My pet theory right now is that President Trump is not trying to win the midterm elections.Many people agree with Klein. They see a president who's focused on construction projects and the SAVE America Act rather than affordability and assume he's not thinking about motivating voters.
... if he wanted to win the midterms, he’d be moving to the center. He’d be focusing on the things that Americans are angry about, disappointed in him about. He’d be supporting the strongest Republicans in contested races and doing everything he could to bolster Republicans in vulnerable states and districts.
He’s not doing even a little bit of that.
It's widely assumed that House and Senate Republicans are different. They passed a bipartisan housing bill! They're at least trying to seem like a party that wants to help people!
But they're not all that different from the president. You really need to understand that this is their idea of an election pitch:
Former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci will appear before the Senate this week for a hearing. Leading up to his appearance, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released thousands of pages of Fauci’s diary entries from 2020 to 2022.Right now, normal people care about gas prices, grocery and housing costs, produce that causes explosive diarrhea, and other concerns related to the world we live in right now. But this story, about a government official who retired nearly four years ago, is a right-wing media obsession now. Here's just a sample of the headlines:
* Amanda Macias, Fox News: Fauci's Newly Released Covid Diaries Reveal Bizarre Fixation on Fame as Pandemic Deaths MountedAnd on and on.
* Bob Hoge, RedState: Fauci's Diary Reveals Astonishing Level of Sycophantic Groveling by the Legacy Media
* Alana Mastrangelo, Breitbart: Actress Patricia Heaton on Fauci Diaries: Lying COVID Tyrant Was ‘Exulting in His Fame’ While We Were Locked Down
* Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire: The Hero Complex That Held America Hostage: For Anthony Fauci, it was Anthony Fauci and his ego, everywhere, all of the time.
* Hans Mahncke, The Federalist: 10 Questions for Congress to Ask Fauci About His Covid Corruption and Coverup
Why this now? Why these hearings now? No one's going to get Fauci to change his mind about the origin of the virus -- he still believes it emerged naturally, not from a lab, as do many other experts. He won't denounce the government's efforts to minimize death and suffering during the worst of the COVID pandemic, when -- it should be noted -- he was working for Donald Trump, not a Democrat. (Fauci was serving as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a job to which he'd been appointed during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.) The facts of his career don't matter -- to the GOP base, Fauci in 2020 represents Democrats in 2026.
Will these revelations and hearings really inspire voters in the Republican Party's grievance-collector base to turn out in November? Hard to know, but Republicans need something, as The Washington Post noted a couple of days ago:
Republican pollsters and political groups are raising the alarm that their party faces a listless and demotivated base ahead of November’s midterm elections....Apart from that housing bill, Republicans have nothing positive to offer their own voters. So they're giving them hate. We'll see if it works.
The lack of enthusiasm is reaching deep into Republicans’ loyal base, spreading to the party’s most consistent voters — who have shown up to vote in all of the past four primaries and general elections, according to an analysis done by Americans for Prosperity Action, a conservative super PAC affiliated with billionaire Charles Koch....
About 1 in 5 reliable Republican base voters are at risk this November, according to Nathan Nascimento, executive director at AFP Action.
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