Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 by speaking candidly to the American people and never backing down from his original statements no matter how offended the mainstream media was by his sentiments.
Every other politician was sticking to talking points, glib and predictable, but Trump was saying whatever came into his head, consequences be damned.
In 2026, that same verbal recklessness is likely to cost Trump a Republican Senate and House and very possibly make it impossible for him to be succeeded by a Republican two years later.
If you are a Democrat, that’s great news. But if you are a Republican, or just someone who was inspired by Trump’s promise to blow up “politics as usual,” it’s demoralizing at best – and terrifying at worst.
And the maddening thing is that so much of the damage is entirely unnecessary. Trump isn’t losing support because he occasionally says something politically incorrect. That’s baked into the cake. He’s hurting himself by saying things that accomplish absolutely nothing.
Take his response last week when he was asked about families worried about sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. First he denied the reporting, and then when asked if the nine-month deployment had gone on too long, he replied, “No. No. No. Not nearly long enough.”
If he wanted to sound like Cruella De Vil, he was doing a good job. But if he wanted to win the support of voters, he just made a mess of it. There is hardly anything that Americans care more about than the well-being of our service members, and it would have cost Trump absolutely nothing to show compassion for those whom he has put in harm’s way. The irony that he was talking about sailors on a ship named for the president who famously visited wounded soldiers in hospitals and fighting men at the front during the Civil War only made Trump’s insensitivity worse.
It’s almost gotten to be a game for the president. He goes out of his way to say the opposite of what is expected. That made sense when he was mocking politicians and untrusted reporters, but not if it flies in the face of reality or becomes downright cruel.
At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Trump falsely referred to Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer as Palestinian and said: “I am going to send him a beautiful Palestinian outfit tomorrow, so he can greet Bibi Netanyahu when he comes to town next week.”
It would be downright insulting in any case. The fact that Schumer is Jewish does indeed push it over into the cruel realm. And you can bet Trump knows Schumer is Jewish; he said it intentionally to be hurtful.
What about his claim that anyone who opposes his demolition and reconstruction of the White House ballroom is “disloyal”? Not disloyal to him – disloyal to the country.
“The people that are opposing the ballroom are people that, in my opinion, are very disloyal to our country,” Trump told reporters 10 days ago.
It’s understandable that Trump considers his policies and programs to be in the best interest of the country, but that doesn’t mean he can legitimately reduce opposition to him to some form of treason. Either defend your policies from a factual standpoint or shut up. There’s no reason to get personal.
And Trump doesn’t even have to insult anyone to hurt himself. Sometimes all he has to do is tell Americans that things are better than their own experience tells them they are.
At the Great American State Fair in June, the president insisted, “In my first term, I … created the greatest economy in the history of the world. We had the greatest economy in history. And now we are going to blow that away. We’re doing better – much better than even the first term.”
The trouble with making those claims is that gasoline is selling for more than $4 a gallon; unemployment was above 4% in May, June, and July; and inflation is sitting most recently at 3.4%, which while not bad is remarkably average.
Now, if Trump tempered his enthusiasm and said truthfully that the economy is improving, inflation is coming down, investment is increasing, and our policies are beginning to work, he might get some credit. Instead, he sounds like a buffoonish braggart.
Trump needs to learn when saying less would accomplish more.
Nobody wants him to start reading poll-tested talking points from a teleprompter. That would defeat his purpose. His willingness to say what other politicians wouldn’t say was one of the reasons millions of Americans trusted him in the first place.
But there is a difference between candor and compulsion. There is a difference between refusing to be intimidated into silence and being constitutionally incapable of silence. Trump has proven for a decade that he knows how to command a room. What he apparently hasn’t learned is that sometimes the most commanding thing a president can say is nothing at all.
Republicans have an election to win in November, and Trump presumably wants a Republican to succeed him in 2028. Unnecessary insults, exaggerations, and provocations make both tasks harder.
Mr. President, you’ve spent 10 years proving that nobody can make you shut up. Now prove that occasionally you can make yourself shut up. Or the country will pay the price.
