(Dobbs) You're Only As Good As Your Last Act
Four months is a long time, and Trump’s last act might be so dictatorial, so anti-American, that we neither see it coming nor know how to stop it.
You’re only as good as your last act.
With the midterms coming up in just four months and change, that’s what worries me. Donald Trump’s last act.
He’ll have to dig himself out of some very deep holes if he is to hold onto a Republican majority in either house of Congress. Right now, as he wallows in gutter after gutter, his ratings are wallowing down there with him. He just won’t admit it. Yesterday, writing from the world of alternative facts that he occupies, he said on his website, “Highest Poll Numbers Ever.”
Except, that’s a lie. Like most of what comes from Donald Trump’s keyboard, it is a claim totally disconnected from reality. Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for The New York Times, posted the latest “presidential approval ratings” graph just yesterday. It is a daily average of polls done by dozens of different pollsters. The upshot? Trump’s approval stands at just 38%. His disapproval stands at 58%. That’s what it means to be “underwater” in the polls. As Cohn reported, no president’s approval rating has been under 38% for more than a few days in the last 17 years.
This is not a record Trump would choose to set.
There is plenty of reason to be optimistic. Not for Trump, but for those of us who see him as the dangerous fraud he is. From the president’s ill-conceived and ill-executed war with Iran to his crass campaign to rebuild the nation’s capital in his image— the billion dollar partially-taxpayer-funded ballroom, the obtrusive triumphal arch, the foul green algae and blue peeling paint in the reflecting pool, topped off by the sickening spectacle of kick-boxing on the White House lawn— Americans don’t like what Trump is doing any more than they like Trump himself.
After all, what’s to like? Every day he shows himself to be even meaner, even more vindictive, even more deceitful, even more corrupt, even more autocratic, even more erratic than he was the day before, if that’s even possible. People say to me all the time, “I didn’t think things could get any worse. But then they did.”
And we, the people, are the victims.
Just for example, because there are so many examples, in the Iran war, he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going. Wednesday last week he said, “For the first time in 3,000 years, we are finally going to have peace in the Middle East.” The peace doesn’t last for 30 hours. Iran attacked another ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Then the U.S. attacked more Iranian missile and drone sites. Then Iran attacked Arab nations across the Gulf. Then the U.S. struck back. Then Trump threatens, “There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”
“Peace in the Middle East” to tame a war he started is a dream. The reality is still a nightmare. Trump even declared yesterday that low-level peace talks were back on the table for today in Qatar. Except Iran said they’re not.
No wonder his approval rating is in the dumps. Nobody can believe the man. Not the American people. Not the world. Not Iran.
It’s because of unhinged behavior like this that he might lose in November.
But there’s one thing we don’t know, and that’s what worries me. What Machiavellian trick will he pull out of his quiver? What powers will he claim to subvert the midterms and subjugate the American people?
So far, for all the underhanded schemes he has undertaken to rig the election in favor of his Republican candidates, his record is mixed. He has some victories to be sure, but sometimes the courts erect a roadblock, sometimes it’s even the Congress. His latest loss was announced just yesterday when the Supreme Court issued its decision on mail-in ballots, which was a case of Trump pressing for a solution in search of a problem. With Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the court’s three liberals, it said that ballots postmarked by election day, even if they do not get to election officials on election day, must still be counted.
But give Donald Trump credit for one thing: he doesn’t give up. If he loses at the goal line, he moves the goal posts. He is so upset that Congress has not passed his Save America Act, which effectively would disenfranchise mostly Democratic voters, that he says he won’t sign any more legislation coming from Capitol Hill until he can sign that. This includes last week’s bi-partisan affordable housing bill, which would make it easier to build houses and cut costs. That is good for all of America. But Trump will put it on the back burner until his own priority is put up front. He is so disconnected from what Americans really need, yesterday he called the housing bill “a yawn.”
That’s no way to win elections.
Nor is he persuaded by profound proclamations, like the one that a federal judge made last week when ruling against him in the use of federal databases to determine someone’s eligibility to vote. What the judge said was, “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
Is there any better way to put it than that? “The sacred right to vote.” In Trump’s world, though, a vote is only sacred if it is a vote for Trump.
A vice president at the Brennan Center for Justice, Wendy Weiser, told The Washington Post, “The administration is doing as much as possible to inject chaos into the election cycle. A top priority for this administration is to try to interfere in this election.”
No wonder. Donald Trump doesn’t just have a lot at stake. He has everything. If Democrats retake both the House and the Senate in a free election this November, Trump’s agenda grinds to a halt, investigations into his conduct— including the Epstein scandal— return to front-and-center, maybe even impeachment (for the third time) threatens his tenure in the Oval Office.
So we can expect more cheating. He already has used the FBI, run by his compliant director, to investigate his complaints about voting in Democratic states.
He has used the Office of the Director of National Intelligence the same way. Putting ICE agents or National Guard troops to work at his service could be in the cards— he already has plainly stated that if he wants to, he can. Now he’s threatening to declare some sort of national emergency, even if none exists, to manipulate the vote. If he times it right, there might be no chance for courts or anyone else to stop him.
And of course, the ultimate weapon in his quiver: if in November he loses across the board, he can declare, and most likely will, “The election was rigged.” As Dan Rather wrote yesterday on Steady, “He has built his entire political persona and his cult-like grip on his loyalists around the issue.” What Trump has learned since the first time he made that duplicitous “rigged” claim is, say it often enough and loud enough, and millions of Americans who don’t bother to inform themselves will believe it. Count the insurrectionists on January 6th among them.
The good news is, notwithstanding Trump’s claim to be the most popular president ever, with candidates on the ballot from the Green and Libertarian parties in all three elections, he never actually got a majority of the raw vote. Sure, in 2024, he did win. However, that was at the peak of his inexplicable popularity. It has gone downhill ever since.
In a New York Times opinion piece yesterday titled “The Vibe Has Shifted Back,” David Wallace-Wells wrote about that apex at the time of Trump’s election and his inauguration last year, then his precipitous fall ever since. The commentator saved the moral to the story for the end: Whenever we try to erect a simple new story about the country on the basis of a couple of percentage-points shifts, we should probably expect the foundation to give way pretty quickly beneath our feet.”
Four months is a long time, and Trump’s last act might be so dictatorial, so anti-American, that we neither see it coming nor know how to stop it.
But if we’re lucky, the foundation will give way under Trump’s feet. And we will have our country back.