Donald Trump Is Bad at Politics

President Donald Trump rounded off a hectic stretch of midterm barnstorming last week with an appearance in Sioux City, Iowa. There, after one completely unidentifiable noise and some desultory talk about extending a last-minute aid package to farmers throttled by sky-high diesel prices thanks to Trump’s feckless war in Iran, the proceedings turned to a Trump obsession: his eternal failure to land a Nobel Peace Prize. In typically cultish form, Joe Mitchell, a former GOP state representative now locked in a tight race for the state’s open second congressional district seat, proudly displayed a gold-framed certificate proclaiming Trump “Man of the Century” to make up for the long-standing Swedish snub. 

Mitchell then launched into a groveling encomium worthy of a Trump cabinet meeting: 

I wanted to say, Mr. President, for the last 10 years, you kept this country more safe than any other president, ever. And they’ve never given you the Nobel Peace Prize, by the way, which is a disgrace. So, what I came up with, Mr. President, is the new award. It’s called the “Man of the Century Award.” OK? It’s the “Man of the Century Award.” And I’m gonna hold this up for the artificial media to see. CNN, zoom in right here, CNN. OK? Because this man has done more for humanity and for America than any other president ever. 

There may be more completely bizarre and off-base appeals to an electorate angered over the twin Trumpian scourges of escalating living costs and rampant elite corruption, but none leap immediately to mind. The voters of Iowa’s second district, like the hard-pressed residents in other traditionally deep-red, but suddenly-swingy, states such as Mississippi, South Carolina, and Kansas, are seeking reassurance that the Republican Party actively identifies with their daily struggles in a top-heavy, inflation-racked, and benefit-starved economic landscape turning their communities into dumping grounds for data centers. Instead, they’re being treated to parodic displays of ultra-elite Oval Office grievance—and a GOP nominee whose chief qualification appears to be maximum sycophancy before the party’s Caligulan overlord.

Mind you, Mitchell was only heeding the main takeaway from the previous evening’s Trump rally in Greenville, S.C., where the president largely neglected his reason for being there—to tout Darline Graham, his handpicked choice to replace Graham’s late brother Lindsey as senator who, like many GOP candidates in formerly safe statewide races, is embroiled in a much closer general-election fight than anyone expected. Instead, he launched into a long harangue about the international awards he’s been cruelly denied—not just the Nobel Peace Prize, but also the Pulitzer “for writing.” (The Pulitzer exists for books and journalism, so it’s not clear what Trump would have been nominated for, since his last book appeared more than a decade ago. Perhaps the laurel would be for fiction, a genre in which Trump has displayed unrelenting mastery while touting his record in office.) 

Trump has claimed on Truth Social that his barrage of homestretch rallies are “SAVING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AGAIN!!!” but instead they’ve been driving home a very different message, which has been clear throughout a second term where the GOP has clocked a long series of off-year electoral losses: Donald Trump is simply not very good at politics. 

Yes, I know: Trump has twice claimed the presidency, and now enjoys a trifecta in Washington—albeit with a seven-vote House majority that rarely stirs out of its state of catatonia, and a Senate that won’t deliver on his pet legislative priorities like the vote-suppressing SAVE Act. But every facet of the GOP’s steeply declining political fortunes is traceable to staggeringly obtuse Trump-authored policy calls and boondoggles, from his disastrous tariff regime to the Iran War to the massively unpopular data-center offensive. 

This is no doubt why Trump has such a pronounced inability to stay on topic at the campaign events meant to close out the GOP’s argument to retain power in Congress—and why his schtick is reaching a notably smaller segment of the party base. As Paul Waldman observes, the Trump rally is a once-formidable political innovation that’s now in its death throes. The shock value that earned them acres of unfiltered media coverage that worked out to an in-kind campaign contribution north of $2 billion in the 2016 cycle has clearly worn off. In 2026, Trump is playing to smaller-than-ever rally crowds; a recent campaign stop in Youngstown, Ohio was booked in a 7,000-seat facility that was roughly half-full, depriving Trump of his standard stump refrain claiming that thousands more of his adoring fans were lined up outside, clamoring to get seats that were already filled. When news organizations reported the anemic turnouts, Trump again repaired to his Truth Social following to ritually declare them ideological fabulists: 

Because of their dishonesty, I have cinematographers shooting the various Arenas where I speak, in that some of the Fake News likes to dishonestly report lies and untruths. In actuality, my Events for very good Republican Politicians are probably more crowded than ever. There are no empty seats, there haven’t been for years, and there never will be. The Rallies are “HOTTER” than ever.

