Trump claims he’s ‘flipping races’ with his rally-a-day blitz. It’s not Republicans he’s helping

With less than a month until voters determine whether his party will retain control of the House, Senate and governorships in nearly every state, President Donald Trump appears increasingly detached from reality amid a political landscape that is growing increasingly perilous for him and his allies. Trump is embarking on what aides are calling an all-out blitz of campaign rally appearances in support of Republican candidates in states across the country, even in places where Republicans would normally be heavily favored.In the last week alone, he has visited Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio, Texas and Nebraska to stump for Republicans in races that just a year ago were considered safe for the party’s chosen candidates. He says he plans to visit key battleground states including Maine and Michigan, where the GOP is hoping to retain one long-held Senate seat and flip another that has been held by a Democrat for decades. The rallies follow the same familiar pattern he’s followed for years. He attacks whatever Democrats get the biggest reaction from crowds, vacillates between topics to the point where his remarks border on the nonsensical, and he ends every appearance by awkwardly dancing to the Village People’s well-known gay anthem, “YMCA.”And at each, he exhorts those in attendance to “pretend” he is on the ballot next month, even though his name will never appear on one again. Trump’s campaign trail appearances don’t seem to be helping his party turn around bad polling results (Getty)On Tuesday, the president took to Truth Social to claim that his late-to-the-party barnstorming is generating “crowds and enthusiasm” he described as “unbelievable” and credited his appearances with “flipping races all the time.”“Nobody has ever seen anything like it,” he said. “It’s all happening!”He also claimed the little-watched right-wing outlets that still broadcast his appearances in full are “being rewarded with BIG RATINGS” and predicted a “MIDTERM SURPRISE” in next month’s balloting, implying that his involvement in the midterm campaign would upend expectations that Democrats will take control of at least one or both chambers of Congress. The night before that he said of high gas prices: “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe,” before adding: “They can take out a city — let ’em take, let ’em take out Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego.” He spent the bulk of the rally complaining about how unfaitrly the media treats him. The night before that, in Ohio, he ranted that journalists “should be arrested.”Still, according to a person familiar with the president’s thinking, Trump is convinced that his presence on the campaign trail is sufficient to energize the political coalition that returned him to the White House in 2024 with a mandate to lower prices that had risen in recent years due to post-Covid pandemic inflation. The same person told The Independent that the president often points to the large-scale polling misses that failed to predict his 2016 victory and overestimated the scale of Democratic wins four years later and underestimated his support during the last election.But even at the rallies Trump says are indicative of a coming “surprise,” there are signs his influence isn’t what it once was.His rally in Alabama, where a 2015 campaign kickoff filled a 30,000 seat stadium, failed to fill an indoor arena with a third the capacity last week. There were also empty seats visible at his events in Ohio and Oklahoma as well. Moreover, television networks no longer consider his appearances to be the ratings draw they’d been during his three runs for the presidency, leading him to lash out multiple times — including at Fox News, which he also assailed on Tuesday for interviewing Democratic and independent Senate candidates running in Michigan and Nebraska.He complained on Truth Social that the network “spends more time covering the Jihadist and Dumocrat candidates than they do the good old fashioned Republicans” and accused Fox of “promoting the Dumocrats, not the Republicans and MAGA”.And at the same time his rallies have failed to capture the attention of broadcasters, his commentary at them is increasingly unhinged and attracting negative attention, such as one incident on Monday when he suggested to rallygoers in Nebraska that it would be acceptable for Iran to employ a nuclear weapon against two of the largest cities in Democratic-run California, San Diego and Los Angeles. Despite his claims to the contrary, polling shows the national picture is as bad for Republicans as it has been at any point in this election cycle.Analyst Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin recently averaged Democrats’ advantage in generic ballot polling at 8.9 percent — or 9.6 percent if counting likely voters — with Democrats attracting an average support level of over 50 percent. A recent New York Times and Sienna College poll put Democrats’ advantage over the GOP in the generic ballot at 51 percent to 43 percent, with Trump’s approval rating dropping as low as 34 percent according to a recent Quinnipiac University survey. Another recent poll from CNN and SSRS had his approval at 33 percent, and a Reuters/Ipsos poll put his approval one point lower at 32 percent — the lowest of his political career.The Senate map, which Republicans spent the spring treating as their firewall, has stopped looking like one. Democrats now lead the RealClearPolitics averages in 10 of the 12 competitive races, even as eight of those are still considered toss-ups by most forecasters. Aides say Trump believes his presence will drive turnout among the voters who supported him during the last cycle, but other insiders are skeptical that even his most loyal supporters are still on board amid persistently high inflation and diesel fuel prices that have topped $7 per gallon in some parts of the country. Some Democrats who have spoken to The Independent in recent days say his presence on the campaign trail will have the opposite effect, a sentiment expressed by Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed when he told MS NOW that he hopes Trump will come to Michigan. “Please, I’m asking you, ‘Come to Michigan.’ Alright, your — clearly — your candidate can’t speak for himself. He doesn’t have anything to say. Clearly, you are the answer, and you should tell everybody why they should imagine you on the ballot,” he said.