I put it to you plainly: Would someone who wanted to win the midterms be behaving as Donald Trump has?
We are a full 20 minutes into Trump’s address to the nation, on the day before Election Day, and he has yet to pivot from pipes. He is standing beside, of all things, the Reflecting Pool, and he is talking about, of all things, the pipes. With visual aids, prepared in advance, lest anyone say “Surely this was some mistake!” (It was some mistake, but, like so many Trump-era mistakes, it was a mistake that had been planned.) He is reflecting on the lifespan of grass. (“Like the human being, grass has a life also.”) Will someone tell him that something big is happening in the country tomorrow?
Here he stands, for his closing remarks to the American people. And those closing remarks are overwhelmingly about the Reflecting Pool. As he speaks, he holds up his slides, each of which he describes with the beleaguered energy of an old laptop with too many open tabs. He goes on about the vandals with box cutters and knives (there were no vandals with box cutters and knives) who attacked the pool.
Look, if I wanted to win the midterms, and I were Donald Trump, I would not go stand in front of the physical symbol of my failure and remind people that my chosen team installed its lining so badly that it looked like the work of vandals with box cutters, but that is just me. I am not Donald Trump for numerous reasons. I enjoy hugging my family and often admit that I was wrong. I am not Narcissus-levels of obsessed with a reflective body of water.
If I had been as embroiled in an unsuccessful pool renovation as Donald Trump has, you could not drag me to the pool with wild horses, not even next to a nifty little prepared sign with a picture of the pool that reads: Back, and more beautiful than ever! Maybe he is trying to spin the “blue wave” as something positive that he has done to remove algae from the Reflecting Pool? I could not tell you. Maybe he thinks that if he can just clean the pool enough, everyone will look into it and see the reflection that he sees?
If I were Donald Trump and I wanted to win the midterms, I wouldn’t march from state to state demanding to be remembered. This is like if the albatross around your neck thought it was helping.
The best that can be said of his Reflecting Pool speech is that it included no odes to anyone’s posterior, not that of Jon Husted or Nicki Minaj or even Abraham Lincoln, who might have sprung to mind because he was seated so near. And that there was only one joke about renaming the reflecting pool the Trump Reflecting Pool (which was a joke, I think).
Of course, I do not want to imply that the speech lacked any of the president’s usual transphobic, bigoted scaremongering about “mutilization” and “jihadists.” Those were also there. But I am not sure that someone standing in front of the worst metaphor for his presidency and sleepily saying that “communist jihadists” (how does this combination of beliefs work, exactly, in his mind?) are coming to take the Senate is the winning closer he pictured. Nor is his announcement that a deal with Iran “could happen.” (Anything could happen!) Or his bewildering statement that the “Green New Scam” predicted that we would all be dead in 12 years? “Here we are, we’re not dead.” Got it. Clear as the … now-at-least-temporarily-algae-free pool surface!
If I were Donald Trump and I wanted to win the midterms, I would certainly not go stand in front of the Reflecting Pool and say any of this. Maybe, instead, I would go hide in a deep hole and hope that no one remembered I existed or noticed anything I had done. But I guess it is too late for that.