As he criss-crosses the nation, stumping for Republican candidates, Donald Trump keeps asking voters to use their imaginations.
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Trump → criss → imaginations
“In this election, I’m asking you to pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.
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I → ask → ballot
Just pretend,” he urged at a Kansas rally as he campaigned for the incumbent senator Roger Marshall and gubernatorial challenger Ty Masterson last month.
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he → pretend → senator
“Pretend I’m on the ballot” has become a regular rallying cry as Trump tries to fend off a Democratic “blue wave” in Congress.
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Trump → pretend → Congress
But will it work?
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it → work → ?
That seems increasingly unlikely.
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That → seem → ?
Given his own lack of popularity and weird behavior, it’s an egotistical notion – more appealing to himself than to voters.
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it → give → voters
People feel like they need to float a loan before heading to the supermarket.
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they → feel → supermarket
In that Kansas rally, he referred to the opposition as “Dumocrats”, which is typical of the level of presidential discourse to which the nation has become accustomed.
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nation → refer → which
In his rallies, he appears “increasingly detached from reality”, as one campaign analysis in the Independent put it, as he “vacillates between topics to the point where his remarks border on the nonsensical and he ends every appearance by awkwardly dancing to the Village People’s well-known gay anthem YMCA”.
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he → appear → anthem
Stranger still, as the Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt reported recently, Trump has been offering “unsolicited and increasingly unhinged assessments of men’s bodies” over the past few weeks.
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Trump → report → weeks
“I examined his ass,” the president said in Kentucky, speaking about Republican senator Jon Husted.
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president → examine → Husted
“And then I looked at his shoulders …
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I → look → shoulders
I looked at his jawline …
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I → look → jawline
I then patted him on the shoulder, and it was like a piece of steel.
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it → pat → steel
I’m still recovering.
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I → recover → ?
Trump has also been – to put it mildly – stretching the truth on the campaign trail, sometimes merely misleading in his remarks, sometimes straight-up lying.
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Trump → put → remarks
For example, he promised a North Carolina rally that gas and oil prices would tumble soon and he claimed: “I had it down to the lowest level in years,” apparently speaking about the price of filling up a gas tank at the pump.
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I → promise → pump
A PolitiFact examination disputed this, noting that when Trump took office at the beginning of last year, the average gas price was $3.23 a gallon, but by late September of this year, it was $4.61.
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it → dispute → year
But it’s not just what he says at rallies that may backfire on the candidates he hopes to help.
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he → ’ → candidates
Much of what’s happened in Trump’s second term is working against Republican candidates.
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what → happen → candidates
That includes the widespread self-dealing that, as the historian Garrett Graff wrote recently, “is so endemic and so obvious that it has broken through to voters”.
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it → include → voters
It’s also his misguided war, his rants on social media, his disparagement of longtime allies, including Canada.
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It → ’ → Canada
It’s also his obvious plan to declare the election rigged should it not go his way.
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it → ’ → way
“Even Maga die-hards and GOP allies in Congress have grown weary of his erratic behavior,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley noted.
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Riley → grow → behavior
And Democrats, including Barack Obama, are only too happy to campaign by associating Republican candidates with Trump.
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Democrats → include → Trump
These midterm elections, Obama told a crowd in Ohio, “is our last best chance to at least rein in some of the foolishness of this administration.
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Obama → tell → administration
It’s the circuit breaker in the system.
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It → ’ → system
That blast of sanity and good sense seems far more likely to resonate with potential voters than Trump’s unhinged rants and dangerous threats.
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blast → seem → rants
Pretend he’s on the ballot?
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he → pretend → ballot
Maybe that’s effective with Trump’s remaining cult-like base.
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that → ’ → base
And maybe it will bring some of those loyalists out to vote next week if they had been thinking of sitting out this election.
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they → bring → election
But more likely, the imagined association with Trump will serve to remind most voters that Trump’s malfeasance must be rebuked and rejected.
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malfeasance → imagine → voters
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Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
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Sullivan → write → media
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