Only one subject truly animates Donald Trump on the campaign trail, and it is, of course, the same one that delights and fascinates him in the Oval Office and everywhere else: himself.
“No President has ever achieved what we’ve achieved,” he told the audience at a campaign rally over the weekend, at a high school in Vandalia, Ohio.
“You know what GOAT means? Greatest of all time,” he said in Grand Island, Nebraska, on Monday. “We gotta be, ’cause there has been no President that’s done more in the first two years than President Trump.”
“We achieved more in two years than any other Presidency in the history of our country,” he said on Wednesday, in San Antonio, Texas, where a Democrat—running against Trump’s hand-picked candidate—now stands an even chance of winning a Senate seat in the state for the first time since 1988.
No wonder, then, that Trump’s diagnosis of his party’s plight in advance of the midterm elections flows back to this one key insight of his, which is that politics is, and should be, solely about him. Hence his refrain at these rallies. “Please pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he told the crowd at the high school in Ohio, where Democrats are threatening to retake both the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat just two years after Trump won the state by double digits. “When I’m on the ballot, people show up and you always win,” he added in Nebraska, on Monday. “So I’m asking you to do me one favor: pretend I’m on the ballot, please.”
By my reckoning, Trump spent some seven hours and fifty-six minutes addressing the (dwindling) Trump faithful in his campaign tour this week, a last-ditch effort to stave off what an increasing number of both Democrats and Republicans believe may be a loss of both the House and the Senate. The President’s itinerary speaks to the abrupt reversal of fortunes for the G.O.P. this election year, with Trump stumping in what should be safely red territory: Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio, Nebraska, and back to Texas. He won these five states by an average margin of twenty-two per cent in 2024. In Texas, where he will soon return for a third visit, nearly all recent polls have the Democratic nominee for Senate, James Talarico, leading the Republican state attorney general, Ken Paxton, several of them with more than fifty per cent support—a key threshold.