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Republicans are Hoping ‘Trump-a-Palooza’ Isn’t Only About Trump

Today marks the start of the Felon's Republican mid-term convention in Dallas. With the Felon having record bad polling, Democrats are hoping the Felon makes the two day event all about himself and his grievances, including the unfounded claim that the 2020 election was "stolen", and acting as if affordability is merely a hoax.  Republicans are hoping for the exact opposite with focus on "Republican achievements" which primarily are comprised of huge tax cuts for the very wealthy, slashing funding for social programs that will harm millions of Americans, and supposed control of the border, ignoring, of course, high disapproval of ICE's ongoing outrages (see the image at right).  Since these "achievements" either ignore ongoing high inflation or are a cause of it, the Felon's tariffs are driving up consumer prices, and the Iran war debacle has driven to oil to over $100/barrel, it is unclear what kind of positive spin can be put on an economy where only the rich are getting far richer while the rest of us struggle to tread water at best.  A piece at Politico looks at the gathering which I - and likely many others - hope goes off the rails:

[The Felon] President Donald Trump will be at the center of this week’s GOP midterm convention. Many of his fellow Republicans are hoping he doesn’t make it all about him.

The parade of lawmakers, candidates, donors and party officials now headed to Dallas for the two-day spectacle are counting on Trump to make a compelling pitch on the national stage before voters hit the polls.

According to interviews with dozens of Republicans, they are largely hoping for a two-pronged approach aimed at getting the president’s committed supporters off the sidelines: a focus on what they call Democrats’ extreme positions and the accomplishments of the Republican Congress — most of which are now more than a year old.

Republicans have reasons to be wary. Trump’s approval ratings are at record lows for his time in office, and many swing-district GOP lawmakers are torn between running from an unpopular president and alienating his base of committed supporters.

There is little evidence Trump is content to let rank-and-file Republicans run away from him. The first pair of national midterm ads funded by his cash-rich political operation put Trump at the very center.

Even if not all agree Trump is the party’s best spokesperson at this point, they are eager to see a new effort to promote the tax cuts, which were enacted in July 2025, and want to see them touted anew in Dallas.

“It’s a great opportunity for us to brag about what the Republican Party has done the last year and a half,” added Rep. Craig Goldman (R-Texas). “So certainly talking about the One Big Beautiful Bill.”

While Van Orden and Goldman are attending the convention, which kicks off Wednesday and ends Thursday, many other lawmakers and candidates are staying back in their districts. Some of those Republicans said they have scheduling conflicts or simply want to campaign back home.

But there are also qualms about Trump’s obsession with priorities that many of them consider off-message ahead of the midterms — such as pressuring Congress to take up the GOP elections bill known as the SAVE America Act.

As GOP lawmakers begged Trump to get serious about tackling the high cost of living, the [Felon] president has instead openly scoffed at “affordability” as an issue concocted by Democrats to hurt Republicans.

He refused for months to help pass a major legislative package over the summer designed to help lower housing costs, and his trade wars and ongoing conflict with Iran have contributed to persistent inflation. A recent import deal designed to address rising beef prices came at the cost of upsetting American cattlemen.

Speaker Mike Johnson brushed off a question last week about the risk of having candidates show up at a Trump-focused event given his disapproval ratings.

“Politics 101 is just telling folks what you’re going to do, and then come to Washington and do it, and then go back and tell them what you did,” said Rep. Mark Harris (R-N.C.). “When you look at President Trump’s agenda, securing the border, we’ve done that. That he wanted to make the tax cuts permanent, we’ve done that.”

If there is one consensus message Republicans want the convention oriented around, it’s the choice between the legislative record Trump will be touting and a Democratic Party that they argue has moved way too far to the left — especially as progressive candidates, some of them democratic socialists, continue to win key primaries.

RNC national press secretary Natalie Baldassarre also said in a statement that the event would “put front and center Democrats’ desire to abolish police and prisons, raise costs, and strip away our freedoms,” while also promoting “Republicans’ historic achievements.”

Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) called the midterm convention — the first held since Democrats did them in the late 1970s and early 1980s — “an interesting concept” and said he would be paying close attention to the size of the television audience. But he said he would be back in his safe red district campaigning.

“I’m going to look forward to listening to it on the radio as I’m driving down the road, going from one spot in my district to another,” he said.

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Trump’s Midterm Convention Circus

Republicans will be having a mid-term convention this week in Dallas, Texas, at the insistence of the Felon.  Initially, elected officials planning on attending were to be required to pay $25,000 for a ticket.  Between congressional Republicans trying to distance themselves from the Felon and his abysmal approval levels and those not wanting to fork over $25,000, there are fears within the GOP that the convention - during which the Felon wants to showcase himself - may have pathetic attendance. As a result there are reports that tickets are being frantically given away to avoid potential media coverage that could show a sparce attendance.  As a piece in The New Republic lays out, the big winners from this unusual convention will be Democrats as the Felon draws attention to his regime (which is way underwater on just about every issue, including immigration, once the Felon's strong suit) and highly unpopular policies and, of course, the Iran war. The Felon, wrapped in his usual narcissism and petty trade war with Canada - while fabricating stories about his activities on September 11, 2001 - seems oblivious to the fact that his demanded convention will showcase how out of touch with reality the White House regime is compared to voter concerns and will likely prove a gift to Democrats, especially  James Talarico who is running against the thoroughly corrupt Ken Paxton.  Here are highlights from the New Republic:

You must be as excited as I am for this week’s GOP midterm convention. I’m being serious—well, kind of. I’m excited because a midterm convention is such a preposterous notion, such a display of desperate, indulgent, Napoleonic vanity, it will undoubtedly make a terrible situation for the Republicans even worse.

Except for the Kool-Aid drinking third of the population, America is sick of Donald Trump. The third of us who’ve always seen him as a fascist were sick of him 10 minutes after he descended that escalator. The middle third, well, their enthusiasm for him has waxed and waned, but in these last couple of months, they finally seem to have realized what a charlatan the man is.

So, this convention, in other words, is exactly what America doesn’t want: Two more prime-time nights of watching Donald Trump whine and moan and tell the country how great his poll numbers are and how “hot” America is. That should work great!

It appears that the idea was Trump’s, not some aide or sycophant. That makes sense. Only Trump is dense enough to think this is a good idea. Much has been made of the fact that they scheduled this without realizing that they’re competing (this Wednesday and Thursday) with the first two nights of the new NFL season, and against marquee matchups both nights. But I prefer to think that one of his saner aides knew this and scheduled it anyway, praying that most Americans would rather watch Sam Darnold and Matthew Stafford than tune in to Trump’s train wreck.

Have you seen that list of speakers? If they’d asked me to come up with a speaking list, I couldn’t have concocted something this self-parodic, this certain to repel middle America. There’s Mr. Measles, aka RFK Jr. He’s almost as unpopular as Trump. . . . . Todd Blanche, the most corrupt attorney general since, well, Pam Bondi, but a man so shady and unprincipled that he makes Bondi look like Louis Brandeis. And Karoline Leavitt—America wants more of her, right after she quit her job, mouthing her mendacious platitudes like those brainwashed soldiers in The Manchurian Candidate? Don Jr.? Seriously? Don Jr.??

What a bestiary. And that’s why I’m kind of excited. A president at 35 percent in the polls presiding over $4.15 a gallon gas and thinking he’s doing something neat by trying to change New Mexico’s name (“Oh, hell, no,” blared a headline in the Albuquerque Journal) will now go before the nation for two nights spewing lie after lie about the economy. Pass the popcorn.

Here’s the thing about economic lies. There are many things in the political arena you can shade or obfuscate. You can hide your falsehood in a thicket of complexity. You can play on people’s fears and prejudices. But you start telling people that the skyrocketing cost of everything isn’t happening? They will see right through that.

