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.