Right After Halloween Trump Will Come Back To Haunt Republican Candidates Everywhere

Republican strategists are counting on this to defeat Democrats

Yesterday, a group of Jess King allies in Pennsylvania, People’s Action, sent out an e-mail reminding their supporters that "We live in a populist moment. More and more Americans understand that the economy has been rigged against them. They know that our politics has been corrupted by big money. Rural and small town America have taken some of the hardest hits. Jobs lost, plants closed, water fouled, family farms crushed, the relentless spread of the afflictions of despair-- divorce, suicide, depression, addiction. Trump and the Republicans consolidated their hold on these regions with race-bait politics. They blame 'those people'-- blacks, Latinx, immigrants, 'limousine liberals'-- for what has been lost."

And now Trump and a GOP with its head planted firmly up his ass will pay the piper. And Trump doesn't have a clue he's leading his party towards the gates of hell. As the NY Times put it on Saturday, Trumpanzee "is privately rejecting the growing consensus among Republican leaders that they may lose the House and possibly the Senate in November, leaving party officials and the president’s advisers nervous that he does not grasp the gravity of the threat they face in the midterm elections. Congressional and party leaders and even some Trump aides are concerned that the president’s boundless self-assurance about politics will cause him to ignore or undermine their midterm strategy. In battleground states like Arizona, Florida and Nevada, Mr. Trump’s proclivity to be a loose cannon could endanger the Republican incumbents and challengers who are already facing ferocious Democratic headwinds. Republicans in Washington and Trump aides have largely given up assuming the president will ever stick to a teleprompter, but they have joined together to impress upon him just how bruising this November could be for Republicans-- and how high the stakes are for Mr. Trump personally, given that a Democratic-controlled Congress could pursue aggressive investigations and even impeachment."

And it isn't just in the richer, whiter, better educated suburban seats that Hillary managed to do well in and was the theory behind DCCC 2018 strategy where Democrats look like winners this cycle. Democrats are even competitive in rural districts now. Thanks to Trump, Democratic candidates came very close in rural districts in South Carolina, Kansas and Arizona and actually won in Pennsylvania-- districts the DCCC wasn't even looking at (as they wasted tens of millions off dollars in an Atlanta suburban district on a Hillary-like status quo candidate).

Last week, in an interview he did with The Economist Rubio admitted that the Republican tax scam isn’t helping American workers like his party promised it would. "There is still a lot of thinking on the right that if big corporations are happy, they’re going to take the money they’re saving and reinvest it in American workers. In fact they bought back shares, a few gave out bonuses; there’s no evidence whatsoever that the money’s been massively poured back into the American worker." You think Trumpanzee would ever/could ever admit that?

That Trump refuses to accept reality will help Democratic candidates far, far more than the bungling DCCC ever will. The 2018 midterms will be a referendum on Trump-- and everyone knows it. Trump seems to think that the only voters will be the racists and gullible morons who were cheering for him at his campaign rally at Total Sports Park in Washington, an all-white suburb north of Detroit, Saturday. His prediction about bringing people "crystal clean water" was as likely as his prediction that "We're going to win the House."

New York Magazine's Benjamin Hart had his finger right on the heart of the GOP's problem: Trump’s Reality Distortion Field. "One of President Trump’s most bedrock character traits," he wrote, "is his refusal to truly reckon with any piece of information that reflects poorly on him. This self-aggrandizing, reality-denying flavor of egotism has defined Trump for decades, through his roller-coaster business career and into political life. In recent months, it has sometimes veered into the straight-up delusional, as when he reportedly claimed last year that it wasn’t actually his voice on the Access Hollywood tape." And now it's catching up with him Señor Trumpanzee's "unwavering confidence may finally be about to take a serious electoral toll." What makes it worse is that his pollster, Brad Parscale, "is feeding him inaccurate, Trump-friendly poll numbers."

In election after election over the last year and a half, Democrats have vastly overperformed their expected vote share, largely thanks to animus toward the president. They have triumphed in a Pennsylvania Congressional district where Trump won by more than 20 points, picked up a Senate seat in ruby-red Alabama, dominated state races in Virginia, and made close several contests that almost certainly would have been Republican landslides in previous years.

...Why does this matter? Most presidents, even if they claim not to be obsessed with polls the way Trump is, have a pretty good idea of their own political currency, and adjust their alignment with their parties accordingly. Sometimes, presidents realize that they are not welcome by members of their own party in certain areas; for example, a then-struggling Barack Obama avoided red states in 2014, and George W. Bush was not always welcomed with open arms on the stump, even in Republican-friendly districts, circa 2006.

Something different is going on this time around. President Trump remains enormously popular within the Republican Party; most Republican members of Congress have made the calculation that even if Trump is underwater in their state, defying the president would be a political loser, since it leave them without any reliable constituency.

The problem is not only that Trump refuses to believe that Republicans will lose, but that, even if he were sufficiently worried, he doesn’t care enough about his own party to bother helping. He is connected enough to the GOP that he sees it as an extension of his own electoral prowess, but not so connected that he will muster the focus and energy needed to boost candidates who aren’t him. (Granted, this may be impossible for him on a cellular level.)

Establishment Republicans reportedly want Trump to flog the GOP’s unpopular tax law on the campaign trail. The president is pushing back on this directive-- which he is right to do, since the unpopular law probably isn’t galvanizing anyone to vote.

But the president’s own, predictably unpredictable routine is unlikely to work much better. He might attack vulnerable Republican Senators he disagrees with; he might serve more as a distraction than a cheerleader, the way he did when he suddenly started complaining about Colin Kaepernick at a campaign rally for Luther Strange in Alabama; he might just ramble about himself. In other words, he’ll put on the Trump show, which is the only thing he knows how to do.

This routine won’t turn off voters who already love the president. But it’s more likely to spark another Trump news cycle than rally much-needed enthusiasm for Republican candidates.

...Republicans seem to have grasped the lesson that Trump needs to be personally invested in their election results. They are trying to make the stakes of the election startlingly personal, reportedly telling Trump that if he doesn’t help them out this fall, they may not have his back if and when Democrats initiate impeachment proceedings next year. That stark warning may perk Trump’s ears up, but it’s just as likely to be perceived as an unacceptable intramural threat, not as motivation to work for the party.

However Trump performs on the campaign trail, and however Republicans fare this fall, the president will continue living in a bubble of his own making. Because Trump was right to dismiss the concerns of the many, many people who insisted he couldn’t win in 2016, he can now perennially point to that shocking election result as proof that his instincts, not some politico egghead’s, are always correct. And if Republicans lose big this year, he’ll just say they didn’t stick by him closely enough.

This is a recipe for gigantic-- perhaps unprecedented (at least in our lifetimes)-- GOP disaster, one that will fail to take advantage of the serial DCCC incompetence that has worked for them over and over for longer than a decade. The DCCC isn't doing anything different than what has lost them dozens and dozens of seats in Congress-- but now the GOP is burdened with Trump, hanging like an insistent, flapping, snapping albatross around their collective necks.