This is a touch meta. But indulge me because I think it could have real world effects. When real world players start acting on new perceptions, beliefs, prognostications, those beliefs become meaningful and consequential even if they’re absurd or unsupported in themselves. Because they are driving actions.
What’s going on? In short, over the last couple of weeks Republicans and Donald Trump have decided they’re losing this election. It’s not clear to me that anything has actually changed — except to the extent that for the party on the ropes “nothing changing” becomes a bigger problem the closer you get to Election Day. What’s focused people’s attention is Donald Trump yesterday reposting a fan’s tweet (on Truth Social) basically arguing that Republicans are heading toward an electoral tsunami and don’t seem to realize it. He’s also reportedly gearing up to have all the GOP’s election ads focus on him — which has Democrats basically ecstatic.
You’ll notice the key detail that tells us where we’re going: Republicans. Donald Trump has decided they’re losing the election and he knows whose fault it is: Republicans. There are many layers of comedy and poetic justice at work here. Trump appears to be rewinding about ten years, certainly way before 2021, to a point where there was a Republican Party as anything other than a manifestation of the will of Donald Trump. There’s no need to even argue this point. The Republican Party is Donald Trump now. Everything it does is what he demanded and ordered. The identity between the two things is total. He calls the shots.
The GOP joins that long list of people and things, most recently Benjamin Netanyahu, who thought that unlike all the others, they were the ones Trump really loved deep down in his heart.
In any case, this clicked with another thing I’ve been wondering about. A few days ago TPM Reader PT wrote me an email the upshot of which was this: ‘You and everyone else keeps saying that Trump is worried about the midterms and the prospect of hearings and all the rest — but is he? Are you sure? Because he’s not really acting like that at all.’
This was, as I told PT, a really good question and one I’ve actually been struggling to get my head around for a while. I actually think it’s eating him up. He seems to be worrying about it a lot — though you can certainly argue that he’ll just stonewall Capitol Hill for two years, so who cares? But he’s not acting like it at all. His election subversion plans have been going nowhere and that mostly still applies even after his incremental win on his mail in ballot executive order earlier this week. And on the conventional politics front, he’s not doing any of the things you’d expect a president in his position to do. He really has no good options on Iran. But he’s not ramping back any of the unpopular policies where he has room to maneuver. He’s very conspicuously broadcasting the message that his real focus is things like his ballroom, the reflecting pool and a bunch other vanity projects and grievances. Those are things many people may not care that much about in themselves but they send a clear message that the things people actually care about are nowhere on his list of concerns. The Canada trade war pulls the whole litany together and tops it with a bow. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to just punt this to the winter or the spring. And yet he didn’t.
So does he actually care? My best stab at this, and what I told PT, is that I think it’s both. And we’re thinking about it too linearly. Yes, he’s really worried, upset, mad. But at the second term’s mix of intense cocooning, several additional years of age and the absence of anyone around him but the most abject yes-men has simply made it impossible for him to do anything but stay in the mode of self-assertion, grandiosity and impulse — some mix of the Mad King and “Anthony” the little boy in the classic Twilight Zone episode who mind-zaps people to the cornfield. As much as you may hate Trump, the 2016 version of him was cannier. He was more dextrous. He can pivot in unpredictable and often advantageous ways. Even the 2024 Trump was meaningfully different from this one. Maybe that’s because he was, in meaningful ways, fighting for his life, or at least his freedom. He was also fighting for the ability to wreak vengeance on his foes.
Whatever it is, I don’t think he’s capable anymore of getting out of the mode he’s been in since January 2025. So yes, he really is worried about the midterms. But he’s unable to do the things that could at least lessen the velocity of impact. Sure, maybe he’ll lose terribly but the fix is in and they’ll say all the Republicans won, or refuse to seat the Democrats. But I doubt it. If anything Trump’s sudden rediscovery of a separate entity called the Republican Party is him telling us he doubts it, too. I don’t take anything for granted. And Democrats need to remain vigilant. But deciding that it’s Republicans who screwed up makes perfect sense. It heals all the ego wounds he may feel he is about to suffer.