THE MIDTERMS WILL NOT BE KIND TO THE REPUBLICANSBacklash against Trump’s strong-arm tactics on immigration could hand Congress to the Democrats
The Democrats have learned the hard way never to underestimate President Donald Trump’s political punch, but he’s not the candidate this fall and fears about the midterms are growing among the political operatives in the White House. I have been told by an insider that the internal polling numbers are not good. It is assumed that the Democrats will win back the House of Representatives by a large number and there will be a new speaker. Some Republican House candidates have been told not to expect generous party campaign funding. “There is no hope” is the consensus. The outlook for the Senate is less bleak. The Republicans now hold a three-seat majority, but no less than six GOP seats are considered to be in play. In three of the races—in Alaska, Maine, and North Carolina—there are especially attractive Democratic candidates. The Democrats also have high hopes in Ohio, where former Senator Sherrod Brown is on the ballot in a special election for the Senate seat formerly held by Vice President JD Vance, and in Iowa, where Senator Joni Ernst is retiring and farming communities are suffering from Trump’s tariff policies. In Georgia, the poll numbers for quiet Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff, who has long been seen as vulnerable, are climbing. The state’s popular Republican governor Brian Kemp stunned the party last May when he announced he wouldn’t be challenging Ossoff. The Democrats are even optimistic about Texas, where the charismatic State House Member James Talarico is leading the Democratic primary for the Senate while incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn is in a tight primary against far-right Attorney General Ken Paxton. Anxiety in the White House that both the House and the Senate might fall to the Democrats is acute. Trump’s poll numbers are sliding amid the ongoing protests against ICE in Minnesota and in reaction to the harsh tactics it is using to find and seize undocumented immigrants. The public lying of Cabinet members in defense of ICE has not helped the president or the party. Trump hasn’t delivered on the economy, except for the very rich, and he hasn’t made good on early promises to resolve the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine. Trump has sought to rally support by asserting that if the Democrats gain control of both chambers they will seek his impeachment, based not on his foreign policy but on the extreme measures he has authorized in the hunt for undocumented immigrants. The hunt has been led by Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff who has been the major advocate and defender of the administration’s strong-arm tactics against immigrants. The White House effort to do something about the immigration crisis—Congress has failed to pass significant legislation on immigration for decades—could have won bipartisan support, but has not, in large measure due to the harsh tactics used. Miller sent the tone early on when he denounced the federal district court judges who initially ruled against the mass seizure and deportation of suspected undocumented immigrants as “communists.” I have been told by someone with knowledge of White House planning that Miller was a major advocate for the ICE operations in Minnesota that have led to the killing of two protesters by federal officers, the ongoing disruption of a major metropolitan area and international condemnation of the administration. But it was Trump who authorized the raids and he has yet to put an end to them. Miller was also the author of an earlier proposal to use local National Guard troops to disrupt the midterm elections in critical states if polling predicted that the Republican Party would lose the House. That suggestion, given the current negative polling, and the fiasco in Minneapolis, is now dead in the water. Another plan that has been discussed in the White House is to disrupt a future presidential election, when Vice President JD Vance might be the candidate, in case of a loss at the polls. It was conceived by John Eastman, the disbarred lawyer (he is currently appealing his disbarment in California) who also thought up the failed plan after Trump’s election loss in 2020 to have Vice President Pence, as the president of the Senate, exercise his legal authority to reject certified state electors and electoral votes for the presidency. The goal was to overturn Biden’s election. Pence refused to do so. I was told that Eastman’s new scheme, recently the subject of informal discussions at the White House, calls for sympathetic election officials in states where the Democratic candidates win simply to delay or refuse to submit the electoral votes at the time mandated by the Constitution. Eastman’s notion is to find a way to void the electoral votes from states with a large Democratic plurality, so that the number of electoral votes needed to claim the presidency is low enough to turn a losing Republican candidate into a president. That such madness is being contemplated is not a surprise to many in the Washington press corps. Last week the journalist Greg Sargent put the issue this way: “Do President Trump’s advisers actively want him to act like a dictator? At the very least, there’s plainly a deep split inside Trumpworld on this question. As deranged as it seems, one faction clearly believes Trump absolutely should project unconstrained tyrannical power, to frighten ordinary voters and institutions into compliance, while another faction thinks acting like a Mad King risks a huge electoral rebuke and, by extension, that normal political patterns still apply.” And then there is the work of Mark Medish and Joel McCleary, who held key positions in Democratic administrations. Two years ago they outlined what they called “dark scenarios” about the future of presidential elections in the Washington Spectator. They quote the sage words of Robert Cindrich, a retired federal district court judge from Western Pennsylvania, who observed that the American Constitution is ultimately “a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ among all interested parties to behave properly.” There have been many definitions of a gentleman through the ages, but I think Judge Cindrich would agree with me that Robert E. Lee had it right in his description of the test of a true gentleman: “The power which the strong have over the weak, the employer over the employed, the educated over the unlettered, the experienced over the confiding, even the clever over the silly—the forbearing or inoffensive use of all this power or authority, or a total abstinence from it when the case admits it, will show the gentleman in a plain light.” If only. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. |