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Republicans promised their midterm convention would feature lots of President Donald Trump. Night one of “Trumpapalooza” delivered — and then some.For almost two hours Wednesday night, Trump exhorted his base to turn out for November’s down-ballot elections. The meandering, made-for-TV speech hit all his Trumpiest subjects, from immigration and crime to transgender athletes, the White House ballroom, and taxes. But equally notable were the issues he brushed past.
The purpose of this convention, after all, was to energize Republican voters whose enthusiasm has flagged. The GOP could lose the House and/or Senate in November, despite its aggressive (and increasingly undemocratic) efforts to retain them.
But Trump skirted several of the topics that voters care about most, like the cost of housing, food, and consumer goods. (More on the politics of affordability below.)
He never said the words “inflation,” “rent,” or “housing,” for instance. He mentioned grocery costs once in passing, when he falsely claimed they were “rapidly” going down. And his 90-second discussion of “affordability” blamed green-energy policies and Democrats for rising prices: “It’s fake. They are so fake,” he said.
Still, Trump does seem to recognize voters’ economic angst. He promised, fantastically and impossibly, to cut everyone $5,000 checks if Republicans hold Congress on Election Day.
Trumpapalooza continues tonight with a keynote by Vice President JD Vance. Personally, I’ll be watching to see if he addresses affordability — or any other important, less-Trumpy topics.
During his first presidential campaign, Trump famously said that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing supporters. Now, as his party fights to retain control of Congress, he’s again testing what he can get away with — this time, by repeatedly dismissing Americans’ growing concerns about the cost of food, housing and gasoline.
In May, Trump said he wasn’t thinking about Americans’ finances as he negotiated with Iran. Weeks later, as consumer prices rose at their fastest rate in years, he told reporters, “I love the inflation.”
More recently, Trump and his allies have called affordability a “made-up” word and insisted prices are falling, though most consumer goods cost more now than at the start of his second term. Trump’s rhetoric suggests he “doesn’t really care about the fate of his party,” the historian Julian Zelizer told Vox’s Astead Herndon last month — pointing to the high cost of gas, in particular, which has proved the undoing of several prior presidents.
Instead, White House officials and other people close to Trump say that his approach to affordability reflects a more personal concern: how history will remember him and his administration.
“When the president goes down in the history books, it’s not going to be for eggs being a dollar a carton,” Shelby Talcott, Semafor’s White House correspondent, told Vox in June. She was paraphrasing months of her conversations with White House officials, who said Trump prioritized legacy-defining achievements, like denying Iran a nuclear weapon or rehabilitating Venezuela.
But there’s an obvious and self-defeating tension here: If the Iran war raises household prices enough to cost Republicans control of Congress, then Trump may lose the opportunity to advance the rest of his agenda. Even Trump may find there are some limits to what he can do without the risk of political consequences.
➨ Lie to your friends. Playfully! For fun! There’s been a boom in so-called social deduction games — like Mafia, Werewolf, and Blood on the Clocktower — which involve deceiving other players. Consider it a lighthearted way to work through the angst of a frequently distrustful and antisocial era.
