Does Donald J. Trump still have the juice?
This was one of many open questions in the air Friday night inside the convention center in Myrtle Beach, S.C., where the president showed up and pleaded with hundreds of Republicans not to forsake him in the coming midterm elections.
“You’re going to lose everything,” he warned.
At another point, he fretted: “I’m going to be impeached. They’re going to impeach me.”
This rhetoric was quite different from the cavalier comments he’s been making back in Washington about his political future that have congressional Republicans so freaked out about their own. Comments such as: “I don’t care about the midterms” and “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” and “I love the inflation.”
The immediate reason he was in South Carolina was to boost his anointed Senate candidate, Darline Graham, sister of Lindsey, whose race for the Republican nomination has gone wobbly more than a month after her brother’s death. She’s clinging tight to Mr. Trump’s Brioni coattails, but is that enough to win these days?
Reading from a teleprompter, Mr. Trump recited some nice lines written about Ms. Graham, said a few nice things about her brother, and talked a bit about the political landscape in the state. He brought her up on a stage for a moment. And he reminded the crowd that she won the endorsement of Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican who was in the convention center.
But mostly Mr. Trump talked about himself and how swimmingly his second term is going. He opened by talking about the ballroom he is building, said the war with Iran is a smashing success, and insisted his economy is as good as it’s ever been.
Still, he worried aloud that his base would not turn out in November to help protect his Republican majorities in Congress.
“They say, ‘Trump does great when he’s on the ballot, but when he’s not on the ballot, his people don’t come,’” he said. “So what I really want you to do is pretend, PLEASE, that I’m on the ballot. Just come and vote.”
“You have to go out and vote in the midterms.”
At one point, he mentioned that Karoline Leavitt, his outgoing press secretary, was there. The crowd went bananas. He told her to come on up.
“He needs your help with a Republican Congress for the next two years,” she said. “So get out and vote.”
Who knows how the Republican Party will fare come November? Mr. Trump has defied pollsters and conventional wisdom so many times in the 11 years since he rode down that golden escalator that nobody can really predict how he might do. And, as he reminded everyone Friday, he is the party.
“The Republican Party is MAGA,” he said.
But serious cracks in the MAGA firmament are showing these days. The war with Iran has gone on much longer than Mr. Trump said it would. There’s seemingly no end in sight. It’s keeping gas prices high and his poll numbers low. An increasing number of high-level defectors with big social media followings have fallen away. A number of his primary endorsements have gone belly-up. Should Ms. Graham fail to make it over the line, it will be seen as just the latest indicator of Mr. Trump’s mojo slippage.
The hundreds of people who waited in line on a Friday night in August to hear him speak were about the most Trump-loving crowd imaginable. People wore T-shirts with pictures of his bloodied face, and vintage MAGA merch from his early campaigns.
And yet, even among this crowd, there was discontent stirring.
“He needs to do a better job on the economy this time,” said Scott Gantzer, a three-time Trump-voting Myrtle Beach man who works for Walmart. “The first time he did really good on the economy. I was expecting the same. But I haven’t seen the same yet.”
It wasn’t just the gas prices that are up, he said. “All prices. My 401(k) has gone down, instead of going up, and I’m closer to retirement now.”
As for the war in Iran?
“I think it was a necessity,” he said.
There was much support for the war among the crowd, though most people grimaced while discussing it. Nobody seemed to feel that it is going as well as the president says it is.
“I think it’s very important that we don’t have a nuclear weapon, but I think he should have just said from the beginning that it might take a little longer than he thought,” said Leslie Simek, a 57-year-old nurse on vacation from New York.
“Him saying that they’d be in and out in a week was kind of silly, because, you know, the press will hold him to it, and now he looks like a J-A,” she said, meaning jackass.
But she wasn’t opposed to the war itself.
“I would pay $10 for a gallon of gas to know that there won’t be a nuclear weapon,” she added. “I’d just work extra shifts. The problem with society is nobody wants to work anymore.” Mr. Trump’s second term was, overall, “a little rusty,” she said.
Up by the front row, a 65-year-old retired schoolteacher from North Myrtle Beach named Barbara McDonald watched as a friendly old biker gang took group pictures beneath a massive sign that declared “South Carolina is Graham Country.”
Asked about the war with Iran, Ms. McDonald replied, “Do you really want me to say what I really think?”
Yes, she was told.
“I think that we should have stopped the war and bombed them completely, because I think that they’re terrorists and they’ll never go away,” she said. (Graham country, indeed).
She reasoned that Mr. Trump must have “more information than I do, and there’s other allies that we’re still trying to appease, to make it be more peaceful and hope for a better ending, and he doesn’t want to kill people.”
Gas prices hurt, she said, “but I’m willing to pay the price.”
“It’s hurting us, but it takes a president that’s going to have the guts to do that, even though it’s hurting him and his political party, because it’s the right thing to do,” said David Lachance, a 59-year-old retired cop from Myrtle Beach. “I think Trump wanted it over quick, but he’s going to do it the right way. And that’s what’s taking so long. People just got to hang in there, that’s all.”
Mr. Trump kept these people entertained on Friday. He said his wife doesn’t exactly love it when he dances to “the gay national anthem” that he’s chosen as his theme song, and they laughed. He pointed the finger at the news media in the room, and they hissed. He reminded people of the time Hillary Clinton said some of his supporters were deplorable, and they booed.
“Would anybody like to hear ‘The Snake’?” he asked. “Look, it’s a Friday night, we have plenty of time, right? What the hell do I have to do, go back, bomb Iran a little bit more?” He recited the anti-immigration poem he’s been telling for years with extra theatrical flair.
“I haven’t done that in a long time,” he said.
There will probably never come a day that Mr. Trump cannot make a convention center full of Republicans laugh, clap, dance or boo on command.
Can he still get them to vote?
“Good luck, Darline,” he said on the way out, and the Village People started blaring.
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