This is, without a doubt, the oddest midterm elections year of the many I’ve covered.
President Trump has been acting throughout his term as if he were trying to turn voters against his party — and thus sacrifice Republican control of Congress — even as he’s been taking steps, especially lately with mail ballots, to rig the election for the party’s benefit.
Just one thing is certain: chaos on some level. That’s Trump’s trademark and yet another reason that voters increasingly give for turning on him. Poll after poll shows about 60% of Americans disapprove of his job performance and just 38% or less approve — a historical low for presidents, and an albatross for his party. Trump calls the polls fake news, yet keeps working to cheat the election rebuke they portend for Republicans on the ballots.
Lord knows he’s earned his miserable polls.
Trump has given Americans higher prices instead of the rollbacks he promised, thanks to his tariffs, threats of tariffs and the Middle East war he vowed never to start. He’s made $2.2 billion since taking office, yet repeatedly dismissed Americans’ pain at the pump and the checkout lane, telling reporters he doesn’t think about it, “not even a little bit,” as he prosecutes his war. On Fox News he swatted away Bret Baier’s offer to let him clean up the quote: “That’s a perfect statement; I’d make it again.” And he has. Democrats’ ads also have kept Trump’s heartless quotes alive.
He gets tangled in his own lies: Trump constantly tells Americans that they’re not paying higher prices because of tariffs, yet just in time for Labor Day weekend cookouts, he proposed to reduce hamburger costs 25% by allowing tariff-free beef imports. He didn’t say who’d agreed to cut prices, but he did succeed in exasperating ranchers and rural voters, including in Iowa, Nebraska and other farm states where Republicans already are battling unaccustomed political headwinds because of Trump’s tariffs, erratic exemptions and war-related costs.
While Americans scrimp, the 80-year-old kid who’s often home alone in the White House shows off his big trucks and front-end loaders, tearing at the People’s House and building a billion-dollar ballroom to dwarf it. It’s hard to imagine an obsession — topping a long list of other gilded projects — that better says “out of touch.”
In a post on Monday trumpeting the Supreme Court’s green light to further construction as lawsuits play out (but silent on Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s dissent that the ballroom is “likely unlawful”), Trump proclaimed, “We are living in the Golden Age of America.” (By “we” he must mean the Trump family.) Yet again he falsely insisted taxpayers aren’t footing any costs. Bills in Congress say otherwise.
With widespread opposition to data centers roiling campaigns across the country, especially for Republicans in Texas and Florida, Trump managed to, yes, make things even worse for his party. On Monday he posted that communities that are against data centers — given the behemoths’ record of driving up utility bills while creating few jobs — “want to end up being backward and poor,” and “you will only have yourselves to blame.”
By his senseless, vindictive trade war with Canada, Trump has alienated the most compatible neighbor a nation could want along the world’s longest shared border. Worse, the U.S. border states most acutely feeling the effects of Trump’s bullying of Canada, on trade and tourism, happen to be battlegrounds where Republican Senate candidates are struggling for election, including in Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Alaska.
No matter to Trump: Adding childish insult to injury, he dashes off one of his imperialist executive orders to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America. Just 14% of Americans approve, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll over the weekend.
The other unpopular war, the hot one against Iran now in its seventh month, isn’t going well either. According to a Washington Post scoop on Sunday, Pentagon leaders have warned that Trump’s war can’t be sustained without endangering U.S. security at home and globally. Last week he declared “Mission Accomplished” (as if that were true this time), then this week relaunched strikes in Iran. Oh, and on Monday his Army secretary, Dan Driscoll, hand-delivered a resignation letter to Trump to personally tell him how badly Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is mismanaging the military, especially by his political purges of scores of valued officers.
Republicans seem resigned to their election fate, which is only fair considering their failures to check Trump. They fear their disillusioned voters will stay home, or even vote for Democrats, Rep. Stephanie Bice, an Oklahoma Republican, told a student group, according to audio that the Bulwark website reported on Friday. She added: “We’re not helping ourselves today when we decide to rename Lake Ontario ‘Lake America.’ I mean, yeah, these are not — this does not help the case, right?”
Right. What’s more, to Republicans’ angry dismay, lame-duck Trump is nesting on about $430 million in campaign cash and so far has shared little. And in a month when it’s crunch time in Congress and Republicans are desperate get home to campaign, he’s decided to throw a midterm Republican convention in Dallas next Wednesday and Thursday, with himself — the albatross — as star. Trump will keynote each night at “Trumpapalooza,” claiming achievements that aren’t. Yet he won’t be in New York the next day for the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks; speeches aren’t allowed. He’s instead going to Hegseth’s Pentagon to speak, and speak.
So, yeah, it’s like Trump is trying to make Republicans lose. Except for everything he’s doing to make sure they don’t. Last year he kicked off red states’ unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering, to draw more House districts favoring Republicans. To that end, yet again the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority gave him a hand. And, by executive order, Trump is trying to use the U.S. Postal Service to restrict voting by mail.
On Tuesday, an anonymous Postal Service official released a whistleblower report warning of “potentially catastrophic problems” given the administration’s rushed effort to exert federal control over mail ballots.
Voters can fight back. If possible, vote in person. Those who can’t, mail ballots early. And more than anything: Just vote. Vote in numbers so great that the midterms are too big to rig.
Swamp the party of Trump.
Bluesky: @jackiecalmes Threads: @jkcalmes X: @jackiekcalmes
The post Trump is turning off voters while trying to skew the election for the GOP appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
