First posted on Instagram · @profilopolitics
President Trump gave the Youngstown crowd a warning that went far beyond November: if Democrats win the next presidential election, he said, they will rewrite the rules of American politics so completely that no Republican will ever win the White House again — and he will be the last Republican president.
“I will be, despite how well our Party is doing, the last Republican President.”
His math is straightforward. Democrats, he argues, will admit Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as states — adding four senators, more House seats and new Electoral College votes from two places that vote overwhelmingly Democratic. They will expand the Supreme Court and fill the new seats with their own. Once the map is tilted that far, it never tilts back.
That is also why Trump is demanding Senate Republicans terminate the filibuster now, while they hold power — pass the agenda before Democrats can use a majority of their own. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has resisted, saying the votes are not there and that the filibuster protects Republicans when they are in the minority: Democrats may one day try to steal the car, Thune says, but Republicans will not hand them the keys.
Statehood supporters answer that Trump is describing no scheme at all — he is describing representation. The residents of D.C. and Puerto Rico are American citizens who pay federal taxes and serve in the military, yet have no voting member of Congress to speak for them. Court expansion, they add, has been debated openly in American politics for generations.
This is Trump's closing argument for the midterms in a single warning: holding Congress is not about two years of legislation. It is about whether the electoral map of the next fifty years gets drawn by his party — or against it, permanently.
In Youngstown, the pitch was not really about one election. It was about every election after it.
Never miss a story.
Join our Telegram channel and get every article link the second it’s published.
Join Telegram Channel