As voters head to the polls this week, Clay broods on the current state of our national endeavor.
It’s election day in America. The time when “all elections are local” (Tip O’Neill’s insight) is over. This one, in particular, is a national referendum on President Donald Trump. It looks like he’ll get a thumping, but in the Trump era the polls have often proved unreliable. I’ll be very surprised if the Republicans keep control of both houses of Congress, but I’ll be equally surprised if the Democrats sweep back into power in a giant blue wave.
What I am hearing as I travel the country and listen to a wide range of “news sources,” is that the Democrats are likely to win back the House and possibly the Senate (unlikely, I think). Still, the voters who are fleeing the Republican Party at least temporarily are voting for the Democrats not because they like the Democrats (national approval rating 42%), but because gas and grocery prices are high. They are angry that Trump broke his promises: no new wars and a better, well-managed economy.
Except for several tens of millions of diehards, the American people have gotten weary of Donald Trump. They have heard all the grievances before ad infinitum. The 2020 election was stolen. The Dems want open borders. Sanctuary cities are insane. Journalists are the enemy of the people. Transgender athletes are lurking in the girls’ locker rooms. Europe doesn’t pay its share. When he is not descending, often incoherently and with slurred speech, into genuinely weird digressions that have nothing to do with anything, Trump is now mostly a broken record. He can still inspire a few hundred in his audience to chant “Lock her up! Lock her up!” if he mentions Hillary Clinton. But that was a full 10 years ago now, and even Trump diehards want something better to chant about.
In desperation, you can declare that the Democrats are leading us to Sharia Law and/or communism, but does anyone really believe that?
Measurable bipartisan Trump fatigue exists in America — and the Trump we now see on the campaign trail himself seems weary of the game. He is like a vaudeville comedian well past his prime. His audience is no longer ardently enthralled by him. They come to his rallies with nostalgia for that golden moment when he offered himself as their tribune and turned the broken American political system upside down. It’s like going to one of the last performances of Red Skelton in Las Vegas.
To win, Donald Trump needs his entire base plus disaffected Democrats and a significant percentage of independents. The president has made no effort to secure these voters’ continued support. In fact, he appears to have gone out of his way to frustrate and alienate them. He has held about 27 rallies in the last two months, but most have taken place in the reddest districts of the reddest states. The venues are getting smaller, and whole sections of the auditoriums are roped off to concentrate smaller crowds where they will be visible on TV. In other words, Trump seems to be speaking almost exclusively to his hard-core base rather than the millions of other Americans who voted for him in 2024. His logic seems to be that if he can whip his base into a retributive frenzy, and make sure they don’t sit this election out at home, he might squeak by: at least keep the Senate and just possibly the House. In my non-scientific calculation, this strategy does not lead to victory, but we have all learned that it is never safe to dismiss Trump’s gut political instincts. He has defied the odds again and again in the last 12 years. There may be method in his madness, but the madness is increasingly obvious to everyone.
If the Democrats were a just slightly left-of-center party whose polar star was common sense and a spirit of compromise, if they understood the most salient fact of American politics, that the great majority of the American people are far more conservative than the trendiest Democratic candidates, far more comfortable with Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and Virginia Governor Abigail Spangerger than with AOC, Zohran Mandani, and Abdul El-Sayed, I believe they would win today’s election emphatically, along the lines of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 victory over Barry Goldwater. But most Americans are not ready for a single-payer Medicare for All health care system. Most Americans are quietly glad that President Trump has slowed the flood of undocumented foreigners across our southern border. Most Americans feel that the DEI agenda went too far. Most Americans are bewildered by any concept of gender construction that seems to ignore the binary biology of being born male or born female.
Ironically, Donald Trump has lost the issue that propelled him into the presidency in the first place. He wanted to stem the flow of immigrants across the southern border of the United States. Since his re-election in 2024, he has effectively closed the border. All he can say now is that if the Democrats return to power, they are likely to open the floodgates again, but I think even most Democrats are secretly ok (for the time being, at least) with tighter border restrictions.
If there hadn’t been a perception of wide-open borders back in 2016, I doubt Trump would ever have won the presidency of the United States. Without that semi-racist fear-mongering (caravans massing at the Rio Grande) as his number one campaign issue, much of Trump’s appeal has attenuated. What’s he promising us now? More support for Putin and Russia against Ukraine? More verbal assaults on Canada and our European allies? Further monkeying with punitive tariffs? An ever-receding end to the war he started against Iran with all the calamities that have followed? Trump’s Republican supporters are forced to trot out the unconvincing argument that higher gas and food prices “will have been worth it” if the endless war prevents Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. They don’t believe it. It’s just the only possible justification for waging an unwinnable war against a proud nation-state that has calculated it can take more economic disruption than the narcissistic American public.
But here’s the most important point I wish to make as people line up at the polls today. If the Democrats do win control of both houses of Congress, our severe political troubles do not disappear. If the past is any indication, inevitable congressional investigations will stall when Trump administration officials defy subpoenas and refuse to appear before oversight committees. The president will veto any laws he doesn’t like. With virtually unlimited presidential immunity (Trump v. United States, 2024), with no one in his inner circle willing to check his wilder notions, and fiercely embracing the concept of the Unitary Executive — i.e., that a president has essentially unlimited power, no matter what the Constitution seems to say — Trump is likely to prove every bit as disruptive in the next two years as in the last six (four then plus two now). Perhaps even more erratic as his physical and mental health continue to decline.
Congressional opposition to Trump has only three highly imperfect weapons: the power of the purse; investigations designed to stall whatever is left of Trump’s agenda; and impeachment. Thin gruel. In other words, the greatest impediment to Trump’s power will come not from the hoary “checks and balances” doctrine of the 18th-century Constitution, but from his own diminished energies and his obsession with a gold-plated legacy of interior decorations in Washington, D.C.
For tens of millions of Americans, this is a hold-your-nose and vote election. Hold your nose and vote Republican because no matter how robotic the Republicans in Congress are in surrendering to Trump’s erratic political agenda, no matter how far they have drifted from anything that can be called conservative, they are at least better than the alternative, even if we will have to hear about the ballroom, the arch, the Kennedy Center, and the reflecting pool for the next two years. Or hold your nose and vote Democrat because no matter how much you disagree with the wokeism, anti-Israelism, and “socialism” of some members of the Democratic Party, Trump has to be stopped before he does terminal damage to our constitutional order.
This is no way to run a republic. We deserve better. The vast majority of Americans live somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. They believe in common sense. They believe in compromise. They are uneasy with the lunatic fringe of both parties, and they are very tired of voting “the lesser of two evils” in election after election.
But vote we must.
We need a new Common Sense Party that will embrace the 70% of the American people who are looking at the ballot today with sorrow and misgiving because they see no really satisfying alternative. While we are at it, we probably need to revise or replace the Constitution to make it resonate with the way public power actually works in the 21st century.
No joy in Mudville.