President Trump asked that this election be about him.
“Pretend I’m on the ballot.”
In 29 in-person campaign rallies, TV appearances, press conferences in over 20 battleground states President Trump urged people to go to the polls in this week’s midterm election, and “pretend I’m on the ballot.”
Voters did, and Republicans across the country – even in states thought to be conservative bastions, like Texas – were wiped out.
Never has it been known in the history of free and fair elections that the majority of people went to the polls to thank you for a job well done.
Every election, no exception, is about the future – not the past.
Yet, the Trump White House and the national Republican campaign operation relentlessly pumped out news release after news release touting President Trump’s many accomplishments, with nary a word about what happens in the final two years of the President’s second term if they retain their majorities in Congress.
Here are just a few examples: ICYMI: Relentless Travel Schedule Puts Trump Administration’s Results Front and Center, President Trump’s Second Term: Promises Made, Promises Kept, Results Delivered and Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Ended the Illegal and Discriminatory Practices of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – and the list goes on and on, all about what Donald Trump did, not what Republicans are going to do.
If you doubt me, I call as my first witness Sir Winston Churchhill. Just weeks after he won World War II and saved the British people’s lives and country from the Nazis he was thrown out of office in a landslide, because he was talking about the past and his opponents in the Labour Party were talking about the future.
Tens of millions of voters went to the polls on November 3rd to send President Trump a message.
For millions of Democrats, as CHQ explained in the article “The Trump Derangement Syndrome Election,” the message to Donald Trump was “I hate you.”
Other voters wanted to send the President a message about the Iran war, others about inflation, high gas and diesel prices, some about food prices, or ICE, or the cost and availability of healthcare, etc.
And, there’s a fair argument to be made that millions of voters who voted for President Trump in the past stayed home to send him the message “You broke your promise” by launching the war with Iran when you promised “no more forever wars” and “You failed to deliver” on your promise to roll back Biden-era inflation and bring down food and gas prices.
Conservatives never win big elections unless the election is nationalized around conservative issues – see the 1980 Reagan Revolution, the 1994 Contract with America, the 2010 Tea Party Wave and even Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2024 victories for examples.
Democrats win, and they almost always want to run on, delivering services and free stuff: Medicare for All, free college, free universal childcare, forgiveness of student loans, universal basic income, and more money for “education” were all promised or implied to be part of the future if Democrats were elected.
Absent a coherent Republican national conservative agenda, send Donald Trump the messages “I hate you” and “I want free stuff” was always going to win this election for Democrats.
God bless President Trump for his many accomplishments, but the time and media attention he committed to the distractions of renaming the Kennedy Center, fixing or not fixing the Reflecting Pool, remaking the East Potomac Golf Links, gilding the White House, and a host of other non-issues diminished him, even in the eyes of many of his friends and supporters, making the Donald Trump voters were supposed to pretend was on the ballot a much smaller and less dignified figure than the one that was on the ballot in 2016, 2020 and 2024.
The good news is that Donald Trump is a consummate counterpuncher, and for the next two years he will have the perfect foil in the radical Socialist, Communist and Islamist Democrats who will now be in charge on Capitol Hill and in many state houses across the country.
So, it may turn out that Donald Trump’s greatest legacy will not be the many real accomplishments of the past two years that he touted during the campaign, but stopping a lot of bad things Democrats will try to do in the last two years of his administration.
In 2028, after two years of experience with the radical Democrats and their agenda, and without Donald Trump on the ballot, Republicans will have the opportunity to win by sending Democrats a message by defining and campaigning on a future of conservative alternatives that restore the economic opportunity, personal freedom and security that Democrats have already promised to take away.
