It wasn’t what Republicans wanted. And it wasn’t inevitable. But it was certainly predictable. Against the backdrop of two Donald Trump-approved, ready-made candidates proudly standing next to him this week on a Pennsylvania stage, the loser of the 2020 election took extraordinary pains to remind everyone that the countdown to the 2022 midterms would be all about him, and him alone.
Sure, six Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices instantly transforming half the American population into second-class citizens by denying them the right to control their own reproductive decisions was always going to be a problem. Still, with a bit of website scrubbing and mealy-mouthed sophistry, even hardcore, virulent GOP abortion deniers like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and wannabe GOP senators like Arizona’s Blake Masters thought they might be able to massage that sticky issue into the background. The important thing was to focus like a laser beam on crime and inflation—so-called “kitchen table” issues that Republicans tout but have historically never had any solutions for—but no matter: As long as that tiny slice of the fickle electorate that actually decides elections wasn’t reminded again and again of the abrasive and unbalanced monster of Mar-a-Lago.
David Frum, writing for The Atlantic, offers some context of the GOP’s thinking about this.
For the 2022 election cycle, smart Republicans had a clear and simple plan: Don’t let the election be about Trump. Make it about gas prices, or crime, or the border, or race, or sex education, or anything—anything but Trump. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost control of the House in 2018. He lost the presidency in 2020. He lost both Senate seats in Georgia in 2021. Republicans had good reason to dread the havoc he’d create if he joined the fight in 2022.
Frum’s thesis is that President Joe Biden didn’t just wake up Thursday morning and decide it was finally time to go to Philadelphia and call out MAGA Republicans as fascist Trump sycophants, hellbent on violently wiping out democracy. To be sure, Biden did that, but he could have done that any time over the past two years. No, this particular speech was crafted for delivery at a specific time, and especially vetted and doubtlessly written to elicit a reaction from one special orange-tinted guy.
And The (Fascist) Former Guy obliged. As Frum points out, the first thing out of Trump’s mouth as he spoke in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on Saturday was an insult to the city of Philadelphia, which Trump painted as some imaginary crime-ridden hellscape. In the banal light of reality, the City of Brotherly Love was simply gearing up again for the millions who enjoyed the holiday weekend’s sunny weather to top off their Labor Day weekend with the Made in America Festival and the annual fireworks over the Delaware River.
Also, Wilkes-Barre has a population of 40,800, with a metro population of just over 562,000. The population of Philadelphia proper is nearly 1.6 million; the metropolitan area tops 6.2 million. Trump insulted far more folks than he praised.
The rest of the speech was a regurgitation of what Trump now considers his “hit reel” of attacking the “vicious monsters” of the FBI, whining about the Justice Department’s search of his closet, vilifying Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and, of course, claiming he truly won the election. As Frum notes, there was only nominal time allotted to praising either Dr. Mehmet Oz or Doug Mastriano—his respective “selected” candidates for Pennsylvania senator and governor—or allowing them to get a feeble word in. The overwhelming focus of the rally, as Frum aptly characterizes it, was “Trump, Trump, Trump": In every sense, the rally was “a protracted display of narcissistic injury that was exactly the behavior that Biden’s Philadelphia speech had been designed to elicit.”
And true to form, the media ran with it. If anyone had any doubt what the 2022 election was about, after this week’s rally those doubts were long gone. It was all about Trump.
Again.
As Frum observes:
Republican congressional leaders desperately but hopelessly tried to avert the risk that this next election would become yet another national referendum on Trump’s leadership. Despite Trump’s lying and boasting, politicians who can count to 50 and 218—the respective numbers needed for a majority in the Senate and House—have to reckon with the real-world costs of Trump’s defeats. But Biden understood their man’s psychology too well.
Biden came to Philadelphia to deliver a wound to Trump’s boundless yet fragile ego. Trump obliged with a monstrously self-involved meltdown 48 hours later. And now his party has nowhere to hide. Trump has overwritten his name on every Republican line of every ballot in 2022.
As Frum puts it, Biden simply dangled the bait and Trump grabbed it like a greedy fish, putting the entire Republican Party on the hook with him. Now all American voters have the 2022 playbook.
They know who’s really on the ballot. It's the Donald.
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