The discordant outlook for GOP electoral prospects

In President Donald Trump’s world, everything is great. A new Golden Age is upon us. Gas prices are down, at least in June. The Iranians are eager to end that "skirmish" and, if only John Thune would follow orders, a century of GOP success would ensue.

But it’s just possible that, when Republican House members start their monthlong August recess this week, they’ll confront a far different landscape than that rosy, Trumpian scenario: gas prices up again as well as insurance costs, government health support down, a new round of costly tariffs.

And instead of a president who promised to cut prices, settle the Russia-Ukraine war in a day and avoid new foreign entanglements, we’ve got one who did just the opposite: prices are still high, the bloody Ukraine war no closer to settlement, the United States increasingly entangled in a seemingly endless war with Iran.

That reality — far from being any Golden Age — explains why Trump’s job approval remains at low ebb and why those GOP lawmakers face an uphill fight to preserve a slender House majority that only their mid-decade gerrymandering provides any hope of maintaining.

They are counting on the Democrats being hardly more appealing than the Republicans, enmeshed in acrimonious internal fights from Maine to Arizona. They hope Democratic primaries will produce general election candidates in key states who are further left than is normally palatable, underscoring what Trump derides as a return of the Communism that Ronald Reagan consigned four decades ago to the "ash heap of history." The Communists even want to bomb Mount Rushmore, Trump said the other day.

For a spell this summer, when the top national political story was the messy controversy over the flawed Senate candidate the Democrats had voted for themselves in Maine, it looked as if those factors might bolster the GOP’s hopes of avoiding the midterm electoral disaster that recently reelected presidents have faced.

But as Trump waffles over whether to fight or settle with Iran, and Iranian attacks in the once free-flowing Strait of Hormuz force a rebound in gas prices, the Democrats hope to head off their most politically questionable left-wing candidates. They seamlessly defused their ticking Maine time bomb, and polls show their initially optimistic prospects have barely dimmed.

It’s even possible that current national Democratic margins understate the party’s potential for November successes. As pollster G. Elliott Morris pointed out last week, most polling at this stage is based on the intentions of registered voters and doesn’t yet reflect the fact that greater Democratic enthusiasm will likely mean that, unusually for recent elections, those margins will grow within the more likely November electorate.

If that is not enough, there are signs that, despite Trump’s realization that a Democratic recapture of the U.S. House could provoke an array of intrusive congressional oversight hearings and make his final two years a political hell, the president is doing little to prevent that and may even be exacerbating the likelihood that the GOP’s most unpleasant potential scenario will unfold.

"I don’t care about the midterms," he said during a May Cabinet meeting, a statement only slightly less helpful to his party than his prior comment — when asked if he considered the financial straits of Americans in negotiating to end the war — that, "I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation."

Still proclaiming his belief that Iran can be prevented from eventually developing a nuclear bomb through repeated American air assaults on everything from its remaining military capability to its civilian economic infrastructure, Trump seems willing to risk a resurgence in domestic gas prices while making a minimal show of interest in easing the economic pressures everyday Americans say they feel.

He seems more interested in devoting a large share of his declining energies to the self-aggrandizing projects he believes will cement his long-term legacy, like the White House’s massive $600 billion (current price) "Donald Trump Ballroom," the over-towering "Donald Trump Arch" at the city’s Arlington gateway, and such lesser vainglories as trying to rename New York City’s venerable Penn Station and other such landmarks after himself.

In addition, while so far unable to bring off a reconfigured Middle East, a democratized Cuba and an America-annexed Greenland, Trump is pressing ahead with his second term’s most consistent campaign — ridding the public scene of people and views who crossed him, from independent counsel Jack Smith, who sought to prosecute his extralegal efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat, to the former Olympic canoeist he blames for sabotaging his bungled effort to turn Washington’s Reflecting Pool blue.

All that misalignment of presidential priorities was on display when Trump made his long-awaited appearance before last week’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, from the misleading depiction of the alleged Golden Age to the purported Iran military success, dampened by his usual ad hominem attacks on politicians and the press whose efficacy has worn thin after more than a decade.

Trump declared that he is the only public figure in whom the public is interested, proclaiming with only a touch of self-mockery that he looks forward to running in 2028 for a "fourth term," on the false premise he won the one election he lost.

The only sign that he might be resigned to his eventual displacement was the fact that he seemed to have more trouble than usual maintaining his focus on a night that, even by Trump’s standards, went on far too long — just like his presidency.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him via email at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.