TRUMP WANTS TO PROJECT FAKE GREATNESS SO HE CAN TAKE CREDIT FOR A FAKE ELECTORAL VICTORY

As Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Isaac Arnsdorf of The Washington Post note, presidents who are struggling in the polls as midterm elections approach generally recognize that some voters don't like them and adjust their campaign strategy accordingly.

... recent presidents ... when their popularity sagged, generally gave endangered members of their own party room to run away from them.

In 2006, [George W.] Bush largely confined his late campaigning to places where Republicans believed he could still help, while vulnerable GOP candidates advertised their independence from him and avoided appearances with him. Eight years later, Barack Obama watched endangered Democrats criticize his policies, skip his visits and keep him out of some of the states where they faced the toughest races.

President Joe Biden made that accommodation almost a running joke. During the 2022 midterms, as some vulnerable Democrats kept their distance from an unpopular White House, Biden frequently told candidates: “I’ll come campaign for you or against you — whichever will help the most.”

Not Donald Trump this year.

Next week, as primaries give way to a perilous general election campaign for vulnerable Republicans, Trump will headline two nights of a GOP political convention in Dallas. Over the next two months, his super PAC plans to run advertisements that feature his name and play up his political record. And although he will not appear on any ballot in the midterms, he has told voters they should behave as if he is.

His interpretation of his record is ... well, delusional. “We had the greatest economy in the history of our country in my first term,” he said, at a recent Las Vegas rally. “But this is blowing it away.”

This isn't completely insane, says Tevi Troy, a presidential historian.

“What we’ve seen over the course of the past decade is, when Trump is on the ballot, you get better turnout if you’re a Republican,” Troy said.

But when polls are showing that more voters disapprove of your job performance than approve of it in 47 out of 50 states, efforts to turn out your own base run the risk of turning out the Democratic base in larger numbers.

Beyond inspiring base turnout, there's a second explanation for what Trump is doing: he's the most egomaniacal person who's ever lived, and he's massaging that ego. But I see a third explanation.

We know that Trump sees only two possible outcomes for the midterms. They're the same two outcomes anticipated by Charles Foster Kane's New York Inquirer during Kane's run for governor in the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane:



The party of Trump might cheat its way to victory in the midterms if the Supreme Court upholds Trump's restrictions on mail voting. Trump might rig elections by seizing ballots or intimidating voters at the polls. Or he might be helped by Republican election officials who refuse to certify Democratic victories, or congressional Republicans who refuse to seat Democrats.

Or Democrats might trounce Republicans. In response to that outcome, Trump and other Republicans will assert that they were the victims of massive Democratic voter fraud (which they somehow can't prove).

One way or another, Trump anticipates a Republican victory -- or at least anticipates an outcome he'll describe as a Republican victory.

I don't know exactly how delusional Trump is. I don't know if he'll really believe that a blue-wave election is actually a Republican triumph, or if he'll merely believe that he can sell that fiction to his gullible superfans. But he expects to announce a triumph -- and he wants to be the one responsible. Even if the "victory" is a total illusion, he wants to say that he gets the credit for it, not the Republicans who are actually on the ballot.

Yes, this is the sort of thing that would occur only to a very diseased mind. But I'm convinced that that's how Trump's mind is working right now.