MIGHT AS WELL FACE IT, TRUMP'S ADDICTED TO LOVE

Okay, this is weird:

So I was just watching Fox News and this commercial played during Jesse Watters show. It says “Paid for by the US Government.”
This is clearly a campaign ad. And the singers are just singing over and over again, “Love me” - over images of Trump. @CBSMiami @CBSNews pic.twitter.com/eCkEZpipWx

— Jim DeFede (@DeFede) September 24, 2026

The tweet comes from Jim DeFede, a CBS reporter in Miami. I agree with Trump that the midterms are a referendum on him, and I agree with DeFede that this looks like a campaign ad -- but if that's what it is, it's the neediest campaign ad ever. "Love me"? Over and over? Seriously? It's fine as a pop song ("Love Me" by JMSN, pronounced "Jameson"; the song was released in 2023). But as a message from a candidate, or pseudo-candidate? Donny, you seem desperate.

This is also weird:

Trump posted this photo on Truth Social this morning. Look close! #TravelWithNatalie

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 24, 2026 at 7:58 AM

Rupar is pointing out the fact that this photo has obvious AI or Photoshop tweaks, most notably the fact that Trump isn't wincing, as he is in the original AP photo (click to enlarge).

But I'm struggling to understand what the point of the post is. "Only Trump"? "Only Trump" what? Only Trump could meet with Xi Jinping while serving as president? Only Trump could order a military flyover as president? Only Trump could have a young blond aide as president?

Natalie Harp is called "the Human Printer" because she prints out stories that are flattering to Trump and presents them to him -- but this isn't a new thing. During his 2016 campaign and his first term, aides supplied him with positivity this way. In May 2017, Politico's Shane Goldmacher reported:

White House and former campaign aides have tried to make sure Trump’s media diet includes regular doses of praise and positive stories to keep his mood up — a tactic honed by staff during the campaign to keep him from tweeting angrily.

The link in this passage goes to an earlier Politico story by Tara Palmeri:

The key to keeping Trump’s Twitter habit under control, according to six former campaign officials, is to ensure that his personal media consumption includes a steady stream of praise. And when no such praise was to be found, staff would turn to friendly outlets to drum some up — and make sure it made its way to Trump’s desk.

But the two items I've posted above aren't just pro-Trump news stories or MAGA opinion pieces. They're delivery systems for pure, uncut Trump worship. They're intended to feed praise and love to Trump in the most addicting form.

I don't know if what we're getting in the Natalie Harp era is driven by Trump's desperation for positive regard as he fails at more and more aspects of his job while aging in a way he can't ignore, or whether Harp is consciously choosing to direct praise and love to Trump in the purest possible form. I suspect that it's the former, and that Harp is just giving Trump what he's jonesing for, in stronger and stronger dosages. But it's not healthy -- though if he's become like a junkie, someone who devotes most of his waking hours to obtaining the drug he needs (which would explain the renovation obsession), this might be keeping him from doing even more damage to America than he's doing now.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION DOESN'T SEEM TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AUTHORITARIANISM AND RAGEBAIT

Today, Axios reports on what its headline calls "Trump's last-ditch hunt for voter fraud." "Last-ditch" is the key here:

The Trump administration says Americans should prepare between now and Election Day for a wave of new arrests and prosecutions over alleged non-citizen voter fraud.

... The Trump administration is deploying hundreds of federal investigators and attorneys to pursue President Trump's long-running fixation — and test a broader Republican claim that tougher enforcement will uncover far more illegal voting.

"This initiative is a tier one priority," a Justice Department official told reporters on Tuesday. "It's a top priority for the attorney general and for the White House."

Wait -- you guys are just starting to do this now, when early voting has already begun in a couple of states, and will soon begin in many others?

Well, no -- they've been at this for a while, but they aren't getting very far, according to Axios:

Across the country, there are now 1,600 open cases of potential voter fraud and 160 people have been arrested, a Homeland Security Investigations official said Tuesday.

Even if you assume that all these open cases will lead to arrests and convictions -- which you shouldn't after seeing how the administration tried and failed to use prosecutions to create the impression that vandalism damaged the Reflecting Pool -- remember that we live in a country where more than 155 million people voted in the last presidential election. Sixteen hundred people is .001% of the 2024 electorate, and 160 people is .0001%. That's not enough to decide the outcome of the midterms. And only some of these people were immigrants charged this year.

