I & I Editorial Board“If we don’t win the midterms, they’re going to blame me. You know that. And if we do win them, I will get no credit whatsoever. It’s true. I won’t get any.” — President Donald Trump, Oct. 10
When President Donald Trump admitted the obvious at a rally in Clarksville, Tenn., last month, the one thing he left out was an admission that, if the midterms go badly, he deserves the blame.
To see why, turn the dial back two years.
The country had just endured four years of a mentally incapacitated and utterly clueless president. Four years of being called semi-fascists. Four years of hyperinflation and falling real wages. Four years of illegal aliens pouring across the border and invading towns across the country. Four years of rising crime rates at home and embarrassing failures abroad.
Trump, as he did in his first election, tapped into the nation’s unrest. He had a villain in Joe Biden and the Democrats. He had a plan to put America back on the path it had been on during his first term.
And on Nov. 5, 2024, Trump achieved one of the most remarkable political comebacks in history. He’d survived two impeachments and endless, unethical, democracy-threatening attempts by Democrats to weaponize the legal system and imprison or impoverish him. He’d survived two assassination attempts – one by millimeters.
His election victory was definitive – flipping counties across the country, gaining ground with blacks and Hispanics, winning the popular vote, and scoring a decisive Electoral College margin. The New York Times declared the day after that “Trump is set to transform Washington as G.O.P. extends gains.”
The election left Democrats demoralized and leaderless. Biden was an embarrassment and an outcast. Kamala Harris was a pariah. The party was seen as having been taken over by woke elitists who were hopelessly out of touch with working families. Republicans were in the catbird seat.
In February 2025, The Hill ran a story about how “GOP gains in voter registration raise red flags for Democrats,” and that “together with Trump’s victory, the registration figures add to signs of an uphill climb for Democrats in the years ahead.”
Trump’s approval rating at the start of the second term was higher than it had ever been in his first. And he was in a unique position to essentially have a second chance at a first term, with the added benefit of knowing he couldn’t run again.
It appeared he’d learned his lessons from his first term and had a better team in place ready to execute his plans. He started with a bang.
After Trump’s first week in office, we wrote that:
The 47th president is different, different from the 45th, and different from every president going back to the 19th century.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said Trump’s first week in office “totally reset my conception of what’s possible, in two wholly different dimensions.”
The headline on law professor and Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds’ recent New York Post op-ed declared that Trump’s “unprecedented and swift action … has reset the national mood.”
But then the wheels started coming off. Instead of focusing on wringing inflation out of the economy, Trump launched an erratic, unfocused, divisive trade war that opened him up to the charge — rightly so — of raising prices instead of cutting them.
The attacks on Iran, as justified as they were to prevent that terrorist nation from acquiring a nuclear weapon, could have stopped with the bombing of its underground facilities, with the promise of more if they tried to reconstruct it. The wider campaign, which we support but which he never fully justified to the public, jacked up the cost of both gasoline and food — the two things where prices are the most obvious to consumers.
Trump closed the border while restarting wall construction, which were massive victories. But the deportation campaign has been a needless PR disaster.
And Trump’s fixations on the White House ballroom, the Kennedy Center, and various other D.C. projects only served to paint him as vainly focused on the wrong priorities.
As a result, in two short years, Trump’s approval rating has cratered, Republicans are back on their heels, Democrats are reenergized, and socialists are winning elections.
Those who suffer from Trump Fanboy Syndrome will blame anything and everything but Trump. Yes, the media share part of the blame. The daily avalanche of world-is-ending-because-Trump-is-crazy stories is bound to have an effect on the public. And it is true that the left regrouped and started mounting organized protests faster than anyone might have expected.
But Trump knows better than anyone that he will never get a fair shake from the press or the radicalized Democratic Party. So why play into their hands? Every day, Trump gives his critics fodder by refusing to stay on any sort of message.
He could have spent the past two years focused on getting the economy back on track and selling his successes. He could have staged public events to showcase people who’ve benefitted from his policies, held press events celebrating the opening of new factories, talked about nothing else but the economy and how people’s lives are getting better after four disastrous Biden years.
Trump is a showman who knows how to tell a compelling story. Yet it seems as though the only time he put these gifts on full display was at his State of the Union addresses — hardly enough to change people’s minds when they are getting a barrage of negative stories from the other side.
This is not to gainsay the many policy victories Trump has secured. The pro-growth tax cuts and deregulation, the demise of the corrupt USAID, the massive reduction in the federal workforce, the anti-fraud efforts, showing American strength abroad, and many others. We have been celebrating them on these pages, just as we have been calling out the many media lies about Trump. (See, for example, “Don’t Buy The Media Lie: Gas Prices Are Not Higher Under Trump Than Biden.”)
But Trump has the giant megaphone, and a little message discipline would have gone a long, long way toward giving Republicans a much improved chance of victory tomorrow.
Even if GOP candidates do manage to perform better than the polls suggest, Trump can’t go on as he has been for the past two years. That is, if he wants to turn these temporary victories into a lasting legacy — which he must if the country is to have any hope of a prosperous future.
—Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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