. And he has repeated tired memes disrespecting Greenland, as well as an endless stream of clips and videos flattering himself.
In many countries, any one of those isolated incidents would cause a sensational scandal — and possibly the end of a political career. In the United States, it is just another day (and night) in Donald Trump’s mind.
With 20 days to go before the midterm elections, the leader of the party that stands to lose everything at the polls insists on ignoring what those polls advise him to do: tone down his enthusiasm and step aside to prevent his unpopularity — which has been negative for over a year and has been setting one record low after another — from affecting those who are running for office with their sights set on the Senate or the House of Representatives.
Far from following that logic in such adverse circumstances, Trump has spent recent days on an unrestrained campaign tour across the country — a headlong dash driven by his obsessions. This week alone it has taken, or will take him, to Ohio, Alaska, Arizona and Montana. In all those places he puts on an extravagantly eye-popping show and tells his faithful supporters something often assumed at events like these but that other presidents in his position would avoid saying at all costs: “Pretend my name is on the ballot.”
That request could be another sign of confidence in himself and in the idea that voters do not blame him for the economic problems they face: rising inflation and high gasoline and diesel prices caused by the war into which Trump led the United States in Iran. It began with White House promises that it would last “a few days or a few weeks,” but it is now heading into its eighth month.
As for the choice of stops on his tour — a farewell-tinged run by an old star — Trump promised he would visit 32 states and districts where things looked bad for the Republicans. In practice the president is alternating visits to competitive areas with stops where he can repeat one of his favorite lines: “Thank you, [state name], I won here easily the three times I ran.”
The strategy also seems to hide a calculation. At this point the Republican Party cannot afford for its core MAGA base (about 30% of the electorate) to stay home on November 3. That is why its leader goes where they are, even when those seats are not crucial. Moreover, his outbursts are greeted with enthusiasm at those events, where attendees have at times physically removed people who protested against Trump, as happened at several rallies in recent days.
To explain the reckless faith in his pull at the polls, it is worth remembering that the politician who said last Saturday at a campaign event in Tennessee how surprised he was that, no matter how much he says “the stupidest things,” his loyalists “will still clap” is the same man who 11 years ago burst onto the scene confident that people would keep voting for him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York.
For his supporters, Husted’s backside, the lions, the memes and the boastful, uncritical attitude of his followers are simply manifestations of an unprecedentedly iconoclastic personality in world politics. For his critics, they demonstrate the cognitive decline of an 80-year-old man with little to lose and much to ramble about (last Friday he spent 10 minutes attacking Norway and the Nobel Peace Prize committee for not giving him the award). Whether he cedes control of one or both chambers in November or not, Trump has shown his confidence in executive power to govern without Congress, and the Constitution — unless he ignores it — prevents him from running again in 2028.
Trumpism after Trump
That disregard for midterm conventions may hide Trump’s limited concern about what will become of the Republican Party when he is no longer around. It is as if he were staging a personal tribute to Louis XV (and his court) of “After me, the deluge.”
Or perhaps the polls are wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time in a country where political information has been held hostage by polling obsession for at least a decade, as Nate Silver — one of the main beneficiaries of that paradigm shift — recalled earlier this month.
This has been another week of terrible polls for the Republican Party. Democrats lead by eight points, according to an aggregate of surveys using the metric known as the “generic ballot,” which gives the best snapshot in such a heterogeneous election as the one on November 3.
Hundreds of races are at stake that day: all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 Senate seats are up for grabs, as are 36 governorships and many other offices. To measure voter intention, pollsters ask which party respondents lean toward in the abstract.
Those polls also foresee possible Democratic victories — encouraged by Trump’s obsessions and erratic behavior — in North Carolina, Iowa, Texas, Kansas, or Ohio, places that until months ago were straightforwardly and deeply Republican.
The inflation figure released Wednesday (which rose more than expected in September, to 3.7%) is another setback for the party on the road to November 3. Along the way, an increasing number of conservative candidates have quietly asked to disembark from Trump’s bus, while he — and it does not take a soothsayer to predict this — will continue insisting that the United States is in a “golden age,” that everything is better than the economic indicators show, and that his predecessor, the Democrat Joe Biden, is to blame.
Against that backdrop, and even though his influence remains undeniable, Republican strategists are beginning to position themselves to imagine a party future without its leader of the last decade — something like Trumpism after Trump. It does not look like an easy hangover to overcome.
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