I admit to finding these predictions hard to accept. Ten years of Trump dominating our politics has killed my ability to convince myself that there is still such a thing as an unambiguously positive outcome in an American election. Trump’s defeat in 2020—which was both predicted and predictable—proved that even an across-the-board loss on Election Night might not be decisive with a President willing to do anything to contest it. So please accept all the usual caveats. It may well be that the smart money is wrong again, and that the margin of error in all those Senate polls was the thing to watch rather than the tenuous one- or two- or three-point leads for Democratic candidates in tossup races from Alaska to Maine.
The bigger question, in any event, may well be Trump’s reaction to the electoral rebuke that looks to be headed his way: How far is he willing to go to back up his claims of a “rigged election” with actions designed to make it so? He’s become the perpetual X factor in our politics. There are many proponents of the theory that the only way to stop Trump from plunging us into another national crisis by seeking to overturn the election is with a Democratic wave so enormous and all-encompassing that there is no plausible way to claim that it didn’t happen. Just how big is that, I wonder? This is not something that Nate Silver’s election forecast can predict.
And let’s say he does lose, and lose big. How much more will he be able to destroy before something—age, his fellow-Republicans, the A.I. doom machine whose apocalyptic possibilities he has been so steadfastly ignoring—stops him?
Trump himself has been making the strongest possible case for his party’s impending defeat. If, at the beginning of this midterm campaign season, he had set out to sabotage the Republicans, he probably could not have done it better: starting an unpopular and notably unsuccessful conflict with Iran, imposing costly tariffs, and launching a trade war with Canada. All of which have driven up prices for Americans, when the signature promise of his 2024 campaign had been to curb the inflation that sank the Biden Presidency.
But it’s not the price of fuel so much as the cost of his own political arrogance that appears to have weakened Trump, who has mocked the concerns of those most affected by his rash actions while at the same time insisting that the election should be singularly focussed on him and his record. Typical was his comment the other day, while campaigning in Georgia on behalf of two embattled statewide candidates who are now quite likely to lose. “I don’t give a damn,” he said, referring to the naysayers about the American economy. “We’re making a freakin’ fortune.” It might as well have been the epigraph—or should I say epitaph?—for his entire crooked, let-them-eat-cake Presidency.
Which brings us to his final appearance of his final campaign, a closing speech on Monday afternoon which channelled that same Marie Antoinette vibe—if, that is, the condemned queen had been a disoriented octogenarian who fancied herself an expert on granite. With hours to go until the election, Trump chose to appear at the National Mall, in front of the Reflecting Pool, whose costly botched renovation over the summer has become a symbol of the President’s obsession with remaking America’s capital to suit his personal vision of imperial grandeur.
His plan, it soon emerged, was not to debunk concerns about his indifference to the electorate but to double down on them. For the first twenty-three minutes of the speech, Trump’s closing argument came down to an extended justification for how he had, however belatedly, finally won—not the war in the Middle East but the fight against algae in the Reflecting Pool that had defeated so many of his predecessors.
