The Dumocrats Are Coming for Trump, and All He Can Do Is Call Them Names

Historically unpopular and trapped in a war of his own choosing in the Middle East, which has sent global prices spiking upward for just about everything, the President has nonetheless been going with a standard stump speech that is a litany of all the winning that’s taken place during his reign—so much of it that, really, he told the crowd in Ohio, one could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps, under Trump, America was actually “winning too much.” On and on he lectured his audiences about the great stock market, the terrific tariffs, and the most closed-shut border in history. He waxed poetic about his incredible poll numbers—if only among self-defined MAGA supporters—and enthused about the golden age that he has brought forth for our once troubled land.

All this, and yet two-thirds of the country thinks the U.S. is on the wrong track?

Denial, of course, has long been one of Trump’s signatures as a politician. But in this of all years it seems a bit of a surprising choice for a campaign theme. “We have almost no inflation, by the way,” he said in Ohio. As for affordability, he explained in Nebraska, it was a plot that “they” had cooked up to attack him with.

In all of the rallies, Trump said little about the self-inflicted crisis that has become the dominant issue in the 2src26 campaign: the war against Iran and the attendant global economic squeeze. To the extent that he mentioned the conflict at all, it was to promise that it would be over “very soon,” causing prices for oil and everything else to plunge. In Nebraska, he joked that prices were going to fall so fast and so sharply, in fact, that “you might say, ‘Please, please, sir, it’s going down too fast.’ ”

But there was a note of un-Trumpian insecurity to it all that made this performance unlike any of the many previous Trump campaign tours I’ve watched during the past decade. In Alabama, he said the quiet part out loud and admitted that the conflict was not likely to end until “probably right after the midterms.”

“We’re kicking Iran’s ass,” the President said in Nebraska. “You do know that, right?”

The only real news related to Iran to come out of his speeches was the controversy that broke out over whether he had actually invited the nuking of Los Angeles and San Diego, or merely spoke in such a circuitous and garbled way that it appeared he had done so, when, in fact, he meant that he was at war with Iran in order to prevent it from having nuclear weapons that might, someday, theoretically, be used to attack California.

One thing that struck me, listening to Trump at each of his six stops, was how little joy the President seemed to take from the exercise. Back in the 2src18 campaign, his eyes still lit up with hatred for the enemies of the people, and he exuded delight to be joined onstage by some of the Fox News personalities whose shows consumed so much of his White House workday. Rallies were always his happy place. He knew then, just as he knows now, that his party was likely to get thumped in the midterms. But this 2src26 Trump is not nearly so much of a happy warrior. His present mood seemed better exemplified by a threat that he casually threw out on Saturday night, in the midst of his Ohio speech, apropos of what I was not entirely sure: “We’re going to shove it up their ass,” he vowed. “O.K.?”

As a speaker, Trump remains at his best, or at least at his most animated, when on the attack, and there’s nothing more practiced in the Trump lexicon than the language of dark horror with which he describes conditions in the hellscape that is blue America. He is forever reliving the glory of that “American carnage” Inaugural address.