DOJ has charged 24 immigrants this calendar year following the prioritization, according to agency press releases. The accuse

So, understandably, this isn't a big national news story. But individual cases serve as Fox News ragebait. Yesterday, Fox reported:

An Indian national was federally indicted by a grand jury in Minnesota for knowingly making the false claim to be a U.S. citizen to vote in the 2024 general election....

Mukeshkumar Somabhai Chaudhari, according to a DOJ press release earlier this month, falsely claimed U.S. citizenship by signing a voter signature certificate required under state law to vote in Minnesota and voting Nov. 5, 2024....

"Once again, DOJ is proving that if you look for election fraud, you find election fraud," Chad Ennis, vice president of Honest Elections Project, told Fox News Digital Tuesday. "The left loves to claim election fraud does not happen. But here we have yet another instance of a noncitizen illegally registering to vote."

Fox is trying to sell this story as Minnesota, hotbed of fraud! -- even it notes that Chaudhari was indicted on state charges in Minnesota five months ago, an indictment Fox reported on at the time. And it's trying to sell the story as Team Trump will find massive amounts of fraud, just you wait -- but who's buying this story, apart from (in all likelihood) Donald Trump himself, along with his fellow rage-addicted Fox addicts?

This isn't intimidating legitimate voters, and it isn't getting the kind of wall-to-wall media coverage that might precede a serious electoral crackdown. That might still come, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that Trump simply doesn't have a plan for seriously intervening in the midterms on or before Election Day. His people know they can mollify him by doing something, anything, to suggest that fraud is being rooted out, and they're feeding him (and the right-wing media) that ragebait. There are low-priority stories in mainstream news outlets, but otherwise there's nothing happening that's likely to prevent the election from taking place.

And no, this Democracy Docket report doesn't impress me:

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is close to fully enlisting the 1,000 federal election monitors it announced earlier this year to observe the upcoming midterm elections — the largest such contingent in U.S. history, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon claimed.

The monitors will be department lawyers and other “trained legal staff,” she said in an interview with the far-right media outlet Real America’s Voice Monday.

“I’ve called for, and plan to send, 1,000 to the general election jurisdictions that we’re selecting. And I’m really excited to say that we have — we’re pretty close to that number of people who’ve raised their hands,” Dhillon said.

As I said last month when the Justice Department announced the plan to deploy 1000 monitors, that's a tiny number compared to the number of precincts in America. "More than 95,000 polling places were used in the 2024 general election," the National Conference of State Legislatures has reported. Just in Texas, which is a swing state this year, there are more than 9000 precincts.

On social media, I've been told I should worry more about this:

... I think an overwhelmingly large fraction of all polling places are in solid blue or red regions, and/or serve comparatively few voters.

I don't think 1000 monitors is enough to swing things all by itself, but you add in the local cops, and various self-appointed vigilante groups, all focusing on tossup regions in swing states, and it could be quite significant. Just scaring non-white people away from showing up would work for the GOP.

But where's the evidence that local cops and vigiliantes are being lined up to do this? Where are the calls for citizen intimidation? There'd be signs of this by now. I see nothing besides this smattering of monitors.

As for the monitors themselves, The Washington Post reported this in mid-August:

For Michigan’s primary this month, the Justice Department sent monitors to four Democratic-leaning cities — Detroit, Hamtramck, Lansing and East Lansing. Democrats openly worried that the monitors would interfere with the primary, but state officials said they behaved professionally and did not cause problems.

I'm not saying that Trump is powerless now -- immigrants who are being brutalized in various ways know that, as do many other Trump victims. But Trump couldn't get the SAVE Act through a Republican Congress. He deployed a plan to interfere with mail voting so late that he couldn't get it past a Republican Supreme Court. In July he delivered a prime-time speech charging China with election interference, then his administration seemed to drop that narrative, and today he's greeting President Xi Jinping on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, ahead of a two-day summit with the Chinese leader. There's no effective follow-through on election interference efforts.

This is why I think any attempted steal will come after the voting, not now or in the run-up to Election Day. Trump doesn't seem to have a well-developed plan. If he really wanted to do this, he needed to have a plan many months ago.