In a separate post, Trump said that the failure to report the Great Leader’s popularity meant that “The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty and disservice to our Country.” 

In reality, the midterm rallies are attracting a turnout down 75 percent from what his first presidential campaign saw, according to an analysis by PunchUp and The Daily Beast. And with an ironclad determination to sidestep the need to galvanize a majority of voters behind his record in office—a much taller order than the 2016 mission of demonizing Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party on all fronts—Trump is freestyling in a fashion that defies the patience of all but the most diehard MAGA cult followers. During his original burst of rally success, the broad grievances Trump brought to the podium aligned themselves effectively with the deep sense of cultural exclusion that’s long fueled mass politics on the right: In calling out the political figures lording over a corrupt political system, Trump offered a critique of the knowledge economy’s phony meritocracy that resounded with the struggles of working Americans who felt their birthrights and livelihoods besieged by it.

Now, however, he’s spewing non sequitur complaints, and lofting bizarre ad libs, into the void. In addition to dwelling on his award deficits, he’s held forth at length on the manly physique of Ohio Senate GOP candidate Jon Husted. He’s weathered repeated interruptions from protesters and strains of booing at several stops, which wouldn’t be all that newsworthy if the hecklers weren’t located in traditionally MAGA-steeped locales in Texas, Kansas, North Carolina, and South Carolina. 

In Kalispell, Montana, Trump entertained a prolonged thought experiment about how animals felt about the Second Amendment’s protections of gun ownership, landing on this, uh, takeaway: “You know, the animals would be very, very happy to see you without guns. They would gain a lot of weight. And leave the law-abiding Americans defenseless while they set loose the savage criminals into your communities.” In Georgia, he proclaimed that the Iran war was going well for his cronies in the oil industry: “The United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars,” he announced with glee, after noting that his advisers had told him to avoid discussing oil-company profits before a crowd of supporters struggling with exorbitant energy costs. “I don’t give a damn, I’m going to say it — we’re making a freaking fortune.” On Friday, when the president was clearly running on fumes, stout Trump followers at a Fort Myers, Florida, rally got to savor this word-picture: 

How about me. I come home, get into the building, get into a gorgeous White House that’s now fully renovated and beautiful again. So I got my guys and we took the good ones and put it on the bad one and we cleaned up everything and we skimmed the entire building. It’s so beautiful. We replaced the floor. We replaced the Home Depot one by one. The little ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You buy the marble. It’s about a half an inch thick like this. We replaced it with statuary. The white and black. Beautiful. That was Rome. That was Greece.

It’s important to note that all these slapdash efforts arose in part because of the weak, ineffectual, and/or scandal-plagued candidates Trump has thrown himself behind, such as Graham in South Carolina, Michael Whatley in North Carolina, and Ken Paxton in Texas. In assembling this motley crew, Trump chiefly pursued one campaign credential: the ability to display maximum Trump fealty—a filtering process that crowded out more viable statewide candidates in the relevant primaries and set the stage for last-minute rescue missions in states that no Republican political operative would have imagined could have been in play this time last year. Trump’s eye for political talent, in other words, is as myopic and destructively narcissistic as his stump messaging. 

Indeed, all of Trump’s rally antics last week came to be dwarfed by his unhinged Truth Social endorsement of the depraved campaign ad released by another of his handpicked proteges, Ohio GOP gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy. That spot features Donna Arthur, the long-estranged mother of Ramaswamy’s opponent, former state health commissioner Amy Acton, denouncing her daughter as a liar—without noting that the reason that Acton hasn’t been in contact with her mother for nearly 50 years is that Arthur sided with the stepfather arrested for raping Acton at the age of 12. In Trump’s world of patriarchal and predator impunity, Acton is simply “fair game” for disgusting drive-by assaults on her survivor’s story—a narrative that Acton has chosen not to highlight in her own campaign. 

Trump feels complete license to treat an adult survivor of childhood rape like a rally protester he gleefully urges crowd members to beat up. And he clearly expects a fawning MAGA electorate to fall automatically into line; as he blurted out at another unhinged rally performance in Tennessee, “I mean, it’s amazing. When you stand up here, it’s just like… the love. I could say the stupidest things and you clap: “Oh, I love you so … .’” That may still be technically true, but the acolytes of unconditional Trump love are getting smaller by the day—and the far greater legions of voters outside the arenas feel strongly otherwise. But the president needn’t be too upset by the mounting evidence of his horrifically bad political judgment; as he faces the prospect of subpoena-wielding Democrats coming to power in Washington, he can always find consolation in his growing trove of fake awards.