It wasn’t so many months ago that Democrats were debating about what their winning message should be for capturing control of Congress in November’s midterm elections and finally putting a needed check on President Donald Trump.

Should they stay laser-focused on Trump’s culpability for a laggard economy and American families’ affordability crisis? Or spotlight Trump’s overt and corrupt self-enrichment?

The answer, finally, became obvious to the ditherers: Both.

Better late than never, the economy and corruption have merged as Democrats’ two-pronged cudgel against Trump. Midterm elections are, after all, a referendum on the president’s performance; the subservient Republicans on the ballot are simply his proxies.

And Trump’s performance in this second term is quite something. If he were trying to drag down his party, he couldn’t have devised a more effective approach. The purported populist who first accepted Republicans’ presidential nomination a decade ago with a promise to be the “voice” of “the forgotten men and women of our country” now spends his time as anything but.

Instead, nearly six months in, Trump hawks a war he vowed never to start and which has spiked gas prices, depleted U.S. weapons stockpiles and caused death and suffering among the mostly working-class men and women who make up the volunteer military.

He boasts of his economically dumb tariffs that raise consumers’ costs and businesses’ uncertainty. And now that the Supreme Court has declared many of the tariffs unconstitutional, billions in refunds are going out to corporations “with remarkable speed,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week, not to Americans who paid the higher prices that the companies predictably passed along.

In private and public, the president spends much of his time poring over plans not for his elusive healthcare initiative but for his marbled and gilded vanity projects. (As for healthcare, at least 5 million families have lost Medicaid coverage since Trump and Republicans last year cut $1 trillion from healthcare to offset tax cuts mostly benefiting the rich and corporations.)

All the while, the pol who once promised to drain the swamp has risen from its depths as the Loch Ness monster of swamp creatures. Trump is getting rich in office like no president before him ever contemplated, and spreading the wealth to family, cronies and donors even as Americans’ wages have fallen behind the inflation he’s pumped up through war and tariffs.

First, consider the current state of the macro-economy. Spoiler alert: It’s the opposite of Trump’s fantasy version.

Growth has slipped from 2.8% when President Biden left office to an estimated 1.8% for 2026. Gasoline, energy prices, inflation and interest rates are up. Wage growth and manufacturing jobs are down.

Contrary to Trump’s laughable pledge in 2025 to balance the budget “in the near future,” his tax cuts and military spending have driven annual budget deficits — and thus the overall federal debt — trillions beyond already unsustainable projections. Woe to younger generations.

Now, consider Trump’s personal micro-economy. Spoiler alert: As powerhouse podcaster and former Trump tribune Joe Rogan recently exclaimed, “He’s just on a grab!”

In just his first year in office, Trump made at least $2.2 billion, much of it through cryptocurrency operations he once (rightly) condemned as scams, according to his mandatory financial disclosure statement released in June. Days later, a crypto analytics firm reported that nearly 1 million small investors in Trump’s memecoin — how many of them Trump’s “forgotten Americans”? — lost nearly $4 billion.

The immediate cause of Rogan’s outburst last week was learning from a guest on his show that, starting this month, the Trump Media & Technology Group is selling companies and big institutions early access to the president’s market-moving posts on his Truth Social internet platform — for a reported $100,000 a month.

Since his first term, Trump’s social media posts have been his outlet of choice for policy, personnel and political pronouncements. To now charge monied insiders for early access — well, you could hardly devise a more clearly corrupt connection between his presidential acts and personal profiteering.

An astonished Rogan wondered for all of us, “How’s that legal?” — we’ll see: a federal lawsuit was filed last week — and, “Who’s telling him this is a good idea?” (My separate question: Why does Rogan think the kleptocrat can’t come up with this stuff himself?)

Just last Friday, the crypto company that the Trump family created before his 2024 reelection, World Liberty Financial, announced that a Trump-appointed regulator had — surprise! — tentatively approved a charter for the firm to become a bank, allowing the Trump family to profit from newly authorized services to rich investors.

Meanwhile, World Liberty Financial has been a magnet for foreign investors’ cash, especially from Middle East moguls seeking favor with the president of the United States. Separately, the Trump Organization has about two dozen real estate projects underway in foreign countries. Then there’s Trump’s unprecedented stock trades— roughly 3,700 in this year’s first quarter — including in companies that soon got federal contracts that boosted their stock price.

It seems each week brings another story of sons Donald Jr. and Eric Trump taking interests in firms dealing in artificial intelligence, drone missile interceptors, critical minerals and more with business before their father’s government. Eric Trump unashamedly went on Fox News to announce a $24-million Pentagon contract for military robots. Even 20-year-old Barron Trump is worth $150 million now, Forbes estimated.

As they say in politics, the ads write themselves. Finally, however, Democrats are doing some writing. Senate Democrats put the talking points on paper under the title, “The Cost of Corruption: How Trump Turns Power into Profit at Americans’ Expense.” Among candidates, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia has modeled the message for months.

When New York Times reporters asked Trump in January why he and his family are doing deals that he refrained from in his first term, he was frank: “Because I found out that nobody cared.”

He’s wrong, perhaps because he’s been too greedy. Nearly two-thirds of respondents to a CNN poll last month said Trump “has gone too far” in pursuing his own business interests. And poll after poll shows his ratings for handling the economy are in the tank.

Not to connect the two would be political malpractice.

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