The Campaign Never Stops

Donald Trump hasn’t entered the fray of the midterms because he hasn’t left the fray since his presidential campaign began in 2016.

Elections are coming up and there’s already talk, in this case from within the American government itself, of Russia’s attempts to interfere with the results. Elections are coming up and Donald Trump isn’t letting up in his campaign to demonize conventional media. It’s “the enemy of the people,” he says, just like religion was in another time and context. The media is the enemy, not opium — because to deal with that issue we already have the pharmaceutical industry and medical prescriptions that have caused a literal, not figurative, opioid epidemic in the United States.

Trump hasn’t hit the campaign trail for the midterm elections coming up in three months, because he never got off the campaign trail. Not since starting the campaign that took him to the White House in 2016. In the two years that have passed since that November, he’s governed, yes, but he’s done so with the anguished mentality of a “catch ‘em all” champion, not with the attitude of a statesman.

And to be honest, the polls back him up: his approval ratings are between 40 and 45 percent, and they have reached 90 percent among voters from his Republican party — a percentage achieved only by George W. Bush in the midst of the post-9/11 antiterrorism offensive.

Referendum

These elections may be a referendum for Trump, but it’s the entire House of Representatives (435 seats), part of the Senate (33 out of 100 seats), 39 governors and some other positions that are on the actual ballots. The Republicans have a very comfortable majority of 24 representatives in the current House of Representatives, but only a majority of two senators in the Senate. This Republican control of Congress has allowed the president to carry out his agenda. We’ll have to see in November if Congress changes political colors again, as often happens in midterm elections, due to exhaustion caused by a ruling administration’s actions. If this is the case, the political panorama could be completely different.

The Democratic Party has spent the two years since Trump’s election licking its wounds from that unexpected defeat, when all the polls had been showing Hillary Clinton as the winner. And she won the popular vote (with almost three million more votes than her opponent), but what counts in the American system is the Electoral College, which gave Trump the win. The November elections have shaken the Democrats out of their self-absorption. They seem to have taken a turn to the left of the centrist positions they held two years ago, and a third of their candidates are women.

In this Democratic turn, poverty will be one of the campaign themes, considering that most of the legislation passed by Trump’s administration — from taxes to health care to labor policy — directly hurts the most disadvantaged. Just in case, the White House bluntly attacked, as “inaccurate, inflammatory, and irresponsible,” a recent United Nations report saying that 40 million Americans are poor and five million live in “Third World conditions.” The report was based on data from the Census Bureau of … the United States.