With six months to go before the midterms, Republicans are offering voters dysfunction and subservience to Donald Trump instead of solutions.
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With exactly six months to go before Americans head to the polls, it is increasingly obvious that Republicans have no answers to the many problems plaguing the nation — problems that voters believe Donald Trump created or exacerbated.
The GOP has no record of accomplishment; seems indifferent to the high cost of living in order not to offend the president who promised to fix things instead of making them worse; and, perhaps most importantly for a party built on grievances, has no one to blame but themselves.
If it weren’t for their aggressive mid-decade gerrymandering campaign, which received a massive boost from “their” Supreme Court this week, and if they were up against savvier and more popular Democrats, Republicans would certainly be headed for an epic defeat.
And chances are that, in spite of those things, they will still get walloped in November because there is no end to their troubles in sight.
That became clear on Sunday, when top government officials failed to provide answers to the most pressing questions voters have: When will prices come down, when will Trump’s unpopular war with Iran end, and do Republicans even have a plan?
One after another, they deflected, tried to blame Joe Biden (a strategy that even some Fox News anchors aren’t buying anymore), and heaped effusive praise on a president who is historically unpopular.
On CBS’s Face the Nation, Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, couldn’t even answer the question of whether the US is at war with Iran. Then, when confronted with evidence that the increase in gas prices resulting from the conflict has wiped out most of the benefit of the GOP’s tax cuts, he threw around a bunch of big numbers to obfuscate the fact that the average refund is only $350 higher this year than last.
The reality is that, by the time the Strait of Hormuz is open again and gas prices go back to pre-war levels, that money will have been more than gobbled up by the cost-of-living increases that are causing tens of millions of Americans to change their lifestyles right now.
Though not for a lack of trying, this is the one issue the administration can’t lie about to voters who are experiencing the affordability crisis every single day and didn’t get thousands of dollars more in their tax refunds as Hassett insinuated.
One casualty of these high prices is Spirit Airlines, which declared bankruptcy this week. The long-embattled company’s CEO blamed the war and soaring costs for the move, while Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pointed the finger at Biden and his predecessor Pete Buttigieg for nixing a merger between the airline and JetBlue.
On ABC’s This Week, Duffy also promised that Americans would see “immediate relief” once the Strait of Hormuz is reopened, even though Trump promised that this would happen weeks ago but it is clear that nobody knows when it will happen.
More than anything, it is clear that there doesn’t appear to be a plan to improve the lives of regular Americans. Instead, it seems as though everybody in the GOP is busy with catering to the president’s whims — whether that means pursuing his political enemies, building a ballroom, putting his face on everything, etc.
Six months isn’t a lot of time to change that… even if Trump and Republicans in Congress were trying. But, incredibly, they are not.
Which means that, at the rate this is going, there isn’t an October surprise big enough to turn the tide in a relatively fair election, and no amount of gerrymandering is going to save vulnerable House Republicans.
But maybe that is the GOP’s best chance to retain the presidency in 2028, because if the Democrats win control of Congress, then Republicans will at least have somebody else to blame again.
