Trump’s final midterms speech really kicked the Republicans while they’re down

If the Republicans weren’t headed for disaster in the midterms, perhaps they will be now.The former shadow of Donald J. Trump arrived at the Reflecting Pool Monday to ramble for an hour about pipes, granite, algae and caulking. He threw in some stuff around halfway through about the election, before returning to huge printouts of cracks in concrete. And then he finished it all off by declaring wealth inequality a good thing. It was quite a speech.All of this was delivered in a halting, croaky voice, from a man who looked, to put it politely, tired. The pool behind him was a “dirty, filthy, stagnant mess,” he said. People tried fixing it in the past, but they couldn’t. They tried diverting water from the Potomac, but “that doesn’t work, for certain reasons I won’t go into.” Really, he added, you need to understand the specific coating that you need to put on a pool, as well as the particularities of pipes and joints. He had A4 printouts of pictures of the insides of pipes. He also had printouts of the joints.As Trump held up image after image of niche construction paraphernalia, all while adding that “granite has a million-year life,” the Election day polling sites for the midterms were getting ready to open. Candidates wrapped up their campaigns; activists knocked on doors. And here was the president, nodding toward an image of the Reflecting Pool from a couple of years ago and saying to the crowd, “That green — that’s not grass, that’s algae… The algae had a bad aroma, to put it mildly,” before pointing to another part of the picture and saying, “All of that has been re-caulked.”The speech swung between “sadly nodding at Grandpa” territory and absurdist performance art. President Donald Trump on Monday delivered a low-energy, rambling ‘closing argument’ speech for the midterms that was everything his party did not need on election eve (Reuters)“It was a work of art, in many ways, but it was a work of art that never worked,” said Trump. Was he self-satirizing? Is he a Democratic operative in disguise? Does he seriously believe this is the big achievement he should be touting just before the elections? Or is this simply all he has left?There was a long, long ramble about how Washington, D.C. — now with cleared-out homeless encampments and law enforcement of various kinds armed with machine guns on every corner — is “the safest place in America” and a great place to go out for dinner, as if anybody else in the US would care.Then came an extended segment on grass — did you know how Bermuda grass will last longer than regular grass? Did you know how hard regrassing is in general? (“Grass has a life of its own,” the president mused.) He talked about replacing light fixtures. He repeated his tidbit about the life cycle of granite. Twenty-four minutes in, he finally got around to mentioning the election, but only to quickly say that “our whole country is booming. We’re booming like we’ve never boomed before,” which does more to invoke the ‘OK, boomer’ meme — or perhaps the war in Iran — than it does an economy that’s working out great for everyone, but sure.Eventually, we got to the part he could read off the piece of paper on the podium in front of him: something about how the Democrats have an “extreme and dangerous slate of candidates,” which includes “jihadists and, uh, Muslim Brotherhood,” he added, slurring. These candidates will be “taking away your guns” and doing “transgender mutilization of your children.” He said it like even he wasn’t convinced.“With your - vote - we - will decide - these extremists will be - given power?” he continued, haltingly, before finding his train of thought again, at least somewhat, and adding that “various ideologies, they’ve always failed.”He mentioned the 29 stops he’s made throughout the month, but he didn’t need to, because those 29 stops were written all over his face. Schlepping from Alaska to Iowa and Texas and back just isn’t a healthy way for an 80-year-old man to spend his time, and now we have conclusive proof of that fact. He half-heartedly claimed Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat standing for election to the US Senate in Michigan, calls the United States “the house of Satan.” Then he immediately added that “it’s a fraudulent election” and ended on the nonsense statement “I’ve actually kept more promises than I made.”“So I just wanna say,” the president continued, “that, uh, we’re very proud of what’s behind me but we’re even more proud of—” What is it, Donald? The economy? The Middle East? Literally any piece of legislation? “—all the other statues we have in Washington.” Ah, yes. The statues. Of course. That’ll get ‘em to the polls!Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was invited to the stage at this point, who looked comparatively sprightly and talked at about a hundred miles an hour about the incredible and wonderful leadership of Donald J. “So I just wanna say that, uh, we’re very proud of what’s behind me, but we’re even more proud of all the other statues we have in Washington,” Trump said in a stunningly tone-deaf speech ahead of Election Day (AFP/Getty)“The president’s a builder. We can’t keep him away!” he said, grinning nervously. “He understands that beauty matters!” At this point, multiple TV stations, including Fox News, cut away and didn’t return.Trump came back to the mic, his voice still hoarse. He talked about how he’s going to build an arch “more beautiful than the Arc de Triomphe” that snipers can scale as a bonus, because what’s beauty without war? He rounded off by saying that the economy is doing so well that we’ve generated “25 trillion — trillion with a T! — trillion dollars of wealth. We’ve never come close to that.”Where does that figure come from? As far as I can tell, it’s the same figure being brought up on the campaign trail by Abdul El-Sayed, the amount of money that is being held by the super-rich in America, the less-than-1% slice of incredibly wealthy people who are benefiting from an increasingly unequal economy. Trump has mentioned a number like that before, at a recent rally in Kansas, when he said that over $22 trillion had been invested in the US during his second term. That number has no evidence behind it. The one about the super-rich, however, does.It’s certainly an interesting number to end his campaign on, which he did, while picking up the big poster of the Reflecting Pool and holding it in front of reporters for pictures. The few of us left watching him speak raised our eyebrows and laughed. The Republicans who thought they were about to get a shot in the arm for their local campaigns must’ve had their heads in their hands.