Trump Keeps Reminding Us He’s a Lame Duck
Power fades long before the presidency ends. The question is whether Democrats are ready to capitalize.
The President’s bad birthday week reminds us that he’s losing traction with his own party and Democrats across the country in the midterms should not take their foot off the gas when making the case against Republicans running for anything from dog catcher to Governor.
The Iran deal is a loser. As I reminded everyone on CNN last week, Iran came out on top and Donald Trump lost the war he started for no good reason in Iran. We are creating a $300 billion reconstruction fund to repair the damage that President Trump created without provocation when we could use that money to rebuild communities here in the U.S.
It doesn’t end Iran’s nuclear program permanently. There were no restrictions on the development of the kinds of ballistic missiles that pose the most significant threat to the region (and to us). It’s not clear what kind inspections they got Iran to agree to, so the ability to do inspections anytime and anywhere (what we want and need) isn’t happening. So, they can keep building nuclear weapons, and we can’t really check to see what they have. And, the Strait of Hormoz is open but not permanently in the way it was before Trump started this war no one (other than Netanyahu) asked for. It’s so bad that you have Republicans in Washington voting to end the war while the peace deal is still pending.
Gas keeps going up, and he doesn’t care. It’s summer and we’re all driving to vacation and taking our kids to summer camp and gas prices aren’t going down anytime soon. While we saw a temporary dip when the Iran deal was announced, we’re still in for months of higher gas prices which will stretch into the elections in November. After telling reporters he didn’t care about the impact of his Iran policy on Americans at the pump, he later said he “love[d] the inflation” which is wild.
Congressional Republicans keep voting against him and Senate Republicans are sick of him. Republicans in Washinton were key in killing his ballroom, stopping his January 6th Reparations Fund, ending the Trump War in Iran, and they’re stopping his nominations. This is a far cry from the same Trump that pushed through the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and threatened Republicans who challenged him. Now, they are openly challenging him in ways that even I didn’t see coming a year ago.
His endorsed candidates keep losing or put Democrats in a better position to win in November. He may hand Texas to Democrats after endorsing corrupt philanderer Ken Paxton, he decided to endorse both South Carolina gubernatorial candidates in the Republican runoff after it was clear that his preferred candidate was going to lose (she lost handily to South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson), his Senate candidate in Georgia will likely be dog walked by Jon Ossoff and his gubernatorial candidate in Georgia (Burt Jones) lost. So, not only is he losing Republicans in Washington, he’s losing the ones on the ground, too.
The message to Democrats is clear: run against Trump, make your opponents distance themselves from him, and depress their turnout. As much as I hope – and believe – we’ll see record Democratic turnout in a lot of place this Fall, I am as invested in depressing their turnout as a I am in juicing ours. Winning is always a two-part formula: you bring your people out and their people choose the couch. I think we’ll be okay (though, election interference scares more – more later on that). But, sliding approval ratings and ads that show how his own people – farmers, White “working class voters”, rural and suburban voters – suffering because of him isn’t about swinging them to us; it’s about keeping them home in November.