TRUMP IS SUFFERING MIDTERM EGO DEATH

On Saturday I quoted a video essay in which Jamelle Bouie argued that Donald Trump might have a muted response to Republican midterm losses because they're not all about him. Bouie said:

He's not literally on the ballot, and so losing doesn't constitute ego death. He sees it as a political challenge that he would like to avoid. He doesn't want to be impeached again. But as far as the kind of ego death that led him to do January 6th, for example, it doesn't apply here because he's not on the ballot. He's a simple man. And whether or not he is going to suffer ego death really does structure his response to things.

But as we're seeing from Trump's most recent attacks on the media, he's suffering ego death right now -- and it's midterm-related.

What is the press reporting on? Republicans' electoral struggles, and a likely blue wave. National news organizations love horserace coverage, so this is the main topic in the political press. And why are Republicans losing, according to this horserace coverage? Trump.

So even though Trump might tell himself that the GOP losers on Election Day have nothing to do with him, even though he might insist that they're losing because he's not on the ballot drawing infrequent voters to the polls, he knows he's being blamed. And he'll be blamed if Republicans losses are substantial. His ego really is on the line. He doesn't seem capable of rising above this. (I won't even discuss the possibility that he might absorb the losses like a grownup, because that's unimaginable.)

He banished CNN, MS NOW, and Politico reporters from the White House, then CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox refused to continue producing pool video, which left Trump "literally shouting into the wind on Monday as he cut the ribbon on his new helipad on the South Lawn of the White House, recorded only by a second-tier news broadcaster that could not capture his voice over the roar of Marine One," as Peter Baker of The New York Times reported. According to the familiar saying, there's no such thing as bad publicity, but Trump doesn't believe that -- he wants nothing but positive news reported. He's hearing that the polls for Republicans are bad and he's the reason, so he concludes that the problem isn't anything he's doing, but the fact that bad press exists. There oughta be a law against negative coverage of Trump! is literally his response to all this.

So he's definitely suffering ego death as a result of the midterms. But his response should give us hope, because it's weak and ineffectual. His staffers have now cobbled together something called Trump TV. It's pathetic. It's just a feed of random past presidential events -- old speeches, old Melania appearances -- and while it has more than 3 million subscribers on YouTube, only 1,947 people are watching it as I type this.



(To pick a random comparison, 21,544 people are currently tuned to "lofi hip hop radio 📚 beats to relax/study to," a YouTube music channel.)

All this suggests that Trump's brain has been fully Natalie Harp-ed. She feeds him nothing but happy hopium, and now he craves it 24/7. So if big midterm losses happen, he might lash out up to a point, the way he did at the three news outlets he banned, but what he'll seek most of all is self-soothing -- he'll want to be provided with something that offers him proof that America really, really loves him, no matter what the haters and losers (and voters) say. He might be so desperate for comfort that he won't have his usual energy for fighting.

That might prevent another January 6. It might prevent him from coordinating with GOP officials in the states to deny certification of Democrats' electoral victories. It might prevent him from coordinating with Mike Johnson on a strategy to replace the House clerk with someone who'll agree not to seat Democrats in January.

If I'm right about this, Trump might be fully Harp-brained now, and that's better for America than January 6-brained.

REPUBLICANS DIDN'T FLEE BUSH. WHY WOULD THEY FLEE TRUMP?

In The New Republic, Timothy Noah predicts that Donald Trump won't make it to the end of his term.

Even as some worry that Trump will defy the Constitution and run for a third term, I’ve come to doubt that he can finish his second.

Noah believes that a deus ex machina will spare us a full Trump second term, but it's a different deus ex machina from the one James Carville is counting on. Carville began arguing a while ago that Trump's poll numbers and standing within the Republican Party will decline so rapidly after the midterms that he'll make the rational decision to quit the presidency sometime early in 2027. (I strongly disagree, as I explained here last month.) Noah's deus ex machina is Trump's brain will finally turn to complete mush, an event pundits have been predicting since 2017 or so. It still hasn't happened.

But I don't want to argue again about Trump's mental fitness. The flaw in Noah's argument is his assumption that there will soon be common consent across the political spectrum that we've reached a crisis with Trump. Noah writes:

How long can this go on? Last week Thomas B. Edsall wrote in The New York Times that “no action to remove Trump from the White House will happen until he does something so threatening and damaging that drumming him out of the White House becomes an inescapable necessity.” But does anybody honestly think that day is far off?

Yes, I honestly think that day is far off. If "inescapable necessity" means "a course of action so necessary that even Republicans acknowledge the necessity," then I doubt that day will ever arrive.

