To be clear, this is a shortened version of the president’s speech, which omits both a lengthy explanation of how he originally decided to take the cognitive test and a discussion of his late uncle, the physicist John Trump, who had “the genetics of motion” and “the genetics of intelligence” and “was just named the first professor in MIT’s history.”
Trump has spoken for nearly an hour at the rally but has made no effort to address the issues that drove this election — voters across the political spectrum unhappy with his promise to lower high prices on his first day as president, only to have them continue to rise as he pledged not to start a war. When he did mention the economy, everything was in the golden age – this and I – it was awesome -. “We are getting rich in this country,” Trump insisted, speaking so firmly that he sounded as if he was thinking about his ballooning bank account. On a less optimistic note, he warned that if the Democrats returned to power, the United States would face a bleak future of “open borders,” “transgender people for everyone,” and a “1929-style economic depression.”
Obama, both as a candidate and as president, has always been good at telling hard truths. Trump remains the opposite in this, as in so many other ways. If there was a problem with reality, he would create an alternative. “Now you have the hottest country in the world,” he told the cheering crowd in Ohio. Pitchers never stop pitching.
Two presidents, two Americas. For a long decade, our politics has revolved around the vast gulf between these two men and the near-impossible task of trying to understand how a country that elected Obama twice could do the same for Trump so soon after. Watching the two of them Wednesday night, switching between screens and parallel universes as they took shots at each other, was a reminder of how long we’ve been stuck in this cycle.
What’s different this time is a sense — and it’s just a sense until the votes are counted and the election is held — that real-world events have stepped in to make the country less of an intractably divided country and more of a place where at least some shared truths still exist. Perhaps the biggest, most galvanizing fact is that the price is too high, and the corollary is that Trump has no one to blame but himself. Going into the midterm elections, the United States is not a country ranked among 550 countries on these issues; Sixty percent or more of the people in this country disapprove of the president and do not support his policies.
David Plouff, the strategist who helped Obama win the White House in 2008, recently observed that when there is a big wave in American politics, it is almost impossible for individual politicians to swim against the current. “Voters just shut you out, and that’s what’s happening now,” he said in an interview at the New Yorker Festival. “When you’re in an overwhelming situation, your political funding and your political advertising don’t have the ability to compete with reality.”
He and others on the political spectrum believe that’s what’s happening now with Trump and his fellow Republicans. The idea is so entrenched in Washington that much of the discussion here is about the infighting that has broken out among Democrats over how to run Congress, and now everyone thinks the party will soon win. In prediction markets, Democrats currently have a 68% chance of winning the Senate and a 92% chance of Democrats winning the House of Representatives.