“The grass in front of the White House was a very inferior grass for many, many years, and now it’s beautiful,” President Donald Trump said during his “closing” message to voters Monday before the midterm elections.
“Look, it is not an easy thing,” Trump added, turning to his campaign to fix the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, which, judging by Trump’s attention to it, ranks among his top priorities this term. “The algae is brutal. It forms easily. … The green, that’s not grass, that’s algae. It took over the entire pool.”
Politically minded people everywhere stood slack-jawed as the president, sporting his white USA ballcap, lingered on these frivolities at such a moment. Didn’t he know that his second term’s Judgment Day was less than 24 hours away? Hadn’t he heard that America was in a dark mood and ready to deliver his presidency a swift, clean blow?
Nobody should have been surprised. This is a man who made his fortune selling bulls*** by putting his name on cheap things in big brass letters. Politics, and eventually the nation itself, became his biggest sales job, and the product was always the same: himself.
“I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves,” Trump said in his 2016 nomination acceptance speech. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
A decade later, it’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly has been fixed — the White House lawn notwithstanding.
Voters on Tuesday weren’t in a bulls***-buying mood. The thrashing was historic: Republicans lost everything. The Midwest. The South. Texas. The map of blue arrows showing the shift since 2024 looked like a blizzard.
In Kansas — that’s right, Kansas — pastor Adam Hamilton became the first Democrat the state has sent to the Senate since the Herbert Hoover administration.
In South Carolina, Annie Andrews beat Republican Darline Graham, the late Lindsey Graham’s sister and Trump’s handpicked successor. In North Carolina, former Gov. Roy Cooper walloped another of Trump’s picks, Michael Whatley, by nearly 20 points.
Michigan and Maine went so far as to send a pair of socialists into the world’s greatest deliberative body. That’s how badly voters wanted to rebuke the president.
And in Texas, James Talarico trounced another of Trump’s handpicked nominees, Attorney General Ken Paxton. Trump, the GOP, and outside groups poured nearly half a billion dollars into this race. But no amount of money could cover for Trump and Paxton’s bulls***.
(Washington Examiner illustration/Getty Images)
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(Washington Examiner illustration/Getty Images)
When asked this morning by Fox News anchor Bret Baier whether he regretted endorsing Paxton and other losers, Trump was candid: “I just wasn’t a big fan of Cornyn. … I found him to be a disloyal guy. He was not a fan of mine. When it wasn’t fashionable, he wasn’t there.”
“I could say that about a lot of people. I could say that about you,” he added to Baier, as if his threat still matters in a nation that just made him a lame duck in every sense.
This insistence on living in a false reality — one where everything he touches turns to gold, political gravity doesn’t apply to him, and personal loyalty to him is the measure of all things — is the most troubling sign as the nation enters the final two years of his presidency.
It’s not merely a political problem; it’s a national liability. The awesome power of the executive, even in a divided government, means the president can still wage war, upend markets, and pardon allies without asking anyone’s permission. It is vital to the interests of the United States that the president live in reality.
In that same speech Monday, Trump repeated his biggest bulls*** boast: “This is the golden age of America. It’s a Golden Age of America. We have a country that we can be proud of again.”
Voters disagreed emphatically. Two-thirds said that Trump’s governance has made the economy worse. Sixty-five percent said Trump’s tariffs have hurt the national economy, while only 22% said they helped.
On immigration, Trump governed on a mandate that existed only in his head. Voters asked for order at the border, and he took it as license to send masked agents to sweep up longtime residents with no criminal records. The mass deportation program was chaotic and ugly, and it squandered his advantage on the issue. NBC News’s exit poll, mirroring public polling in the past year, found voters disapproved of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s performance at a 60-40 clip.
As for the war in Iran that Trump has repeatedly claimed to have won already (“Total and complete victory. No question about it,” he told a reporter in April), voters, who live in reality and can see plainly that we haven’t won, saw it differently.
Today, the Right is predictably lobbing bombs at itself, with each faction blaming others for the rout. National conservatives blame the traditional hawks for Iran, while traditional conservatives blame the national conservatives for tariffs and mass deportations. The argument will persist until Trump’s successor is nominated in 2028. It will be a ferocious battle of ideas, and one that is long overdue.
But the Right can’t begin to fix this disaster until it snaps out of fairyland and back into reality. That means refusing to indulge the president’s bulls*** about living in the golden age, rather than clapping and nodding like good little apparatchiks. It also means correcting him publicly and not letting his delusions go unchallenged. The GOP can no longer afford to be the party of the bulls*** golden age.
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Trump is now a spent political force. He retains immense power, but there is nothing to be gained by continuing to march to his drum. This morning on X, Vice President JD Vance appeared to acknowledge as much by charting his own path forward for the GOP, one at odds with Trump’s delusions of grandeur.
No more clapping for bulls*** — let that be the Right’s rallying cry.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