[P]eople know that economic lies are lies because they live the economy every day of their lives. You can’t tell people who just shelled out $8 a pound to grill the kids some burgers on Labor Day that affordability is a Democrat hoax. So, I feel pretty confident in saying not only that Trump won’t get a bounce from this convention. Indeed, if there is a bounce, it will be for the Democrats generally and for James Talarico specifically . . . .

No, Trump’s only hope in November, as even he may know deep down, is to steal it. The lawsuit to stop the Postal Service from implementing new rules on mail-in voting is working its way toward the Supreme Court and may get there very soon. The Supreme Court is as corrupt as it’s been since the 1850s, but even with that being true, it’s hard to see how five justices will find any justification for the executive branch having any say in how elections are conducted, since the Constitution expressly and clearly says that duty belongs to the states, with Congress playing a secondary role.

So, he should lose at the high court. But that just means he’ll ignore the ruling. . . . . ICE still may show up at some polls. The military? Probably not, but Trump would surely try, and Pete Hegseth would do everything he could to please the boss.

Will it make a difference? It might. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. It is one on level terrifying, knowing that there’s no law Trump won’t break, no article of the Constitution he won’t shred, and no lie he won’t tell in order to avoid humiliating defeat.

On the other hand, we still have good cause to be reasonably confident that elections will be conducted for the most part honestly. Election officials, even most Republican ones, tend to take their duties pretty seriously. They did in 2020. They had more motive then to keep him in office, I should think. Now, their desire to cheat for a lame-duck loser should be pretty de minimus.  

In the meantime, let’s sit back and enjoy the show this week . . . .

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What the Felon's War Against Iran War Is Costing Americans

The stalemate in the Felon's war of choice with Iran continues with no end in sight, oil prices have inched still higher, gasoline prices in America are the highest ever for a Labor Day weekend, inflation is up. Americans are paying dearly for the Felon's foolish war of choice given the ripple effect of higher energy costs, especially for diesel which is used in transporting consumer goods. Add in the inflationary effect of the USA ballooning national debt - 30% of which was added under the Felon - through higher interest rates and increased borrowing costs, and the financial cost to American households is rising even more. In increased energy costs alone it is estimated that the war has cost the American public 93 billion dollars or $1200 per household.  When the military costs are added to this, it's likely the total cost is in the hundreds of billions of dollars range. And these estimates do not factor in America's damaged national security through reduce arms supplies and isolation from former allies.  All, in part to perhaps distract from the Epstein files and the manufactured trade war with Canada perhaps aimed at distracting the media from the Iran war.  A piece in The New Yorker looks at the costs the Felon has inflicted on Americans.  Here are excerpts:

Back in early March, speaking to a group of Republican lawmakers and donors who had gathered at his golf club in Doral, Florida, [the Felon] Donald Trump described the Iran war, which he had launched a couple of weeks earlier, as a “short-term excursion” that would end “soon.” Last Friday, the conflict passed the six-month mark. While the U.S. and Israel are no longer bombing Iranian targets on a daily basis, roughly fifty thousand American service members are still deployed to the region; the Strait of Hormuz is largely closed to commercial shipping; a memorandum of understanding that the two sides signed in June has expired; and the Trump Administration has reportedly told Middle Eastern mediators that it has no interest in reviving it.

With no end in sight, the costs of Trump’s war are mounting. Some of them can’t be expressed in dollars and cents. According to the Pentagon, eighteen U.S. service members have been killed and more than seven hundred and fifty wounded. The Iranian death toll is in the thousands, including more than two hundred children, according to estimates from UNICEF and the Iranian government. The war has spilled over into other countries, causing hundreds more deaths—thousands, if you include Israel’s assault on Lebanon.

In principle, it’s easier to estimate the economic costs of the war; in practice, the task is far from straightforward. Even if the calculation is restricted to the United States, you first have to count the military outlays on things such as munitions, additional troop deployments, and repairing the extensive damage that Iranian counterstrikes have done to American bases in the Middle East. Then there are the financial costs that higher energy prices have imposed on American households and businesses. Plus, there are more indirect costs, such as the penalties that Americans have paid in terms of higher inflation and rising interest rates. Only by putting all these things together is it possible to estimate the total cost. But let’s start with the bill for military expenditures, which will ultimately fall on taxpayers.

