As the world fixated on the Strait of Hormuz, US president Donald Trump took Wednesday afternoon to drop into the real America. He visited a pharmaceutical packaging company in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he reminisced about three golden summers spent there with his father Fred. He moved on to a haulage factory in Hebron, Kentucky, where he gave a speech that was significant because it sounded very like a prototype for the attack campaign the Republican Party will use in its bid to wrestle back the midterm election campaign momentum from the Democrats.
Trump returned to the heartland on a Wednesday when, from Texas to Lake Michigan, 100 million people were under a severe weather watch while tornadoes caused severe damage among unfortunate communities along the Indiana-Illinois border. There was no mention of that in Trump’s speech, nor of the dead Iranian schoolgirls, nor of the strike on the oil tankers in the Gulf. No, while the turmoil continued in the Middle East, Trump took to the microphone and performed for an hour as though he were Dean Martin on a bang-average Friday at the Sands Hotel, with not a care in the world.
It felt like a moment that Democrats should be paying attention to. This was a rehash of Trump’s indispensable lines, like the 2020 election fraud line, and sharp new attacks featuring targets familiar and fresh. Former president Joe Biden, inevitably, featured prominently. So too did Barack Obama as Trump gave what may become his standard reasoning for provoking the Iran war, or “excursion”, as he fleetingly alluded to the day when he will no longer be in the Oval Office.
“There will be some day when you won’t have me as president,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll have a weak pathetic president like we’ve had in the past. Like Barack Hussein Obama who signed one of the worst deals ever, with Iran. Where they were going to give up everything. Remember when he filled up a 757 with billions of dollars of cash and sent it to Iran? That’s when I realised the presidency is very powerful. But that deal gave them the right to have a nuclear weapon. If I didn’t terminate that deal, they would have had nuclear weapons and this world would have been a much different place.”
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As so often, Trump was shuffling mixed figures and misconceptions here. The non-partisan Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation states that under the Obama-brokered “joint comprehensive plan of action”, the $100 billion Iran received at the time were Iranian foreign assets seized under sanctions and waived with the agreement. It also maintains that the $1.7 billion sent by the US to Iran was not to secure hostage releases but was a return of $400 million the Islamic Republic had placed in a US military sales trust fund – with accumulated interest.
The difficulty for the Democrats will be communicating those cumbersome truths as smoothly – and as often – as Trump while he gives his version of events in the coming months. In addition to pushing hard for the “Save America Act” on voting reform, Trump began eyeing up future Democratic opponents, starting with California governor Gavin Newsom, who has been openly parading his presidential aspirations over the past few months. Newsom’s ongoing book tour has included the admission he is dyslexic and cannot read speech notes. The revelation contributes to Newsom’s wish to be seen as a politician who tells it like it is, and perhaps to add complexity to an image that detractors dismiss as too West-Coast-burnished. But Trump flipped the story into a flaw.
“Newscum ... I think his career is over. He has a lack of mental ability – he can’t read. Nothing is wrong with it. But I don’t want the president of the United States to have a cognitive deficiency. Right? And when he admitted this I said: I think he just lost the Democratic nomination. But what do I know? But you know what, when it comes to the presidency you gotta be sharp.”
The ever-lively Newsom X account fired back a reply within the hour, but it was unusually feeble: “He’s talking about himself in the third person again.”
Then Trump turned to local politics and his abiding wish to unseat Kentucky Republican representative Thomas Massie, who has become his most strident critic. Massie got a taste of what’s coming. Various interest groups have already spent millions campaigning against him and on Wednesday, his prime opponent received Trump’s official endorsement.
Trump introduced Ed Gallrein as though he had walked straight from the pages of the Grapes of Wrath; a war hero and farmer, modest, strong as an ox and with no wish to run, apart from his belief that the Bluegrass State needs rescuing from Massie.
“He’s like central casting,” Trump enthused.
“I wanted ... just give me someone with a warm body to beat Massie. But I got someone with a big, beautiful brain and a great patriot,” he said before showing his man off to the crowd. Big Ed may be a reluctant Washington congressman but it turns out he’s a natural showman.
“Mr President! Welcome to Kentucky and thank you for coming to the heartland. Thank you! This is the land of ‘we the people’ right here,” he said before breaking into the 2024 election chant, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”.
Behind the podium the crowd cheered. It was middle America all right: the crowd understated, pleased with the fuss of a visit from their president and, in profile, overwhelmingly white. The big question is how loudly Trump’s message will reverberate through the centre of the country at a time when gas pumps are showing eye-popping prices and reports indicate slowing employment numbers.
“Oil will be coming down,” Trump promised them.
“That is just a matter of war. You can almost predict it. It’s gonna come down more than anyone understands.”
Trump’s gamble may be that the current global supply squeeze will pass when the attacks on Iran cease, perhaps leading to a glut, or at least a return to stability so that by November, all of this will have been forgotten. By then, he can use the story of how he took out the ayatollah and reduced Iran’s military threat to nothing as a symbol of his strength of leadership. His gamble is that he can once again produce from the hat the old bogeyman of promised Democratic tax rises and ask his voters if they are willing to risk a return to the Biden-Harris inflation crisis of 2024. And then he will bank on being able to outperform or out-message his opponents when the attention on the American economy intensifies.
Hebron was like a dress rehearsal for the upcoming performances in which Donald Trump will campaign and scrap to convince his voting base that everything is still okay.
But maybe the Maga Republican he was trying to convince most of all was himself. Under darkening skies at Joint Base Andrews, outside Washington, Trump stopped on the tarmac to give his latest prediction on what comes next, even as the ships burned and Iran vowed $200 per barrel oil prices, and preliminary reports are indicating the US was responsible for the missile strikes that killed at least 175 people, most of them schoolchildren, in Minab.
“The main thing is we have to win this thing, win it quickly, but win it,” he told the White House press corps.
“Most people say it’s already been won. It’s just a question of when. When do we stop?”
He offered no answer to his own question.