Noah writes:

According to a Washington Post/Ipsos poll, belief that Trump already lacks the mental sharpness necessary to be president has risen from 43 percent in May 2023 to 59 percent in April 2026.

Is that evidence that the entire country thinks it's time for Trump to go? Only 24% of respondents in a July 2024 Pew poll believed that President Joe Biden was either "very" (4%) or "fairly" (20%) "mentally sharp"; earlier, in February 2024, 76% of respondents in an NBC News poll expressed concern about the possibility of "Joe Biden not having the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term." Yet there was no sense that removing him from office was "an inescapable necessity."

And in that Post poll, 87% of Republican respondents insisted that Trump does, in fact, have enough mental sharpness to serve as president.

Noah continues:

Trump’s approval rating has been sloping downward since his second inauguration; the decline has been gradual, but consistent, with approval falling from 48 percent to 36 percent. The all-time lowest presidential approval rating in history, according to Gallup, was President Harry Truman’s 23 percent in late 1951 and early 1952. Trump’s approval rating is on track to beat Truman’s humiliating record....

There is a point at which Trump’s approval number will fall so low, and make Trump such a liability to fellow Republican officeholders, that they’ll move to get rid of him. I don’t know what that number is, but I expect he’ll reach it during the first half of 2027.

But Truman finished his term, as did George W. Bush, whose approval rating fell below 30% in thirteen Gallup polls between April and December 2008. (He'd first fallen below 30% in a poll released in July 2007.) If by now Trump's numbers still haven't sunk below the mid- to high 30s, much less into the 20s, it's quite possible that he commands so much cult loyalty that even a dwindling MAGA fan base will keep his numbers well above Bush's or Truman's lows.

What would Trump have to do to make his removal "an inescapable necessity"? Noah suggests that a repeat of Trump's behavior after the 2020 election might do it.

If the midterms are as catastrophic for Republicans as political professionals expect, Trump’s political sway over his party will weaken dramatically, along with his ability to do mischief. Everything we know about Trump tells us he will not take that well. He’ll deny the midterm results as he denied the 2020 election, and will probably attempt some chicanery to keep newly-elected Democratic House and Senate members from being seated. I believe he will fail. But whether he succeeds or fails, anything Trump does to further subvert democracy will drive his approval ratings down further, and drive further upward the public’s conviction that he’s lost his marbles.

But until January 6, 2021, Trump's post-2020-election "chicanery" didn't "drive his approval ratings down further." Here are Trump's numbers for the last six months of his first term:

Only in January, when there was an actual riot, did Trump suffer a serious polling decline -- and as we now know, that was only temporary, because he'd turned 2020 into a Lost Cause and made himself even more appealing to his base.

The moment when all of America appeared to agree that January 6 was bad didn't last -- a month later, in the Senate trial after Trump's second impeachment, only seven out of fifty Republicans voted to convict Trump. Noah predicts another impeachment, and says that "this time I think the necessary 67 Senate votes will be gettable," but there's no reason to believe that.

Impeachment still might be a useful exercise if it leads to a trial that puts Trump's crimes and failings on display for voters who haven't kept up with Trump's record -- and if it forces Republicans to run in the future after having cast votes in Trump's defense.

But Republicans generally choose party loyalty, even at the cost of electoral doom. In the 2008 Republican primaries, it seemed reasonable to expect that at least one mainstream candidate might break from Bush on the widely hated Iraq War. But none did -- only Ron Paul, who'd opposed the war on isolationist grounds from the beginning, denounced it as a presidential candidate. The hawkish John McCain won the nomination and then suffered the worst president defeat in this century -- even though he was running against a Black man whose middle name was Hussein! -- but McCain did what he had to do as a Republican, which was to follow Cleek's Law:

Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.

Democrats hated Bush and the war, so Republicans had to be in favor of both. (It was only after Barack Obama continued the War on Terror in a modified form that Donald Trump could run as a war skeptic.)

Democrats hate Trump now, so Republican voters can't. Republican politicians who want to have ongoing careers can't, at least openly. So no matter how bad things get, they'll die on the Trump hill.

