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Donald Trump, ever the empath, has been showing a great deal of concern towards his Republican colleagues in Congress of late — specifically when it comes to how they perform in November’s midterm elections. So concerned does the president appear to be, in fact, that at the end of the GOP’s two-day midterm convention on Thursday, he asked the crowd to take a solemn pledge to vote for his beloved party.
“Please raise your right hand,” Trump urged the audience gathered in Dallas, Texas, who dutifully complied. “I pledge”, he began, “to the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe” — the crowd repeated each of these snippets in unison as if they were at some kind of religious ceremony (maybe they were). “That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it anyway, I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell, like they do . . . ” — by this point the pledge seemed to have veered off course a little. “And we are going to vote on November third.”
It was by no means the only such plea Trump made to Republican voters at the event dubbed “Trump-a-palooza”. In fact, he seemed to talk of little else (other than his own brilliance). “You know what happens if you don’t vote?” he asked earlier on Thursday. “You go to hell, you know that, and I don’t want that to happen to you so please go and vote.” The previous day, he had gone so far as to promise that if the Republicans managed to keep hold of their majority in the House and the Senate, every American would be given a “Trump dividend” of $5,000.
Many people are calling it desperation. Trump’s approval ratings have hit fresh record lows, and neither the polls nor the betting markets are looking good for the Republicans’ chances of holding on to their House majority. The president is aware that if the GOP does lose its majority, his ability to push through new legislation will be severely compromised, with the Democrats empowered to challenge, block and investigate his administration.
Others are calling Trump’s cognitive state into question, and suggesting that the 25th Amendment, which makes it possible for a president to be removed if considered unfit for office, should be invoked — particularly in the context of a social media posting spree of some quite wacky and offensive AI-generated content a few days earlier. It is not the first time such arguments have been heard: claims that Trump is “not of sound mind” have been made by his critics for the past decade. I guess it depends what you mean by being “of sound mind”, but I tend to think of such ideas as slightly wishful thinking.
No, what Trump was doing struck me as much more calculated. He was using the convention to tell the world that he is the only person who matters in the Republican Party and who will matter in the coming years. Sometimes his pleas to the crowd sounded deliberately neggy. “You gotta do me the biggest favour you’ve ever done me,” he told them. “You’ve gotta do this for me. You’ve gotta pretend I’m on the ticket.” He repeated this idea many times over the two days,
And it’s clever when you think about it. Even if the Republicans do lose the House, he gets to make it all about him. You can almost hear him now: “Even when I begged them to vote for them, even when I told them I’d give them $5,000 to keep the majority, they just don’t wanna vote without me on the ballot.”
And this would chime with Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s reporting in their book about Trump’s second term, Regime Change, that advisers noticed he “didn’t care much” what happened to the GOP when he was not on the ballot. “In fact, he seemed to take some satisfaction in the unspeakable: Republicans losing when he wasn’t running,” they write. “When Republicans performed badly in the off-year elections, Trump would say he was ‘honoured’ that people were saying they couldn’t win without him on the ballot.”
Indeed Trump seemed, as so often, to say the quiet part out loud during an interview with Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham directly after the convention. When asked if he was going to campaign for the midterms harder than he had ever before, he simply replied: “No.” Why? Because “I’m campaigning for other people.”
Trump doesn’t care very much about the future of his party. Just like his golden ballroom, just like his proposed “Arc de Trump”, just like his renaming of the Kennedy Center, the great spectacle of sycophancy that was the Trump-a-palooza was all, ultimately, about his own vanity.
