TRUMP'S FOX NEWS BRAIN MIGHT LEAD TO HIS DOWNFALL

Here's a headline at Axios right now:

Trump says GOP would never lose an election again if filibuster is eliminated

What exactly did the president say? I went to the transcript of his remarks at a White House meeting with Viktor Orbán. He said:

Here's some of the things that we pass if we terminated the filibuster, voter ID, no mail in voting, no cash bail, no men in women's sports, no welfare for illegals. You could go on and on. This is two pages of things I would do if you did that. Without it, I don't know that you passed anything because you can't deal with them [Democrats].

A bit later, he said:

And if we do it, we will never lose the midterms and we will never lose the general election because we will have produced so many different things for our people, for the people, for the country, that it would be impossible to lose an election.

(Senate Republicans, of course, don't want to eliminate the filibuster.)

Some presidents change course after bad off-year elections. In 2006, when George W. Bush suffered what he called a midterm "thumping," he fired his widely reviled defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Barack Obama called his party's losses in the 2010 midterms a "shellacking." The following summer, he attempted to negotiate a "grand bargain" with congressional Republicans that would have included significant cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in return for increased taxes on the wealthy.

Will Trump pivot after Tuesday's blowout? Nahhh.

His remarks confirm the fact that he thinks Democrats win elections dishonestly because mail voting exists and not every locale requires an ID to vote. He simply doesn't believe that the public ever gets fed up with him or his party. He also said,

The Democrats are good at a few things, cheating on elections and conning people with facts that aren't true.

Trump rattled off assertions about prices in America, in an effort to prove that Democratic candidates' focus on affordability was dishonest. Nearly everything he said was a lie. Nevertheless, he insisted that Democrats are the liars. When Trump accused Democrats of "cheating on elections," he clearly included these (non-)lies as acts of cheating. But he primarily believes that Democrats cheat procedurally.

Trump also believes that the average American's list of political priorities exactly matches the list in every Fox viewer's head: "no cash bail, no men in women's sports, no welfare for illegals." Those are, in fact, fairly popular GOP positions. But voters didn't vote on them in 2024, because they're broke. They care about the economy.

Day to day, it's bad for Americans that Trump doesn't see any reason to moderate his views. It's bad that he believes everyone loves what he's doing and wants him to continue. Trump's policies are hurting Americans profoundly.

But politically, it's excellent news for the Democrats. It suggests that Trump won't change, because the most influential commentators in his bubble keep telling him that all of America wants what hardcore Republicans want.

And oddly, he doesn't seem to want to shut down the electoral process or make it Orbánesque or Putinesque. His administration is investigating Democratic institutions such as ActBlue, but he seems to believe that simply tweaking the voting process and passing a 100% Fox News agenda would lead his party to glorious victories. So it's possible that we'll have legitimate elections in 2026, with a persistently unpopular Trump effectively on the ballot, because he really can't believe the public hates him.