Washington insiders are convinced that Tuesday’s midterms could mark the beginning of the end for President Donald Trump, and The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser wrote that the blow may come from his own voters.
“Forget the hedging and careful a--covering embedded in so many election forecasts and trust me on this: the campaign obsessives in the capital really think that this may finally be the Big One,” Glasser wrote.
What makes the moment “even more remarkable,” she argued, is who would be delivering the rebuke – “millions of Republicans in large swaths of red America voting to renounce the President, his reckless policies, and, in a number of high-profile cases, such as the Texas Senate race, his handpicked candidates.”
Glasser wrote that Trump himself has made “the strongest possible case for his party’s impending defeat.” He launched an unpopular war with Iran, imposed costly tariffs and started a trade war with Canada, all of which drove up prices after he had promised to tame inflation.
“If, at the beginning of this midterm campaign season, he had set out to sabotage the Republicans, he probably could not have done it better,” she wrote.
Glasser singled out Trump’s recent comment in Georgia, “I don’t give a damn ... We’re making a freakin’ fortune,” calling it “the epigraph — or should I say epitaph? — for his entire crooked, let-them-eat-cake Presidency.”
Glasser saved her sharpest barbs for Trump’s closing speech Monday at the Reflecting Pool, writing that it “channeled that same Marie Antoinette vibe — if, that is, the condemned queen had been a disoriented octogenarian who fancied herself an expert on granite.”
Trump spent the first 23 minutes explaining how he had finally won “not the war in the Middle East but the fight against algae in the Reflecting Pool.” He insisted of Iran, “It’s not a war — we’ve done very little fighting.” He also brought Interior Secretary Doug Burgum onstage, where Burgum declared, “Today is a day of gratitude to President Trump.”
“I found myself wondering, if and when the wave sweeps in, whether it will mean that the members of Trump’s Cabinet won’t have to say stuff like this anymore,” Glasser wrote.
She cautioned that even a blue Congress almost certainly can’t remove Trump through impeachment, and that Democrats’ leads in key Senate races are thin. The bigger question, she wrote, is how far Trump will go to back up his claims of a “rigged election.”
“If this week’s election represents, at last, the beginning of the end," Glasser wrote, "well, the end can’t come soon enough.”