JULIAN ZELIZER:
Welcome back, everyone, to Then and Now. I’m Julian Zelizer of The Long View.
JONATHAN ALTER:
And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
As the midterms approach, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role President Trump will play in them. His popularity is very low. The war in Iran is very unpopular. The economy has all kinds of problems.
I think back to 2006, when President Bush was in office and also very unpopular in his second term. The key issues were Iraq and the economy — including healthcare — as well as corruption, which was a big issue in that midterm.
How would you compare the role Bush played then with the role Trump might play going forward?
JONATHAN ALTER:
Well, the Republicans lost 31 seats in the House in 2006 and six in the Senate. Amazingly, that’s pretty close to what Charlie Cook and some other experts are saying might happen this year. Maybe it’ll be four or five Senate seats instead of six, but it could be pretty close to that in both chambers.
On one level, this isn’t a surprise. The second midterm for almost any president is really bad. Even Franklin Roosevelt — he did pretty well in his first midterms, in 1934, but in his second midterms, in 1938, he got clobbered. People get tired of the president. And when you have somebody like Trump, who seems to be committing all these unforced errors, it gets even worse.
In Bush’s case, the Iraq War was costing more American lives than the Iran war is now, so you could argue that it was more of an albatross around his neck. But Bush wasn’t oblivious to the political realities. Trump is. He seems to be in a total bubble. He thinks that if he goes out and campaigns for candidates, it’s going to help them. In many cases, it will hurt them.
So, politically, he’s in a world of hurt — but he doesn’t know it. The Republicans do. They’re getting ready for a shellacking.
The wild card is whether he will establish emergency powers.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Right.
JONATHAN ALTER:
The secretary of Homeland Security just talked about sending ICE to polling places. It barely got any attention at all. This is terrifying, and the whole world has to be on watch for Trump trying to use ICE as a private army to steal the election.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
I think that’s well said. One difference is certainly that Trump is inserting himself, whereas Bush realized in 2006 how unpopular he was.
But this last point you made, I think, means it’s all hands on deck.
JONATHAN ALTER:
Yeah. It’s just one of those things. I’m trying to spread the message that election officials need to understand that if they go along with Trump — if they follow unlawful orders — they’ll spend years in court, defending themselves with their own money.
Trump can’t pardon them because they’re at the state and local level. And he’s not going to pay their legal expenses. If they go along, they could lose a million dollars in civil cases. They need to understand that.
When an ICE agent says, “I have emergency powers. I have an executive order from the president,” they need to say, “We’re not doing a thing until we see a signed order from a judge. Otherwise, please leave.”
They’re going to have to do that, and it’s not clear that they’ll all be capable of doing so.
Trump will almost certainly declare an emergency. Maybe he’ll chicken out at the last minute, but remember, he has declared emergencies several times already. Just in the last year and a half, he declared an emergency on tariffs.
And when you think about how much he cares about the midterms, I think it’s quite possible that if this gambit with the Postal Service doesn’t work out for him — and it probably won’t — he’ll go to Plan B, which is emergency powers.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
An important warning.
That was Then and Now. We’ll be back next week.
JONATHAN ALTER:
Thanks, Julian.