DO WE NEED TO BE GRATEFUL FOR TRUMP'S EGO? (updated)

No officeholder in American history has done more damage to the country than Donald Trump, but imagine how much additional damage Trump could do if he weren't fixated on ego-boosting projects like this:

The president, who is the [Kennedy Center’s] chairman, first announced in February that it would close for two years of renovations. Democratic lawmakers on the board said it was an excuse to avoid the humiliation of plummeting ticket sales and fleeing artists. Since then Mr. Trump has fought to add his name to the memorial to a slain president, drawing multiple court injunctions. When a judge denied him again last week, the president made his priority clear. He decreed that the closing would take place immediately but that the renovation would not begin until courts — potentially the Supreme Court — allow his name on the building front.

And this:

President Donald Trump on Sunday said his proposed 250-foot triumphal arch will now be a “top grade” military complex that will house drones, snipers and ammunition.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote that he has agreed to convert the arch “at the strong request” of the U.S. military, and “for National Security purposes.”

The “Military Complex/Triumphal Arch” near Arlington National Cemetery will “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage,” Trump wrote. “There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World.”

Maggie Haberman of The New York Times tells us that 70% of Trump's "mindspace" is on "renovations." And maybe we're lucky that that's true.

Yesterday I said that Trump might not be fully invested in the midterms because, in Jamelle Bouie's words, a loss for congressional Republicans won't result in "ego death" for Trump, who's not on the ballot. But more than that is going on. Trump's fixation on construction projects takes a lot of time out of his day. Look at today's New York Times story on Trump and the Kennedy Center and realize that this is what the Leader of the Free World does with his time when he should be doing the actual job of president:

Workers renovated Mr. Trump’s three theater boxes in the center, installing gold plumbing fixtures and tearing up newly laid tile whose color was not to the liking of the White House. In one email, a Kennedy Center staff member, Lisa Dale, alerted colleagues to Mr. Trump’s demand for a certain type of tree on campus: “Our Chairman loves maple trees and is insisting we plant maple trees from a very specific Grove by a very specific gardener. :) I actually love this about him!”

The president of the United States micromanaged these details. And while the story doesn't tell us anything about Trump's involvement in another aspect of the "renovation," you just know Trump's has spent hours paying very close attention to this:

This summer a series of unsigned, unattributed gold-plated reliefs appeared in the Reach, a newer Kennedy Center annex that is slated to remain open during the main building’s closure. The images depicted include Mr. Trump raising his fist after he survived a 2024 assassination attempt, the billionaire Elon Musk and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The artist is believed to be Trish Duggan, a major Trump donor.

The reliefs are godawful:

The proposal to turn Trump's arch into a military facility is almost certainly an effort to get it approved by the courts -- Trump's lawyers stressed the secure bunker below his proposed ballroom in court filings, and the Supreme Court allowed him to proceed with that project.

A fascist president who wasn't obsessed with projects that scream "ME! ME! ME!" would have spent much of the last year meeting with advisers and laying the groundwork for a successful executive branch takeover of the electoral system. Maybe this hypothetical smart fascist president would have taken away some of Stephen Miller's immigration goons and prepared to deploy them in large numbers to key precincts, or become more involved in Pete Hegseth's overhaul of the military, with the express purpose of ensuring that troops would dop his electoral bidding. Trump and his advisers might have written a SAVE Act that could get through Congress, might have begun implementing an executive order on mail balloting early enough that it wouldn't be shut down by the Supreme Court because it's impossible to implement in the required time. Instead of getting up every morning and thinking to himself, What do I need to do today that will glorify me?, Trump would wake up every day and think, What do I need to do today that will take power from everyone who has power and isn't me? He'd defy court rulings. He'd shut down courts. He grab power, not reach for glory.

So while the Trump presidency is shockingly awful, its authoritarianism is limited by Trump's narcissism. Let's hope America isn't run someday by a fascist who lacks this weakness.

*****

UPDATE: The photo above doesn't include the relief of Elon Musk. Here's the Musk relief:

It's supposed to be an arts center, they have been removing actual artwork and replacing it with this propaganda kitsch. 2/2

[image or embed]

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn.bsky.social) September 20, 2026 at 4:06 PM

IS TRUMP'S EGO REALLY NOT INVESTED IN THE MIDTERMS?

On Wednesday, Jamelle Bouie posted a video in which he argued that President Trump might not try very hard to interfere with the midterms. Bouie argued that Trump doesn't really care about the midterms because they're not all about him.

