Clarence Page: How Trump helped the GOP to lose

Thank you, Mr. President.

That's what courteous Democrats might say to Donald Trump for the immense (and I'm sure involuntary) assistance he lent to their historic sweep in last week's midterm elections.

After all, right up until Election Day, Trump did all he could to amplify the Democrats' key campaign message by making the midterms about himself.

“Pretend I’m on the ballot,” he gleefully growled at rallies for GOP candidates, who were quietly telling reporters he might be doing more harm than good.

Pretending wasn't necessary for voters. Virtually every concern in the forefront of their minds as they cast their ballots had Trump's fingerprints all over it.

Let's start with soaring fuel and consumer prices. Trump's disastrous war with Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes about 20% of the global crude traffic and about one-third of the world's fertilizer.

The global oil shock this caused only added to inflationary pressures already created by Trump's love affair with tariffs. According to the New York Federal Reserve Bank, tariffs added 2.9 percentage points to the price of a basket of representative consumer goods.

In other words, they were a tax on American consumers.

It's no wonder that "affordability" emerged as a hot-button issue, but Trump merely insisted it was a liberal “hoax,” costing him dearly.

Much in the way inflation crushed the Democrats in 2024, it came for the Republicans in 2026. Yet this was by no means Trump's only problem with voters.

As soon as he took office in 2025, he embarked on policies of cruelty and recklessness few were expecting when they cast their ballots.

In early 2025, Trump's State Department canceled 83% of programs administered by USAID, our country's foreign aid agency. The results have been catastrophic for underdeveloped nations. NPR reported that as a result, "more than 700,000 people have died ... including more than half a million children."

A key player in the destruction of USAID was DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump put under the leadership of his largest donor, Elon Musk. DOGE's actions were largely hidden from public scrutiny, and we have yet to learn what its monkeywrenching of the federal government has cost taxpayers.

And then there were the militarized raids on various cities carried out by agents of the U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The tumult of these raids, which played out daily on TV and social media, ruined lives and hurt local economies, all apparently in the interest of creating content for the MAGA faithful.

Yet for every Trump fanboy who tweeted, "This is what I voted for!" there were many more Americans who wondered how our country ended up in such a dark place. Trump's approval ratings began to slide, but he never doubted his mandate.

Much had been made of the support Trump had won in 2024 among traditionally Democratic demographics —racial minorities, women, young white males — but this all vanished last week.

I was not surprised. Some of us are old enough to have seen this before. On Election Night, pundits were comparing it to the backlash that followed Watergate.

Twenty years ago, too, we saw an unpopular second-term Republican president, George W. Bush, saddled with a questionable and poorly executed Middle East war, suffer a similar midterm election disaster.

It led to a GOP loss of both chambers of Congress and the later rise of Nancy Pelosi to become speaker of the House in 2007, and Barack Obama was elected president in 2008.

Now, as Democrats celebrate flipping both houses of Congress in another midterm blue wave, they need to understand that voters are not exactly thrilled with their party. As I write this, their net favorability, according to one source, is negative 12 points.

Mainstream, moderate Democrats are increasingly challenged by the farther-left progressive Democratic Socialists, who chalked up another astonishing win last Tuesday by claiming the mayor's office in Los Angeles.

I'm reminded of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination. Jackson didn’t win the nomination but his movement had a populist-outsider impact that led to the winning “Yes We Can” appeal of Barack Obama.

There's a caution in that story. The populism of Obama is sometimes blamed, especially in Republican circles, for the reactionary populism of Trump.

Yet the Democrats now have an opportunity to articulate a much-needed optimistic vision of America, a vision of rebuilding after Trump. First comes the difficult work of setting priorities. Democrats should concentrate on solving voters' problems.

For a start, they plan to reinstate the enhanced health insurance subsidies that expired under the GOP Congress and reverse the Medicaid cuts Trump signed into law last year.

“Affordability" and “corruption” are top priorities of likely House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and other leading Democrats, along with undoing Trump’s tariffs and ending the war in Iran.

There's a fine line between score-settling and protecting the public from the legal and ethical abuses that have been rampant under Trump. Where does impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fit? What about opening the Jeffrey Epstein files?

Trump has warned that Democrats had better not mess with his agenda, and he threatened in his typical tough-guy manner to put his veto pen to work against any moves he doesn’t like.

I think now is the time for the author of “The Art of the Deal” to show us his skills in the art of compromise. And that goes for the Democrats as well. Voters want results.

In the meantime, thanks again, Donald Trump. You will leave behind a smoking ruin, but at least you are going to leave.

(E-mail Clarence Page at clarence47page@gmail.com.)