It was around this time eight years ago when The New York Times reported on an interesting chat between Donald Trump and Republican leaders ahead of the 2018 midterm election cycle.
GOP officials, taking stock of the available evidence, tried to warn the president ahead of his first midterms that the party faced significant headwinds. But it quickly became clear to them that Trump did not “grasp the gravity” of the situation.
In fact, some Republican officials tried to tell the president directly that the party’s House majority would almost certainly disappear once voters had their say. “That’s not going to happen,” Trump replied.
That’s exactly what happened. In fact, the GOP suffered their worst midterm cycle since the immediate aftermath of Watergate, the president’s bluster and optimism notwithstanding. Trump seemed to be under the impression that if he simply maintained positive thoughts and assumed that the polls were all wrong, then everything would work out fine for his fellow Republicans. Reality, however, intruded soon after.
Eight years later, the circumstances are eerily familiar. Trump is in the Oval Office again; he’s working alongside a Republican-led Congress again; the GOP is facing headwinds again, party leaders are preparing for a public backlash again — and the president refuses to believe the readily available evidence again.
Consider the missive he published to his social media platform on Monday afternoon.
The Radical Left Democrats are going CRAZY with Fake Polls. They’re putting them out at levels never seen before. They’re called, “Demoralization Operations,” where they try to demoralize Republicans so that they don’t go out and vote — But the actual Polls are tremendous, and the Spirit in our Country has never been higher. … Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Trump’s conspiracy theories are often twisted, though this one is especially remarkable. As he sees it, the national surveys conducted by major independent news organizations, universities and research institutions are secretly being coordinated by Democrats, as part of fiendish and undisclosed plot to make GOP voters feel discouraged.
There are, according to the president’s same pitch, a series of undisclosed polls, which paint an entirely different picture about public attitudes, but which we’re apparently not allowed to see for reasons Trump hasn’t explained.
Such thinking is obviously bizarre and will do little to calm concerns about the president’s mental fitness, though it’s worth keeping in mind as the election season progresses for a couple of reasons. First, the Republican is surrounded by sycophants, largely limits himself to conservative media, and soaks up the adulation of supporters who show up at his events. Is it any wonder why he struggles to believe polling that shows him deeply unpopular?
Second, this also helps explain why Trump has repeatedly been surprised and confused by election results he didn’t like: He simply assumed ahead of time that all of the evidence was “fake” and concocted by his polities enemies as part of a scheme that only he was aware of.
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