... I do think that we will be pleasantly surprised at how ordinary the midterm elections will be in terms of their conduct. And that's because Trump, the guy who is directing so much of this, ultimately doesn't care that much about the fate of Republicans. We saw this in 2018 during the last midterms. He's not literally on the ballot, and so losing doesn't constitute ego death. He sees it as a political challenge that he would like to avoid. He doesn't want to be impeached again. But as far as the kind of ego death that led him to do January 6th, for example, it doesn't apply here because he's not on the ballot. He's a simple man. And whether or not he is going to suffer ego death really does structure his response to things. It's why, as I've said a bunch, I'm actually much more worried about 2028 and January 2029 when the prospect of ego death emerges for him, and who knows what he'll do?

A Washington Post story today suggests that Bouie might be right, and that Trump, shockingly, might be accepting reality when he thinks about the midterms:

Trump in recent weeks has become sober about the gravity of the political situation, listening intently as he is presented with often discouraging polling, according to four people with knowledge of his recent comments, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations....

Trump has long dismissed unfavorable polls, fastening his attention on surveys that present him in an artificially positive light. He often says that negative surveys are fake and not to be believed. Increasingly, however, he has accepted his team’s polling that shows his and his party’s poor standing with voters, his advisers say.

Several of Trump’s advisers said they had become “increasingly blunt” with him, as one put it, and that in recent weeks he was listening to them about the electoral reality the GOP faces. It didn’t always translate to a good mood for Trump.

In other words, they show him bad polls and he has a temper tantrum, but he eventually accepts the numbers, according to these sources.

“He definitely feels like some of his decisions have led to the dynamics where he’s unpopular and things aren’t looking great for the midterms,” one of the people said.

A second person who confirmed Trump has subtly acknowledged some degree of responsibility for the situation noted that he has made similar remarks in public.

This strains credulity, but sure, maybe.

Another person in frequent communication with Trump about the midterms, however, pushed back on the notion that he has accepted any blame, saying he feels strongly that his not being on the ballot this year is the biggest problem the GOP faces.

Okay, that sounds like the Trump we all know. Bouie correctly points out that Trump didn't try to overturn the results of the 2018 midterms, in which Democrats won back the House but not the Senate, and his excuse for the GOP's poor showing was precisely this:

Despite frenetically campaigning, rallying and tweeting support for Republican candidates in the lead-up to the midterms, President Trump didn't take any responsibility for the GOP's losses in those elections in an interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace that aired Sunday.

"I have people that won't vote unless I'm on the ballot, OK?" Trump said, later noting, "My name wasn't on the ballot."

This year, he'll have other excuses as well: Congress wouldn't pass the SAVE Act, the Supreme Court wouldn't let him control mail balloting, and so on.

Trump has finally agreed to spend some of his MAGA Inc. PAC's money on Republicans running in midterm races, and he's doing some campaigning, but he's not "frenetically campaigning" the way he was in 2018. A passage in the Post story suggests that Trump's heart isn't in it, or that age is taking its toll:

And after months of his advisers saying that Trump was on the verge of incorporating weekly domestic travel into his 2026 schedule, Trump has now pledged to make personal appearances to campaign in 35 competitive races in key swing states. Trump and his team have said midterm campaign travel will pick up in frequency in October, though his advisers have acknowledged that they aren’t sure how many trips he actually will make, despite having drafted a travel schedule for him.

(Emphasis added.)

We're told that Trump

is unlikely to make a campaign stop next week, as he is scheduled to travel to New York on Monday and Tuesday for the United Nations General Assembly and then host Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington for a state visit on Wednesday and Thursday.

A vigorous Trump would campaign over the weekend. I guess that's not happening.

Bouie talks about Trump's efforts to stave off "ego death," and we see what he's doing along those lines: threatening the destruction of the Kennedy Center if his name isn't put on the facade, building the ballroom and the arch, reaching an agreement with Greenland so he can tell himself he won a huge foreign policy victory even though nothing much changed.

