We are now under 100 days until the midterms, and Republican strategists and GOP leaders have all come to the same conclusion for their caucus: keep Donald Trump’s name out of your mouth, and ostensibly keep him off the campaign trail.
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Operatives close to the White House are reportedly telling incumbents and challengers alike — privately, one assumes, so the boss doesn’t find out — to stop echoing his line on the Iran war, stop defending his economic numbers, and build their own case to voters instead.
They’d be fools to attach themselves to him, even in some red districts where inflation has really come home to roost. Trump’s almost “worst ever” approval rating is in the mid-30s and sinking. The war is closing in on half a year old, with no clean end in sight.
Gas prices are up, “affordability” is the word Democrats have successfully claimed as their own, and every additional minute Trump spends talking is, by the party’s own admission, a minute of bad news for candidates trying to get their messages through and survive in November.
It all sounds reasonable and doable, except for the fact that one variable in this equation is petulant and predictable. When you tell Donald Trump no, or that he needs to be managed, nothing in the man’s history suggests he knows how to do that.
What’s actually coming down the pike for Republicans isn’t pretty and will make their plans look like chop suey. Does anyone say that anymore? Well, we can say it literally, because if Trump’s economic chaos continues, the only thing Americans will be able to afford to eat are cheap cans of chop suey.
Trump is heading into the fall with a wish list that has absolutely nothing to do with food prices, reality or what’s on voters’ minds. He’s obsessed with the SAVE Act, which is a loser in the Senate.
He is still gunning for funding for his anti-weaponization fund, eager to provide updates about his gilded ballroom, and determined to sell the Iran war as successful when everyone, except he and Hegseth, knows it’s a catastrophic failure.
Standing between Trump and all of it is a small but real bloc of his own party. Jilted Sens. John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy have shown they’re willing to buck him now that the chains are off after Trump sank their re-election hopes.
Sen. Thom Tillis has already called parts of Trump’s agenda “theater” and made clear he isn’t interested in absorbing the blowback from ramming through election-law changes months before voters go to the polls.
In the House, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie is making it his life’s mission to buck his party when it counts and say no. Individually, none of them can stop Trump, but together they can make his life miserable by blocking the SAVE Act, trying to rid the bill, once and for all, of the anti-weaponization funding, and denying him the permission and funds to keep the Iran war going.
And that is exactly the problem, because a boxed-in Trump doesn’t respond well to being told “no.” Instead, he has a long history of reacting by getting louder, angrier, and, in his current demented state, more demented.
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In 1990, he opened the Trump Taj Mahal on a mountain of junk-bond debt after financial advisers warned him the numbers didn’t work for the economy at the time. When an analyst went public predicting the casino would fail, Trump’s answer was to fire the analyst. The Taj Mahal missed its debt payments within months and was in bankruptcy court within the year.
And who could forget Trump’s insistence on promoting his favorite drug, hydroxychloroquine, from the White House podium? After federal scientists told him, repeatedly and on the record, that there was no evidence it did anything for COVID-19, he took it upon himself to play doctor and tout the drug’s nonexistent benefits.
He kept pressuring regulators to protect its emergency authorization right up until the clinical trials came back and the FDA had to reverse course in public.
And more recently, when military and intelligence officials warned that an open-ended bombing campaign in Iran risked a war with no exit, he launched it anyway, relying on his “gut instincts” and, most assuredly, his spoiled brat persona to try to prove he knew more than military generals.
Being told “no” has never once made Trump smaller. It has always made him bigger, louder, and more determined to prove the people telling him no were wrong. And what’s wild about the whole thing is that Trump has always been wrong, even though he thinks he’s always been right, which is yet another reason why he will ignore the word “no.”
Each of the examples above shows that Trump takes the word “no” as a personal insult, and hearing “no” from his own party, which he built and claims to have rescued, is going to be too much for him to handle.
He is going to hit back publicly, make it all about him, loyalty to him, and betrayal of him, and remind everyone watching that he is the one being wronged.
While the GOP insists on message discipline on the campaign trail, off the trail it will be Trump trying to derail it all. He will try to drag the entire midterm conversation back onto his issues, his war, his ballroom, and his enemies list, precisely the topics his own party is begging him to avoid, and at the exact moment voters are trying to decide whether they can afford their groceries, gas and chop suey.
Watch how he will repeat ad nauseam that “affordability” is a Democratic hoax, because Trump can’t be wrong, even when it could sink his own party’s control of Congress and put his whole agenda, and behavior, at risk.
Democrats should hope that Trump keeps being exactly who he has always been: an undisciplined and pertinacious Trump who can’t let a single “no” go unanswered.
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