Jay Cost of National Review Online considers a “blue wave” election likely in November.
If we look only at the macro conditions of the country, we might think that the Republicans are in reasonably good shape. The United States is not bogged down in any major wars abroad. At home, we have a reasonably strong economy, bolstered by the most recently reported growth rate, of 4.1 percent. And the incumbent party has not passed any legislation that has met with the widespread disapproval of the voters. That should put the GOP of 2018 in better shape than it was in 1982, or that Democrats were in 1994 or 2010.
The predicament for today’s Republicans is not the agenda or the state of the union. The predicament is the president himself, Donald Trump.
Trump is not currently facing a Watergate-level scandal that threatens to bring down his administration. It looked as if this might be the case in, say, the spring of 2017, when it seemed to his critics as though he may have fired FBI director James Comey because the Bureau was on the verge of uncovering collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign. But there seems to have been no collusion, and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is now primarily focused on apparently unrelated matters. Maybe Mueller will conclude that Trump obstructed justice, but that is not the issue at the moment.
Instead, Trump’s challenge is that he seems incapable of acting the way most Americans expect their president to act.