Trump's efforts to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico journalists from the White House are also intended to protect his precious ego. Yesterday he essentially told reporters that these news outlets were banned because they won't proclaim his greatness. Trump said:

I think that somebody has a right to keep them away, if they’re going to write false stories all the time. I don’t think I’ve had — look, I won the presidency. I won all seven swing states. I won the popular vote. I won 87% of the counties. That’s why the maps are all red when you look, except for two little blue lines on each side on each coast. I won a landslide, and I get no — I get I don’t get fair press. I get it from Breitbart. I get it from a little bit from Fox. Fox is the worst. I think Fox has, frankly, the worst polls in the whole business. I think they should have gotten rid of their pollsters years ago. They’ve been calling me wrong for ten years, but my polls have been very good. You know, I get good polls. I get good everything. But what I do ask is just a semblance of truth. CNN is fake news. MS NOW is fake news. They’re fake news. They know it. They’re put there for a reason. Politico was bailed out by our government from going out of business. I don’t know if it was $8 million or something, but they were given this massive subsidy prior to my coming into office, because they write only negative, you know, only negative. Now, we’ve done something that nobody’s ever done politically. I’ve had a political career like nobody else in history. On occasion, it would be nice if we had some fairness. It’s all fake news.

By now I expected Trump and the Republicans to be laying the groundwork for a reversal of the midterm results. I'm shocked that Republicans and the right-wing media aren't talking about reports in July that approximately 6600 non-citizens were erroneously registered to vote in New Jersey and 400 actually voted in 2023 and 2024. I would have expected that to get the kind of attention that right-wingers are giving to trans athletes, Hasan Piker, and the Lindsay Clancy case. Sure, the GOP says that Democrats will rig the election, but they're not saying it more than they've said it at any time in the Trump era (or the George W. Bush era, for that matter).

It's possible that this is because Trump is too immature to plan anything, and that after the election there might be a massive GOP effort to overturn election results. Ballots might be seized. Local officials who are loyal to Trump might refuse to certify Democratic victories. House Speaker Mike Johnson might fire the House's current non-partisan clerk during the lame-duck session and replace him with a GOP hack who'll agree not to seat multiple Democrats on January 3, 2027, as Republican lawyer Michael Luttig predicted in a recent New Republic article.

Jamelle Bouie's video is a response to thie Luttig article. Bouie points out, correctly, that it will be much harder for Republicans to do this if Democrats win a big House majority in November.

But maybe none of this will happen, or not enough of it to overturn the results, because everyone in the GOP is waiting to see what Trump will do and Trump isn't seriously preparing to challenge the results -- or try to prevent the midterms from taking place using self-proclaimed emergency powers. That might really be because his ego isn't directly involved.

TRANS-AVERSE DEMOCRATS ARE REMEMBERING 2024 ALL WRONG

Democrats are in a strong position going into the midterms, but they're still trying to calibrate their messaging as Americans are about to vote. Last week, Punchbowl News reported this after an appearance on a Punchbowl podcast by Mike Smith, president of the House Majority PAC:

... here’s something that stuck out to us the most: the House Democratic super PAC won’t spend a dime to elect Democrats who aren’t speaking about the economy or rising costs. This comes as HMP and other political organizations are beginning to make “cold-blooded decisions about when and where [they] actually spend.”

“We’ve been very clear to our candidates,” Smith said. “Anyone that’s not hyper-focused on cost of living and the economy as their No. 1 issue, don’t expect to see any support from House Majority PAC.”

On one hand, this PAC, which is linked to Democratic leaders in the House, says it won't fund a candidate unless the candidate is monomaniacally focused on the economy. On the other hand, parts of the Democratic establishment have clearly sent out the word that candidates in tough races should proactively distance themselves from trans people.

Yesterday, Erin Reed reported this:

Some [Democratic candidates] have tried to use weak and wishy-washy language toward transgender people, like James Talarico in Texas, who said he opposes transgender girls competing in girls' sports "if it endangers safety or fairness." Others have taken harder-line stances, like Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Iowa, who announced that he does not believe "biological males" should play women's sports and whose campaign said he opposes "taxpayer-funded sex changes." Today, however, brought what may be the most extreme anti-trans statement by a Democrat running for Congress in recent memory. Marcy Kaptur has released an ad announcing her support for anti-trans sports and school policies and casting transgender existence as an "ideology."

"My opponent won't talk about all that. He'd rather lie about my record. Here's the truth. I voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools, because parents know what's best for their kids. And boys should not play in girls' sports. Don't let them change the subject. I'm Marcy Kaptur, and I approve this message because I'm focused on making your life more affordable," says the ad, released today.

#OH09: Incumbent Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D) is up on TV with this response spot --

Kaptur to camera:

"We're stuck in another unnecessary war and inflation is making everything worse. But, my opponent won't talk about all that. He'd rather lie about my record"

"Well, here's the… pic.twitter.com/SncdXUndq4

— Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) September 17, 2026

Kaptur's boast about voting against trans athletes is wedged between references to the Iran war and affordability, so the focus is, arguably, on pocketbook issues. But why make this ad at all?

