The Madoff Presidency

The lobby TV has been running election coverage since breakfast, and this morning the only man watching it was a trucker waiting on his eggs. He gave it about five minutes, said it was the same circus with different clowns, and went back to his phone. Our midterm elections are on Tuesday, and I have been asking myself whether my readers in Britain care about them. I honestly don’t know. I am not sure how much I care myself. The difference in practice between our two parties doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Whichever one holds the House in January will spend money it doesn’t have and keep the warfare state fed, and it will tell us every evening that the other party is a threat to democracy. If the Democrats take over, nobody in my town will see a dime of difference in what comes out of his paycheck.

Still, something has happened over here that is worth a few minutes of anybody’s time, even from three thousand miles away. Two years ago Donald Trump put together the broadest coalition any Republican has had in my lifetime. He kept the old Republican vote, the churchgoers and farmers and small businessmen, and he added people who had never voted Republican or never voted at all: union men in the Ohio valley, young men who had given up on both parties, Hispanic families in South Texas, and a great many people like me, who voted for him three times because he said he would end the wars. That coalition gave him the White House, the House and the Senate. On Tuesday it is going to come apart in front of everybody, and he is the one who broke it. All he had to do was say no when Benjamin Netanyahu came wanting a war with Iran. It is one word, and other presidents have managed it. Trump said yes, and he laid his presidency and everything he hoped to be remembered for on that altar.

I have spent this year looking for the right name for what he has done, and I think I have it at last. Donald Trump is the Bernie Madoff of American politics. Readers who don’t remember Madoff should know that he ran the biggest fraud in the history of Wall Street, and ran it for decades. His clients believed they had about sixty-five billion dollars with him. He paid them steady returns that had nothing behind them, because the money from each new client went to pay the old ones, and the scheme held together only as long as nobody asked for his money back all at once. In December 2008, with the markets falling, too many of them asked. There was nothing there. The people he ruined were not strangers he had cheated in the street. They were the people who trusted him most, friends and charities and men who had known him for years, who handed over their savings because they thought he was one of them and didn’t think they needed to check the books.

Trump’s clients were the voters, and what he paid them in was promises. No more foreign wars. Cheaper gas. America First, which most of them took to mean that their own government would think about them before it thought about anybody else. For a while the promises held up, because nobody could cash them in. Then he spent the fund. He spent it on a war that a foreign government had wanted for thirty years, and the returns have been the reverse of what was advertised: a war now in its ninth month, gas prices that Karoline Leavitt, until lately his press secretary, calls a short-term consequence, and an American government that runs its errands for a client state. Tuesday is the day the voters ask for their money back. There isn’t any.

Now look at the client he spent it on. We are told every day that Israel is our closest friend in the world, so it is fair to ask what the friendship has amounted to. In June 1967 Israeli jets and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an American intelligence ship in international waters off Sinai, and killed thirty-four American sailors. Israel said it was a case of mistaken identity. Many of the survivors went to their graves refusing to believe it. In the 1980s Jonathan Pollard, a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy, passed Israel a mountain of our most secret documents and was paid for it. He got life in prison, and when he was finally let go and moved to Israel in 2020, Netanyahu was at the airport to greet him. For years Israel sold advanced military technology to China, some of it built with American help, until Washington forced it to stop. In return we send Israel $3.8 billion of military aid every year under the ten-year agreement signed in 2016. Some people call that a friendship. In my trade we have another word for a guest who never pays his bill and takes the towels on the way out. Whatever it is, it is barely the ghost of friendship.

And the guest is still at the front desk asking for more. While Qatari mediators shuttle back and forth to Tehran, and while Saudi Arabia and Turkey both urge Trump to give diplomacy more time, the New York Times reports that American and Israeli officials have drawn up joint plans to hit Iran again after the polls close on Tuesday. Netanyahu is said to be pressing for a joint operation the moment the election is over. Trump, for his part, says the talks are going fine and he is in no great hurry. I can think of only one reason why the bombing should wait for Wednesday, and it is that the voters who are paying for it won’t get a chance to say what they think of it. The Iranians have already answered that any new attack will be met without geographical limits, and tankers are hitting mines in the Strait of Hormuz as I write.

You can see the coalition breaking in Ohio. Trump won the state by eleven points in 2024, and a Senate seat there should be safe. Instead Jon Husted, who was appointed to the seat Vance left, is trailing Sherrod Brown, a Democrat Ohio threw out two years ago. A Fox News poll taken in mid-October has Brown ahead 52 to 47. In August, Fox found 13 percent of Ohio Republicans ready to vote for Brown. Trump flew into Youngstown on October 12 to help, and what everybody remembers from the evening is the President telling the crowd that he had looked over Husted’s backside after hearing what an athlete the man had been at college, and then admiring his hands, which he likened to claws. He added that, as a politician, he probably ought to take that back. You can’t make this up. Brown’s people, meanwhile, have spent the fall tying Husted’s vote for the Iran war to the price of gas. One side is talking about the war and the pump. The other side’s leader is talking about a senator’s rear end.

