Thumbs down for Donald Trump

In the United States, midterm elections are almost always bad for the president’s party, so it was taken for granted that this time round Republican candidates would have a hard time of it. But few imagined that even in Texas, of all places, they would get clobbered by their Democrat rivals. Of course, the big loser was Donald Trump. Though he reacted immediately to the massacre by pointing out that his name was not on the ballot, until that moment he had been doing his energetic best to persuade voters that the legislative elections, like everything else that happens in the universe, were all about him. Large numbers took him at his word.

Even among those who on the whole greatly prefer Trump’s overall approach to his country’s worst problems to that of any Democrat faction, there are many who think he thoroughly deserved the shellacking he received. As well as being put off by his increasingly obnoxious behaviour, they have come to suspect that, in his 80s, he is simply losing it. Some compare him to “sleepy Joe” Biden in the months preceding the elections of 2024 when the then president hoping to get re-elected had to give way to the word-salad expert Kamala Harris.

Hours before voters made their way to the polling booths, Trump spent about 20 minutes droning on in a public speech about the beauties of the reflecting pool he had built beside the Lincoln Memorial. It would have been difficult for him to come up with a better way of telling his compatriots that he was completely out of touch with their concerns and was determined to remain so.

After the votes were counted, pundits of all kinds agreed that the Republicans – that is Trump – lost badly because the government has failed to deliver on the bread-and-butter issues that are summed up in the voguish word “affordability.” Much the same problem had made life difficult for the Democrats two years earlier. It would seem that, throughout the West, most people take it for granted that politicians should be able to improve the living standards of ordinary folk but refuse to do so for sinister reasons. Unfortunately, things are rather more complicated. Economies everywhere are evolving in such a way that, while a fairly large minority is doing very well, those further down the food chain are losing ground, a tendency that seems certain to intensify in the coming months and years after getting turbocharged by Artificial Intelligence.

Trump, and the Republican Party, got to where they are by cleverly taking advantage of the disgruntlement of the millions of people who felt that, in addition to falling behind economically, they were being subjected to a bizarre experiment by cultish “woke” fanatics seeking to indoctrinate them. Though many Democrats still cling to what the supposedly “uneducated” regard as thoroughly outlandish beliefs about sexual matters, race relations and the like, during the campaign they had the good sense to concentrate on more down-to-earth matters such as, inflation – which by Argentine standards is barely noticeable – the cost of petrol and the price of groceries at the local supermarket, with many blaming them on Trump’s decision to go to war with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It would seem that, as far as Trump’s many critics are concerned, he made a gross geopolitical error when he came to the conclusion that preventing the ayatollahs and their friends from getting their hands on an atomic arsenal mattered rather more than keeping the Strait of Hormuz open and the international oil price down. After all, they tell themselves, Iran’s rulers are sensible people who would never dream of testing a nuclear device by firing it at Israel in order to kill not only the hated Zionist Jews but also a huge number of Palestinians.

Ironically enough, while Democrat ownership of both the House of Representatives and the Senate will make it far harder for Trump to pursue his anti-woke policies at home, he will continue to enjoy much leeway abroad. This is why many assume that, now that the midterms are out of the way, he will renew the campaign against Iran and by doing so greatly increase the danger posed by the Islamic regime’s many terrorist proxies who are biding their time in Western countries. And, being the man he is, Trump could go out of his way to cosy up to Vladimir Putin who is also suffering setbacks; if nothing else, the two share a strong dislike for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a leader who has had the bad taste to outshine both of them on the world stage and retains the sympathies of most North Americans.

The Republicans got hammered in the midterms in large measure because they proved unable to defend the interests of the people who a mere two years earlier had given them their support. Could much the same happen to the Democrats? Though if his health holds up Trump should remain in the White House for the next couple of years, he will be able to accuse the Democrats of doing their utmost to stymie all his initiatives, something he could not do when the Republicans had a slim majority in both houses.

Given the Democrats’ evident willingness to make it all but impossible for Trump to do anything useful, they run the risk of discrediting themselves before the presidential race, which is already underway, finally enters its decisive phase. For a decade, the Democrats have been kept united by their opposition to a man who, by constantly needling them, behaving in an erratic way and revelling in his often gross vulgarity, became an obsession whose very existence dominated their every thought, but now that he has turned into a lame duck, they will have to pay more attention to their many internal disputes with the zealots of the “progressive” wing having little in common with traditional middle-of-the-roaders. It would not be at all surprising if, after congratulating themselves on their victory over the MAGA hordes, the very different Democrat factions immediately began fighting one another in a fierce civil war that would allow their Republican foes to regroup and stage a comeback strong enough to ensure that, after Trump, the White House stayed in their hands.