The Tribune

THIS morning, it’s 33 days until the date when many Americans feel that their great, ignominious embarrassment will finally begin to end. That’s Tuesday, November 3, election day in the US. Democrats are expected – and expecting – to win big on that day, stymying Republican plans to gerrymander Congressional districts to retain their current advantage.

The Dems only need to gain a few seats to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, so that seems probable, if not certain.

So what?

What if the Dems do regain control of the US House of Representatives? First of all, there will follow after Election Day a period of 60 days before the new-majority Democrats take over in the lower chamber and resume control of its many powerful committees.

Six years ago, during this same two-month hiatus, an angry mob attacked the US capitol building in Washington and besmirched, likely for generations to come, Americans’ vision of their own democracy.

Many rioters and some law enforcement officers were injured (and a few killed) on January 6, 2021 as Trump’s mob tried to bully Congress into pretending that the president hadn’t just been unseated. Now, Trump has pretty much finished up pardoning all of those rioters whose guilt had been painstakingly established during Joe Biden’s one-term presidency.

How will Trump react this time if/when he faces losses?

It appears to be extraordinarily unlikely that he will calmly accept defeat in just five weeks’ time. He’ll likely find many others to blame when the GOP concedes the loss of at least the House. But he has already inserted himself in this campaign to such a degree that it will be difficult even for him to dodge the uncomfortable reality that American voters have had enough of him and the legions of MAGAns who surround, support and cosset him every day.

Trump has become a tragic-comic figure, whose foibles and idiosyncrasies dominate the headlines in the US and in many parts of the world. He has crazily promised $5,000 bounties to those loyalists who attended his inconsequential mid-term GOP convention in Dallas three weeks ago.

While national party conventions in presidential election years are a long-standing tradition in American politics, it is rare for such an event to be held by either of the two major parties outside of presidential election years. Previously, only three large, major-party conferences were held outside of a presidential election year, all by the Democratic Party, from 1974 through 1982. The Dems abandoned them after that, with their party leader at the time declaring them “a waste of money, time and energy.”

The Republican Party had never staged a mid-term convention before last month, and the party’s bylaws had to be hastily revised to accommodate this year’s gathering.

Was it worth it? It’s not likely that many party leaders feel that way. To begin with, the scheduling was appallingly poor: The first two games of the 2026-27 NFL season, featuring the defending Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks, the team they beat in February, and perhaps their two leading challengers, were played on same two nights as Trump’s convention. One of these games was the first ever played in Australia.

There were other issues. Trump made his absurd $5,000 offer – to be paid if the GOP retained Congressional majorities. The president rambled and blathered on to a limited TV audience and a fair number of empty seats in the arena. Even his protégé, the notorious Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who is now running for the US Senate and not doing very well, admitted that the convention had failed.

According to the New York Post this week, Paxton recently told a group of conservative donors and lobbyists that GOP polling numbers suffered as a result of the party’s mid-term convention.

“To be honest with you, the numbers — when we did that convention, it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped,” Paxton told a private gathering last week, according to audio obtained by several news outlets. “Right now, yeah, not good.”

Trump himself, of course, had a different view. He told reporters afterward that “I think the fact that we had such a successful convention really helped Ken Paxton. He was a big part of it. And look, I mean, he was a great attorney general. Ken Paxton was a great attorney general, and continues to be, and I think that counts for a lot … I hear that the convention helped Ken Paxton a lot.”

The president has an unshakeable faith in himself, and, as he has acknowledged in some of the books he has written, he has a firm belief that he will run in good luck. In a way, then, he seems to believe that he is right and that events will always support that belief.

Being right is important to most of us, but Trump takes it a few degrees further. He even forecast his own defeat six years ago. 

Trump has shown us for a decade that he is one of the canniest, most prescient political observers in the country. He loudly presaged his own 2020 defeat by announcing more than once that only Joe Biden, among the many candidates vying to oppose him that year, could triumph. Trump, as he often is with his political predictions, was correct.

For the record, the president has now told reporters that the Democrat most likely to reclaim the White House in 2028 is California governor Gavin Newsom. That, too, looks like a good prediction now, two years ahead of the next American presidential election.

Trump, who looks, talks and acts more like an 80-year-old almost every day, may have lost a step or two under the constant pressure he attracts with his relentless narcissism. But he seems to retain the same steely determination to never take responsibility, never concede defeat and never reflect on his own failures.

Add up all of this and it’s pretty hard to look forward to November 3 with undiluted optimism. Assuming the Democrats at least retake control of the House of Representatives, we can reasonably look forward to two months of chaos, denial, real and threatened lawsuits, Trump tantrums and a depressing period of adjustment, both for the president and his legislative allies.

There is increasing talk these days that the Democrats can regain control in the US Senate where they will need a net gain of four seats to succeed. But there’s still a sense that such speculation is fantasy, particularly as news breaks that Maine Republican stalwart Susan Collins may have regained control in her own re-election campaign, despite recently reported scandals among her senior staffers.

Maine is generally regarded as one of the seats the Dems absolutely need to recapture if they are to succeed in the Senate.

The polls – so discredited for much of this century for their repeated failures to detect grass-roots Republican support for Trump and others – continue to show a steady trend away from the president and his party. A frequently-cited indicator is ‘party preference,’ which measures which party the voters feel better about it terms of managing the country and its economy.

The Democrats, who seriously lagged behind in this measurement at the start of the current Trump administration, now seem to be riding comfortably in the lead heading into the final stages of this election campaign. More pundits each week seem to be buying into forecasts of Democratic victories.

Maybe the Dems will actually defy expectations and retake the Senate. Even if they do so, however, their margin of control will not approach the 67-seat level they would need to convict Trump and remove him from office after a possible House impeachment. And, assuming they win a majority in the Senate, furthermore, they would need to stay united just to frustrate his nominations and legislative initiatives. With unpredictable wild cards like Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman in their ranks, would that be very likely?

So, is November 3 going to be a day when the sun finally breaks through the accumulated clouds of the Trump administration and signals the beginning of the end for this president? Maybe so.

But it says here that however jubilant Trump’s opponents may feel on Election Day, their high-spirited optimism is quite unlikely to be followed by events that will inspire them going forward.