Trump’s Bizarre Closing Message to Voters

Jonathan Lemire: “Modern political history offers few examples of closing arguments that appear more out of touch, self-defeating, or downright bizarre than what Donald Trump has offered his fellow Republicans ahead of next week’s midterm elections. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan told voters to consider Jimmy Carter’s presidency and ask themselves, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?,’ it helped turn a tight race into a Reagan landslide.”

“But many stretch-run messages prove deeply ineffective and are quickly forgotten. Ahead of the 1998 midterms, Republicans went all in on investigations that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton only to be rebuked by voters. President Obama’s insistence in 2010 that the country was coming out of the financial crisis led to his party enduring a ‘shellacking.’ And during the 2018 midterms, Trump and his fellow Republicans tried to stoke fears about an alleged caravan of migrants headed toward the United States, only to have skeptical voters hand the House of Representatives to Democrats.”

“This time around, Trump’s primary rationale for why voters should support the GOP, as best I can tell, is that the affordability crisis is a ‘hoax,’ Bill Maher is a ‘loser,’ and Senator Jon Husted of Ohio has a nice physique. That easy-to-mock message has been accompanied by a staggering number of missteps.”