TRUMP'S MEDIA BAN IS WORKING PERFECTLY -- FOR HIM

The Atlantic's Quinta Jurecic believes that President Trump's efforts to prevent Politico, CNN, and MS NOW reporters from covering him has been a failure and an embarrassment for him:

Last Friday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he would ban journalists from the three outlets from the White House “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” The reporters promptly sued; in the meantime, the television networks responsible for White House pool coverage suspended that work. The counterproductive result was an odd several days during which Trump went without the traditional passel of reporters hanging on his every word.

Jurecic says the press-pool boycott revealed Trump's "impotence." The New Republic's Timothy Noah agrees:

It quickly became apparent that the news networks possessed all the leverage. This was demonstrated most hilariously on Monday when the White House website’s livestream of a Trump gaggle, in which Trump cut the ribbon on a new White House helipad, was inaudible.... Trump ... lost access to a huge distribution network on which he relies to spread his utterances, however inane, across the globe.

As does The New Republic's Greg Sargent. He quotes a Trump Truth Social post:

CNN and MSDNC, to show you how fake they are, today refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years, the arrival at the White House of the Highly Respected President of China, Xi Jinping, and his beautiful wife, Madam Peng. The event was magnificent — Actually made for Television but, because they’re Fake News, and because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to “TRUMP,” they refused to be there.

Sargent writes:

Though a judge has now temporarily blocked Trump’s ban, the immediate result of the pool suspension was that the participating networks didn’t film Xi’s arrival. So there was no widely aired coverage of Trump’s grand ceremonial reception of him—hence his fury.

In angrily pretending the news organizations boycotted the event to deny him attention during a successful moment, all Trump really demonstrated is that he badly needs their attention. Thus, their decision to join together in defense of excluded colleagues has located a real weak spot—and nailed it with a direct hit. That’s the true source of his furious outburst.

But if the battle with the three news organizations backfired on Trump, why is he trying to prolong it?

First there was this on Thursday, after Judge Timothy Kelly (a Trump appointee) ordered the ban lifted:

When the press arrived at the White House gates ... the reporters from the three disfavored outlets were still barred from entering.... the TV press pool refused to resume operations until [Friday] morning. The result was that Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s state visit to the White House yesterday took place without any American live television coverage. Trump also barred some—though, confusingly, not all—CNN and MS NOW journalists from covering the state dinner, which does not directly violate Kelly’s order but could land the White House back in the courtroom.

And now there's this:

The White House on Friday night blocked CNN from accompanying President Trump on a Saturday trip to Tennessee, a network spokeswoman confirmed....

The decision immediately raised the question of whether the television pool would cover the president’s trip. The TV pool, a rotating group of networks that share the work of filming the president’s daily activities, had boycotted those responsibilities this week after Mr. Trump first banned CNN from participating in the pool.

If, as Sargent says, news organizations are hurting Trump where he's most vulnerable -- his desperate need for attention -- then why is he continuing to put the media's pool coverage at risk?

The answer is obvious: Trump might not be getting his ordinary coverage from the press pool, but his fight with the media is getting massive amounts of media attention. The world's neediest attention seeker is getting the attention he seeks.

The main battle Trump is fighting right now -- the war with Iran -- isn't going very well, so Trump is picking a different battle, with the media, an enemy he knows his (shrinking) base hates. The base loves this, and loves Trump for picking this fight.

However, I don't see how this helps Trump's party as midterm voting begins. The GOP's numbers just get worse and worse, as do Trump's numbers. But he doesn't care. He's just seeking love from the voters who haven't abandoned him.

*****

Trump seems to be doing that a lot these days. The Washington Post notes today that instead of campaigning for an embattled Republican or two this weekend, Trump is focusing on sports:

President Donald Trump has vowed to go all-out campaigning for Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections, which he has said could decide the fate of the country.

But first: it’s time for golf and college football.

Trump is set to travel to Tennessee on Saturday to watch a high-profile clash between the University of Texas and University of Tennessee’s college football teams....

The president will then head to a golf club outside Chicago for Sunday’s final round of the President’s Cup tournament, where he will serve as honorary chairman.

