特朗普的“为了你”总统任期最终完全围绕他自己展开。这正在伤害共和党

Trump’s ‘for you’ presidency became all about himself. It’s hurting the GOP

2026-10-07T04:00:44.728Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/07/politics/trump-rallies-2026-election-republicans

The ad that defined the 2024 election said “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Two years on, it’s mostly about him.

The scathing jab at the Democratic nominee did not just attack her positions on transgender issues. It positioned her opponent as the only one listening to Americans’ pleas for help with high food and housing prices.

But a return to the gold-draped Oval Office and a personal construction spree immortalizing his legacy seem to have distracted President Donald Trump from such concerns — which in some ways have gotten worse as a result of his policies.

And Trump’s accelerated campaign swing, so far stopping in Texas, Ohio, Alabama and Nebraska — ostensibly meant to help GOP midterm election candidates — is featuring undisciplined and self-referential appearances that trigger political firestorms but produce few answers to the critical question of the election.

In recent days, Trump trampled his party’s campaign message by igniting a furor over whether he’d suggested Iran could “take out” San Diego or Los Angeles. Democrats’ responses did not accurately reflect the context. But his intemperance gave them a chance to dominate the narrative on one of the declining days before the election.

Trump is also bitterly complaining that Fox News isn’t being fair. He launched another controversy by using taxpayer cash for campaign-style ads; used an anti-transgender slur against a Democratic candidate in South Carolina; and told a weekend crowd in Ohio the GOP would shove an election win up the rival party’s “ass.”

Touting a shipbuilding project Tuesday in Maryland, he bafflingly extemporized about rechristening the “fake media” the “artificial” media after freeing up the word by dubbing artificial intelligence “super intelligence.”

Trump has never stuck to the script. In fact, his verbal improvisations have often been a political strength. Yet the off-the-cuff riffs and taunts that once marked him as the ultimate outsider eviscerating the political system now risk becoming a liability as voters blame him for high prices, a Middle East quagmire and their thwarted hopes.

And in a midterm election turning on the unpopularity of his presidency and apparent denial over the haves-and-have-nots economy, his intensifying campaign blitz — mostly so far in red states — seems to lack a strategy. There’s also no evidence it’s having the intended impact, though he claimed on Truth Social on Tuesday that he was “flipping races all over the place.”

Four weeks from an election in which Democrats only need a handful of seats to win back the House, and as a close battle for the Senate goes down to the wire, Trump is being as good as his word to make the campaign about him. And he may be letting Democrats — who still lack voters’ trust, polls show — off the hook.

He’s siding with tech billionaires in telling Americans they must embrace AI data centers, which many voters loathe for their vast footprint on the landscape and for guzzling electricity and water. During a trip to boost Republicans in Nebraska on Monday, he seemed unsympathetic to ranchers angry at his move to pause tariffs on tens of thousands of tons of foreign beef to bring national prices down, saying they’d be in “big trouble if Democrats win.” In Baltimore on Tuesday, he boasted about stocks that keep hitting record highs — benefiting the richest Americans most. And he told families who dread every visit to a gas station that it’s a “small price to pay” to keep Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon — though he’d claimed to have obliterated Tehran’s nuclear capacity before launching the war.

When the president does have good news to tout, such as the $5 billion infrastructure investment by South Korea’s Hanwha Group in Philadelphia, he styles it as a personal triumph rather than embroidering a narrative about how such successes can create an economy that helps working Americans. His scattershot method rarely shows off achievements like higher-than-expected tax refunds and initiatives to cut the cost of medicine and housing in their best light.

Incumbent presidents always face a balancing act in midterms, especially when voters blame them for economic conditions. But rather than explaining the reality and offering ways to improve it, the president often conjures a fresh one.

“This is the golden age of America,” he said Tuesday. “We’re doing numbers that nobody ever thought were possible.” This doesn’t only ignore polls like one released Sunday by CBS/YouGov that found 70% of voters think his policies are hiking grocery prices. It’s a gift for Democrats when gasoline averages $4.36 a gallon, diesel is around $6.30 a gallon and mortgage rates just topped 7%.

“The president is showing, which is not unusual, that he is living in a bubble,” Michigan Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell told CNN’s Audie Cornish on Monday, specifically referring to AI data centers but exemplifying Trump’s wider issues.

Whether he’s foisting weak candidates on Republicans in states such as Texas and Georgia or insisting that his party elevate a president with an approval rating in the 30s, Trump’s entire approach to the midterms seems unwise.

“I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” the president pleaded with voters at his rally in Alabama last week, delighting Democratic strategists.

But could there be some method in his maelstrom?

Trump would probably be wasting his time by wooing moderate and independent voters as polls show them drifting away. In swing Senate races in places like Maine, Michigan and Georgia, he might do the GOP more harm than good.

If polls can be believed that there are tight contests in states — such as Ohio and Iowa — that Trump won by double digits two years ago, reviving that almost mystical connection with the base might offer his party the only viable form of triage.

“Democrats have placed President Trump on the ballot,” Pennsylvania Rep. Ryan Mackenzie told CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday. “What we need, and what I think the president is saying … is that we need Republicans to see that he is going to be on the ballot in the sense that his policies and his agenda are going to be on the ballot.”

During the 2016 campaign, the chaos was not a turnoff but an asset. Trump’s untamed nature, insults and absurd digressions eviscerated mores his supporters hated. Everyone in politics thought he’d destroyed his own campaign by denigrating the Vietnam War heroism of Sen. John McCain. But the episode showed instead that Trump was ahead of the curve, and political and media elites hadn’t realized he’d changed the game.

Back then, Trump would scour his crowds to test reactions to his most outrageous lines. The rallies often felt like a night at a party when someone was saying stuff many people agreed with but wouldn’t dare blurt out. When Trump goes off on a rant now, he may be trying to recapture that magic.

But circumstances have changed a decade later. Trump isn’t the outsider now; he is the establishment figure waging a poorly explained war and driving up prices, despite his attempts to show he’s not relinquished his rebel spirit.

His political longevity is extraordinary. But the gap between Trump’s “golden age” and the lived reality of many of his supporters is described by high housing and grocery prices. His base also appears to be narrowing, as CNN’s Aaron Blake noted Tuesday, citing New York Times/Siena College polls showing between 9% and 16% of Republican voters saying they favored the Democratic nominee in key states Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio and Texas.

Polls can change in the final days, and on November 3, they won’t matter. That’s when voters will answer the question defining Trump’s 2026 campaign.

Was it all about them?

Or him?