One issue with tallying them is that the Pentagon has been less than forthright about many aspects of the conflict. In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the Senate Appropriations Committee that the conflict had cost roughly $37.5 billion, but he didn’t provide much in the way of detail. Shortly before Hegseth’s appearance, NBC News reported that internal Pentagon estimates put the true figure, including military-base reconstruction costs, at somewhere between eighty billion and a hundred billion dollars.

In air wars, the biggest single expense is often munitions, and that is true in this conflict. The Pentagon has made extensive use of precision missiles, such as Tomahawks, which cost $2.6 million each, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (C.S.I.S.), and advanced air-defense systems, such as Patriot-missile batteries, which cost $4.9 million. A C.S.I.S. analysis of the war’s cost, published earlier this summer, said that the Pentagon has used more than a thousand Tomahawks and as many as fourteen hundred Patriots, in addition to roughly ten thousand unguided “dumb” bombs. This dramatic rundown in munitions accounts for $26.1 billion of a total military cost of about forty billion dollars, the analysis said.

It identified the second-largest cost item as damage to U.S. bases in places such as Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, which it estimated at up to $9.2 billion. Although the Pentagon has tried to play down the effectiveness of Iran’s attacks, they appear to have destroyed, wholly or partially, hundreds of structures, including aircraft hangars, fuel depots, radar facilities, warehouses, and barracks—delivering a blow to U.S. military infrastructure without precedent in recent times. . . . . When the conflict ends, Cancian went on, the Pentagon will have to think seriously about whether to rebuild or abandon the damaged facilities, given their vulnerability to future attacks.

Whatever the true figure is, it’s a considerable sum that comes on top of the bloated trillion-dollar Pentagon budget that has already been approved for 2026, and it is money that could, in theory, be used for other purposes. Take the seventy-three billion dollars in extra funding that House Republicans approved. The authors of an analysis published last week by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank, pointed out that this amount of money would “provide full Medicaid coverage for 5 million more people, with $33 billion left over.” That money, in turn, could be used to substantially raise SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps) for children from poor families and double the funding for the National Park Service and for emergency food-and-shelter assistance, the CAP authors said.

In broader economic terms, the biggest burden that the war has created is sharply higher energy prices. Since late February, the cost of gasoline has risen by more than a dollar a gallon, on average, across the fifty states: that’s more than a third. And petroleum isn’t the only fuel that has become more expensive. The price of diesel, which powers the trucks that traverse the country carrying goods of all types and sizes, has risen by roughly half. . . . . if you combine the rising prices of gas and diesel, the financial hit to Americans since the war began is about ninety-three billion dollars—more than seven hundred dollars per household.

That isn’t the final economic tally. The price of heating oil has shot up by about seventy per cent. The cost of fertilizers, which are largely made from methane gas, the price of which spiked after the war began, has also risen sharply, contributing to higher food prices. . . . . since February, the rate of inflation has risen from 2.4 per cent to 3.4 per cent. Market interest rates, which are influenced by inflation and inflation expectations, have also jumped up, raising the costs of mortgages, car loans, and other types of consumer credit.

Adding all these things together, Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, put the total cost of the war for the typical American household at a thousand dollars—a figure he described as conservative. That was at the end of June. More recently, Zandi has raised his estimate to more than twelve hundred dollars. . . . “Trump decided to launch it, and Americans are paying for it.”

Thus far, the cost to Trump has largely been restricted to sagging poll ratings. Last week, a survey from Reuters/Ipsos put his approval rating at thirty-three per cent, matching the lowest level recorded by this poll during either of his terms in office, with just twenty-five per cent of respondents approving of his handling of Iran. Absent a break in the war’s current stalemate between now and the November midterms, the [Felon] President and his party may end up paying a higher political price. But the economic costs of the conflict can’t be reversed.

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