We don’t know what’s going to happen in the midterms. But we know for a fact that today you can watch the hilarity of the collapse of so many of Trump’s plans and cheap, or corrupt, midterms gambits. Even the inside D.C. sheets can sense the energy. Here’s a piece — Trump officials weigh rolling back beef import plan as GOP midterm panic spreads. A picture of an angst-ridden, wayward Trump adorns the article. This is the plan Trump rolled out last month to institute a 90-day import bonanza of foreign beef that was apparently some kind of sweetheart deal with a Brazilian beef lord named Joesley Batista. The Wall Street Journal has a good story on that part of the tale. Here’s a New York Times op-ed questioning the safety of what was first called Trump’s mystery meat. In any case, the point was to engineer an extremely short-lived drop in the price of hamburgers. But it drove beef producers — an extremely GOP constituency — crazy since, of course, the whole point was to lower the price of the product ahead of the midterms. Now they’re getting so desperate at the White House they’re apparently considering scrapping the whole plan, with, I guess, a sort of mass deportation of beef.
Meanwhile the White House seems to be hurtling toward a 90-day ban on exports of diesel fuel despite the fact that no one seems to think that will reduce prices and actually stands a very real chance of hiking them. There’s an international market in diesel fuel. The regional U.S. markets are also international. So, at best, the plan seems likely to reduce imports rather than prices. And U.S. refinery capacity is already maxed out. The whole policy seems driven by GOP candidates extremely short-term need to say, something, anything about prices even if it’s stupid and might be discarded after a few days.
Here’s another Politico article — As midterm prospects grow bleaker, Senate Republicans wonder what they can do about it. It begins with this rather sad sack lede …
Facing rising gas prices, an Iran war with no end in sight and increasingly dire midterm polling, Senate Republicans are facing a crucial choice this week: fight or flight.
Some GOP lawmakers are caught between their desire to use the rest of the scant preelection legislative calendar to improve their standing with voters and the likelihood there probably isn’t much they can do anyway.
As Trump himself used to say when his faculties were sharper: Sad!
Facing a hard election, presidents and congressional majorities often resort to desperate measures. But Donald Trump is particularly empowered on this front since there’s no level of desperation, policy nonsense-itude, or cynicism he won’t resort to. So the desperation cycle is accelerating while they also second-guess the short-term gambits from last month. Meanwhile, you’ve got Trump making headlines about compiling new lists of Washington buildings and institutions to rename after himself, including Ford’s Theater, which may have a more ambiguous meaning than he realizes. At a basic level he can’t help broadcasting what people may not care about that much in itself — his silly schlock building projects and renaming efforts — but which tells them at high volume that doing the actual job of president or caring about top public concerns is the furthest thing from his mind.
At a larger level, though, Trump and his party are facing the consequences of the through-line of a second Trump presidency — that they’re remaking the world and the state, cashing in like there’s no tomorrow and doing whatever they want with a pure confidence that there are no political consequences for anything. Democrats, in their own perennially sad sack way, have their own version of the same viewpoint; that common refrain in the face of each new outrage or silliness: Nothing matters!
But things do matter. And we’re seeing that in this speed-running from “we’ve got this!” to sheer panic, over the course of, like, a week. Any reasonable look at the last 18 months would make something like we’re seeing now quite predictable. We’ve seen every incremental step to getting here, a slow march of one massively consequential and unpopular decision after another. The mass deportation campaign that started with some support but became more and more unpopular overtime; massively destructive and chaotic tariffs; a war no one wanted, conducted as disastrously as possible; at least two of these policies contributing to price inflation Trump was elected to fix; a daily litany of unbounded corruption by seemingly everyone in the executive branch. In any normal world it shouldn’t surprise us that all of this together would have severe electoral consequences. Trump’s magical thinking contributed a lot to ignoring this. So did the ban within the Republican Party on thinking Trump could ever be politically wrong. It’s hard to think clearly about what you’re not allowed to talk about. Figuring that out all at once makes it all more intense, as it does in the automative world going from 60 to 0 in like one second feels really bad. But here we are.
As I said in the headline, we can’t be sure what will happen in the midterms. Maybe dreams of a tsunami will be greeted by a moderate semi-wave. But right now, the GOP terror and the desperate tears are real and you should feel perfectly entitled to inject that schadenfreude directly into your veins. In November you may be crying into your drink. But not today.