I'll acknowledge that Kaptur is in a tough race. A Bluesky poster who calls her an "incumbent with a 5 point polling lead" misstates her vulnerability -- she won her race in 2024 by less than a percentage point, and Ohio's mid-decade redistricting subsequently made her district more Republican, which initially led the Cook Political Report to describe the district as "Lean R." (The race, according to Cook, is now a "Toss-up.") Kaptur is in a real fight.

But does anti-trans messaging really work for Republicans?

It's widely believed that it worked in the 2024 presidential race. Say it with me now, everyone: Kamala is for they/them. But we're not remembering those anti-Harris ads correctly if that's all we rememnber, because the ads included specifics that don't apply to Democrats running this year.

Here are two of the ads:





These ads don't say that Harris is generally pro-trans. They emphasize her support (during the 2020 campaign, but that's never mentioned), for taxpayer-funded gender-confirmation surgery for prisoners. In the interview clip that's used, she's emphatic about this.

The candidates who are running scared from trans rights need to realize that Harris was unusually easy to attack on the issue because of the specifics of this clip. If you're a Democratic candidate and there isn't a clip of you advocating this policy, you're much less vulnerable than Harris was.

(The first ad also asserts that she supported taxpayer-funded surgery "for illegal aliens.")

And don't forget the tag line from these ads -- and I mean the entire tag line:

Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.

Apart from the 38% of Trump dead-enders, no one can seriously believe that Trump -- or any Republican -- "is for you." Not now. Republicans are for an unwinnable war, inflationary tariffs, gas approaching $5 a gallon and diesel over $6. It's not 2024, when voters were still responding to the inflation spike in the middle of Joe Biden's term and had vague memories of a decent economy in the first three years of Trump's first term.

It was obvious even last year that other Democrats weren't as vulnerable on this issue as Harris had been in 2024. Reed writes today:

Even before the current potential wave election took shape, recent elections indicated that the anti-trans panic is no longer effective. In Virginia's election last year, Republican candidate Winsome Earle-Sears blanketed the airwaves with anti-trans ads, with 57% of all of her ads targeting transgender people. In a race that was supposed to be close, Earle-Sears lost by 15 points. Likewise, similar ads went up in New Jersey against Mikie Sherrill, who won by 13 points in a race that was similarly expected to be neck and neck. Anti-trans ads also failed to flip Wisconsin Supreme Court seats in three consecutive races.

I agree with Evan Urquhart, who has looked at the polling on this issue and recently told The New Republic's Perry Bacon:

We’ve seen a clear shift to the right, as the right has made attacks on transgender people central to their policy, central to their platforms. And when we’re thinking about this polling, it’s absolutely true that the right has succeeded in convincing people that there’s some sort of problem going on with trans people in sports.

They have not succeeded in convincing people that this matters. It ranks consistently the absolute bottom of people’s issue priorities.

(Emphasis added.)

As Reed notes, even Republicans are beginning to realize that this issue isn't the magic bullet they thought it was after 2024.

... there is one group that stands out among the rest for its long history in this arena: the American Principles Project. The organization could be considered the progenitor of the phenomenon of Republican politicians targeting transgender people in political ads to win elections.... Now, the organization has released a new memo to candidates in 2026, announcing that while it still believes these ads are important for Republicans to run, they "may not be sufficient" for Republicans to win in 2026....

“There is no question that Republicans face significant headwinds in the upcoming midterms. Past political trends alone dictate that the party of the sitting president typically loses congressional seats, regardless of the environment. The current conventional wisdom seems to favor a similar outcome this November. But even at this late hour, the past need not be prologue. While Democrats may be on the offensive, recent message testing we have conducted in several key swing states suggest that they remain vulnerable on culture-war issues, particularly in their support for transgender ideology and so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) policies. Still, pressing the advantage on these issues alone, while important, may not be sufficient. Republicans must also make the case to families on what they plan to do to help improve their economic standing,” reads the memo from the American Principles Project.

(Emphasis Reed's.)

The country has moved to the right. Democrats have some vulnerability on this issue. But watch the anti-Harris ads. The circumstances that made her vulnerable don't apply to this year's candidates. I wonder if Democratic consultants think the issue is more salient now than Republicans believe it is.