The national numbers say the same thing. Reuters and Ipsos put Trump’s approval at 31 percent on October 19, the lowest they have recorded in either of his terms, with the Democrats twelve points ahead on the generic ballot, and a week later he was at 32. In January, 86 percent of Republicans in their polling approved of him. By September it was 73 percent. Those missing Republicans are the coalition walking out of the door. As of yesterday, Decision Desk HQ gives the Democrats an 83 percent chance of taking the House, with something like 241 seats, and a 63 percent chance of taking the Senate. Gallup’s annual governance poll, taken in September, has 43 percent of Americans thinking well of the Democratic Party against 35 percent for the Republicans, and 59 percent calling the Republican Party too extreme, the highest figure Gallup has recorded for either party. On the question Gallup has asked since 2002, which party would better protect the country from terrorism and military threats, the Democrats now lead 46 to 42. The party of the national security state started a war and lost its name for national security in the same twelve months.

I should add that a majority of Americans still think poorly of the Democrats. They are not winning because anybody likes them. They are winning because they are the only other store on the street.

If you don’t trust polls, watch the money. Pollsters can fool themselves, but a man spending his donors’ cash has to decide where it goes. At the beginning of October the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC that answers to the Senate Republican leadership, cancelled every ad it still had booked in North Carolina, where it had once planned to spend $71 million. Michael Whatley, Trump’s own pick for that seat, was left in the ditch against Roy Cooper. The money went to Kansas instead, where the same outfit is now spending around $14 million to save Senator Roger Marshall from a Methodist preacher named Adam Hamilton. Trump won Kansas by sixteen points. The Democrats have not won a Senate race there since 1932. The polls have the race about level, and two former Republican governors of Kansas, Bill Graves and Mike Hayden, have come out for the preacher.

Look at where the fighting is now. Decision Desk rates Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, Texas and Alaska as toss-ups. In Texas it is James Talarico against Ken Paxton. In Alaska, Mary Peltola has been leading Dan Sullivan. In Nebraska the party has had to spend heavily to protect Pete Ricketts, a former governor from one of the richest families in the state, against an independent named Dan Osborn, who led him in at least one October poll. South Carolina is on the list too. These are the states Republicans used to count before the polls closed. Anybody who has run a small business knows what that means. When you start spending money to keep the customers you were sure of, you have already lost the ones you weren’t sure of.

For years, whenever the numbers went bad, MAGA had one place to go for comfort, and that was Rasmussen Reports. Rasmussen could be relied on to find Trump a few points higher than everybody else, and his people quoted it the way my aunt quoted Scripture. Even that door is shut now. Mark Mitchell, who ran its polling, was telling Alex Jones’s audience as long ago as the summer of 2025 that the party was bleeding support and could lose the House, and he went on saying unwelcome things about Trump’s numbers this year. He was gone from Rasmussen by July. The story I hear is that he was pushed out for refusing to dress the numbers up, and I have no trouble believing it. But even with Mitchell gone, the Rasmussen map has the Republicans losing six Senate seats. They hold fifty-three. Lose six and they are in the minority. When the friendliest pollster you have can’t make it look good, the trouble is not with the pollsters. It is the same with every Ponzi scheme near the end. The statements still look fine. It is the customers who have stopped believing them.

So why should anybody in Britain care? Partly because your governments have followed ours into every one of these wars, and the bombers that left Fairford in October were flying from your soil. Mostly, though, because of what Wednesday morning is likely to look like. The House will very probably be gone, and perhaps the Senate with it. The voters will have done the one thing they can do, which is to take the keys away from the man who broke his word to them. And then, if the papers are right, the bombing starts again, because the election that was holding it back will be over. That is the whole account. The coalition that put Trump in office was spent to buy a war for Benjamin Netanyahu, and the war is to resume as soon as the people who paid for it have finished voting. The Democrats won’t end it. They are the other half of the hill of beans. But a man who took the trust of millions of ordinary people and spent it on somebody else’s account ought to find out what that costs, even if the only ones in a position to collect are the other crooks. When Madoff was caught, the judge gave him a hundred and fifty years. The voters can’t send anybody to prison. What they can do is close the account, and on Tuesday they will.

The trucker came back through for coffee after lunch. The anchor was going on about Kansas by then. He watched for a minute and said that if the Republicans were losing Kansas, somebody ought to go and check on the President. I told him that was the trouble. Nobody ever checked the books.