Trump’s midterm fall is the fault of one person: ‘I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap’

At least it was possible to disguise Joe Biden’s senescence. The old boy could be wheeled out to smile and read a few stumbling lines while the decisions were apparently made by his wife, his staff and a coterie of senior Democrats.

Donald Trump is another story. He seems determined to broadcast his instability as widely as possible, using his own social media platform – and thereby, incidentally, boosting his private income. Far from being controlled by others, he has an uncanny ability to make previously decent and respectable politicians jump to his command.

Have American voters finally had enough of his antics? I think so. Travelling through the US Midwest last week, I came across a sense of weary exasperation, not only about Trump’s tariff policies, which badly impact the states along the Canadian border, but over the grotesque freakshow behind them.

There is still a MAGA base, but I am struck by how much smaller it has become. The president is down to his credulous core. At a recent rally in Tennessee, he told the crowd: “I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap.” Sure enough, the audience clapped.

Commentators often underestimate the extent to which Trump’s vote was a protest against his unelectable opponents. Yes, having made their choice, albeit in a hesitant way, his voters tried to justify it to themselves, talking up his achievements (which are real enough, especially on border control) and averting their eyes from his flaws.

There comes a point, though, when those flaws become impossible to ignore. The cruelty and stupidity of Trump’s online posts, the chaos of his trade policy, the brutish way he acts like a Russian ally, his apparent inability to distinguish between private interests and public role; the general sleaziness.

Voters are set to give Trump’s candidates a whacking in the midterm elections on Tuesday; and I am afraid that the Democrats will draw the worst possible lesson, and will double down on the far-left posturing that played such a large role in enabling Trump in the first place.

Let’s start with online evidence of the president’s growing erraticism. We might ignore the AI-generated images. He has posted pictures of himself riding a lion, having his features added to Mount Rushmore and as a Jesus-like figure.

We might set aside his threats against opposition politicians. “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” he announced when several Democrats reminded military personnel that they were not required to obey illegal orders. “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOUR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” another post said. “Punishable by DEATH!”

When he pronounces on foreign policy, though, that is not mere knockabout. It has real-world consequences – of which the most immediate is to cheapen the American republic.

Trump’s apocalyptic threats against Iran (“A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again”), would be bad enough had he actually been winning the war. Set alongside his inability to force the straits, they made America look petty and vindictive.

His rage at not getting the Nobel Peace Prize persuaded the sycophants around him not to deal with the leader of the Venezuelan democratic opposition, who had won it instead. He even threatened to start a war over Greenland apparently because he was upset at the Nobel Prize Committee.

Armies of sophists are on hand to explain, to reinterpret, to justify. Still, there comes a point where the president’s craziness becomes impossible to ignore. My sense is that we have reached that point. According to Pew Research, Trump’s approval ratings are down to around 30 per cent.

What has brought voters to this point? The failure of Trump’s policies in their own terms. His tariffs have neither raised significant revenue nor led to any major reshoring of industry. Nor, indeed, did they deliver what Trump was bizarrely and ignorantly obsessed with, namely narrowing the trade deficit.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with trade deficits. America has been running them without a break since 1975, and has outgrown the rest of us over that period. By definition, a trade deficit must be matched by an investment surplus and vice versa. When Trump demands both more investment in the US and a trade surplus – indeed, simultaneous surpluses with every other nation – he disqualifies himself from the conversation.

But, as I say, he has a weird ability to make clever people behave stupidly, and no one around him dares point out that his approach is based on a misunderstanding.

In any case, even by his own test, the tariffs have failed. A sharp drop in imports from China has been offset by a rise in imports from Mexico, Vietnam, Taiwan and elsewhere. The US goods deficit in September was $US134.9 billion ($192 billion), the widest since March 2025, when companies were rushing to beat Liberation Day.

The US is the world’s largest economy, and trade is a commensurately small share of its GDP. A terrible trade policy can be offset by sensible policies on deregulation and energy abundance. To have turned trade policy into an electoral liability in such a vast country is an astonishing achievement.

The same is true of foreign policy. American voters are often said to be uninterested in the rest of the world. Still, there is a belated awareness of how Trump’s behaviour over Ukraine, Greenland and Canada burned through decades of accumulated goodwill, forcing even the strongest American allies to pursue different arrangements among themselves. Not everyone is as indifferent to the collapse of American moral leadership as the president.

Voters seem to have had enough of what I can only call Trump’s Third World vibe. His territorial claims on neighbours and his petty insistence on renaming lakes and oceans, his obsession with building monstrous triumphal arches, his apparent refusal to understand the difference between the Nobel Prize Committee and the Norwegian state (“a s---house country”), his demands that political opponents be locked up; and, now, his overt electoral bribery, his offer to send a $US5000 cheque to every American if the Republicans hold Congress.

Nowhere is the Third Worldery more visible than in the way the president’s coterie has grown rich in office. The gifts from overseas, the digital currency racket – this would, until an eye-blink ago, have been unthinkable in the US. A handy test of whether you are in a tinpot autocracy is that the richest people are not entrepreneurs but presidential cronies.

I have never bought the theory that Trump has a magical connection to the electorate. He benefited from facing dreadful opponents – and twice managed to lose the popular vote even to them. Much the same could be said this time.

I was in Michigan, where the incumbent senator, Mike Rogers, until now a reliable MAGA cultist, is desperately calling for an end to the tariffs on Canada that have caused such chaos to local businesses. His Democrat opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, is a far-left anti-Israel activist. Polls nonetheless show Sayed nosing ahead. If the Democrats win in places like Michigan, I am afraid they will select many more socialists.

Invisible to most observers is the mass of Americans voters who long for boring candidates in suits – even if they are, as PJ O’Rourke said of Hillary Clinton, “wrong within the normal parameters” of wrong. That is the real silent majority. On Tuesday, it will remain silent.

Daniel Hannan is a former Conservative member of the European Parliament and is president of Britain’s free-market Institute of Economic Affairs. He sits in the House of Lords as an independent peer.

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