He's not campaigning.

His trips to Tennessee and Illinois are not expected to swing local races. Neither state is expected to be key to determining the outcome of November’s midterms. Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election prognosticator, does not identify a single House seat in either state as a toss-up or otherwise in play.

And when he's scheduled to resume campaigning, he's traveling to friendly territory, not to battlegrounds:

Next week, the president is set to resume campaigning, but in Oklahoma and Alabama, two deeply red states.

Oh, but this is totally about the midterms.

Republican officials say they hope those appearances will spill over into media markets in neighboring states, Texas and Florida.

So why not just go to Texas and Florida?

Trump is laser-focused on self-soothing. You can see that from his travel schedule. And fighting with the media is part of that, even when he loses in court.

IS THIS AN ANTI-REPUBLICAN WAVE OR AN ANTI-STATUS-QUO WAVE?

Yesterday, Nate Silver wrote this:

A New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll out this morning had some disappointing news for Democrats, with Susan Collins leading Troy Jackson by 3 points in Maine.

Other NYT polls had Democrats ahead by 5 points in Michigan and New Hampshire. Still, this poll feels like a “heat check” for Democrats....

Polls have shown Democrats massively overperforming in red states, especially in the Midwest....

By contrast, though, Democrats’ polling has been pretty “mid” in blue states.

Sure, maybe Collins, as one of the few truly moderate members left in Congress, is an exception to the throw-the-bums out mood. The other NYT polls were perfectly fine for Democrats....

In some ways, it’s more surprising to see Chris Pappas only ahead by 5 points in New Hampshire — or Peggy Flanagan in a close-ish race in Minnesota, or Kathy Hochul struggling to achieve a double-digit lead in New York. (Though other polls disagree there.)

So if you take the polls at face value, we’re seeing a blue wave that’s … overwhelmingly concentrated in red states.

The Times poll of Maine is, as the paper's Nate Cohn admits, an outlier -- both the University of New Hampshire and the University of Massachusetts have just released polls showing Jackson beating Collins. But the Democratic leads are modest -- 4 points in the UNH poll, 5 points in the UMass poll.

Democrats are beating past performance in red states by double digits. Why not in blue states?

I think two things are happening this year: many voters are eager to punish President Trump, and many voters are eager to vote against the status quo. In red states -- Ohio, Iowa, Texas -- those motives combine to help Democrats. If you're an anti-Trump and anti-GOP partisan, you're especially motivated to vote Democratic this year -- and if you're not a partisan but you think this country is going to hell in a handbasket, you want to blow the system up. The system where you live is Republican, and has been for years. So you want to vote Democratic, too.

But in blue America, "blow up the system" voters see Democrats as the system. I think that's what's keeping some Democrats in Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan, Minnesota, and New York from achieving strong showings in the polls.

I'm being somewhat flexible in my definition of "blue America." New Hampshire isn't really blue -- it has a Republican governor and a Republican House and Senate. But the state's entire congressional delegation is Democratic (the Senate seat is currently held by retiring Democrat Maggie Hassan), and it's a very small state surrounded by other strongly Democratic states. Nearly one in six New Hampshire workers work out of state, and most of those commuters work in very blue Massachusetts. New England is regionally blue. So voting Democratic doesn't seem like a way to blow up the system.

In Maine, Susan Collins has always managed to persuade a large portion of the electorate that she's different from the rest of the system. Those voters don't want to blow her up. And in New Hampshire, the Republican Senate candidate is a member of the widely admired Sununu family. So my template doesn't fit every blue or blue-ish state perfectly. But in general, I think it explains why Democrats aren't running away with many Northern-state elections.

A Democratic wave election seems extremely likely this year even though much of America is wary of the Democratic Party. That's because voters are very angry at Trump and very angry at the system. Democrats haven't improved their image much. They haven't established a strong identity that's being embraced by the voters. It's going to work out this year, but in the long term they'll need to be seen as a party that stands for popular, compelling ideas, and they'll need to show results. They're overperforming this year because they're out of power nationally and locally in many places, at a time when millions of people hate the majority of people in power.

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

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