A lot of us were concerned that the incoming Democratic Congress would revert to their standard, normal-times outlook and agenda. They would chase after items on the welfare-state wish list and avoid confronting the big constitutional issues raised by the last two years of Donald Trump’s power grab. Instead of making it their first priority to rein in executive power and reassert the power of Congress, they would offer to work with Trump for a goal like “universal health care” (what we used to call “socialized medicine”).
And lo and behold, here is a guy like Abdul El-Sayed, incoming senator from Michigan, doing precisely that, making Trump an offer that he can named the system after himself, fulfilling his desire for presidential aggrandizement, so long as he gets on board with a massive expansion of the welfare state. I am sure there are other Democrats in Congress—though by no means all—who would be willing to make that deal.
But Trump’s decisions in the last week show that he is not going to give them a choice.
Too Big to Rig
After initial conciliatory signs, including accepting the result of the midterms on the night of the election, Trump is back to trying to cast doubt on it.
By the way, I had a whole list of links prepped for you on Trump’s various attempts to interfere with the election and lay the groundwork to pull another January 6. I think he would have liked to. But as Nicholas Grossman argued, Trump didn’t have enough goons to pull off voter suppression, and the vote result was so overwhelming that it was “too big to rig,” as one Trump advisor put it. It took a solid five days for the usual right-wing hacks online to come up with some implausible rationalizations about supposed mathematical irregularities in the vote. It’s too little too late.
Still, Walter Olson reminds us that even if Trump failed to interfere with or overturn the midterm election, he did try to do it.
The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal is already suggesting that there was no need for “all the hyperventilating about what Mr. Trump might do” to meddle with the midterms—after all, they went forward without incident. The “wildly speculative nightmares about mass election theft,” it avers, were “another partisan panic attack, promoted to gin up interest and enthusiasm”—that is, were promoted insincerely.
The editorial’s chosen narrative requires a great forgetfulness about the actual record. It is clear that for the past 18 months, Trump has indeed been intent on messing with the midterms.
He gives an overview of some of Trump’s efforts and how they were blocked by the courts and by local election officials. In effect, this is kind of like the Y2K Problem. It’s not that the problem never existed, but enough people rallied to fix it before it could become a catastrophe.
For the actual story of this election, the New York Times has a great rundown on how Trump himself sank his party’s chances through systematic mismanagement that amounted to sabotage. He personally intervened to foist weak senate candidates on his party in places like Texas and the Carolinas; he delayed decisions on where and how to spend a giant fund of campaign money; and above all, he insisted on putting himself front and center, as always, and didn’t allow Republicans to distance themselves from him even as his approval ratings dropped.
Trump’s policies were the main factor driving voters away from Republicans: the impact of tariffs, the cruelty of our new immigration police state, especially in places like Minneapolis, his failed war with Iran. But I am increasingly of the opinion that it was no one thing that did Trump in, it was all things taken together. Look at Joe Biden’s approval numbers from his term in office, for example, and you can see one big drop that corresponds with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August of 2021, and Biden’s approval bounces around a little after that, but he never really recovers. With Donald Trump’s second term, by contrast, it’s just one long steady decline, for a guy who was already below 50% by his fourth day back in office.
There is no one visible trigger, just a steady drumbeat of failure as the public slowly remembers what Donald Trump is like when he’s not just a guy on TV but is actually in office and wielding power.
Someone Who Will Crack Skulls
The issue is how Trump will respond to the inexorable decline of his approval and the election of a hostile Congress. Will he face up to the crisis and change course, making some wily shifts in policy and mesaging, like Bill Clinton did in 1995? Well, I think we all knew how likely that was.
