Five decades ago on “Saturday Night Live,” John Belushi played a character called “The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave,” a slobbering uninvited houseguest who crashed on the couch, littered the living room, and refused to go despite his host’s persistent pleas.
Who does that sound like?
About two weeks before the most crucial midterm elections in living memory, Donald Trump is in peripatetic overdrive, littering the land with his rhetorical junk food, desperate to outrace his cratering polls, hurtling hither and yon to wherever he’s not invited, refusing to abide by the axiom that it’s wisest for an unpopular president to stay off the trail when control of Congress is at stake.
During the 1998 midterm season, Bill Clinton – saddled with the Monica Lewinsky scandal – largely stayed off the trail. So did George W. Bush in 2006 and Barack Obama in 2014, who learned from the 1986 midterms, where Ronald Reagan stumped in 14 states and saw the Republicans cough up eight Senate seats and control of the chamber.
By contrast, Trump is historically unpopular. Despite that, he has staged 17 (often ill-attended) rallies since Sept. 9, with at least five more on tap this week. Nothing and nobody can stand between Trump and the cameras, despite the fact a number of Republican candidates are doing all they can to steer clear of his cooties. As former Ohio congressman Jim Renacci told Politico the other day, “In most cases you do not want him standing near you.”
Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan political analyst, told me Trump “is simply incapable of receding into the background or allowing the midterms to be about anyone other than himself.” Stu told me that in the autumn of 2018, when Trump was refusing to leave the midterm trail despite low job approval – and wound up fueling the loss of 41 House seats and handing the gavel to Nancy Pelosi.
This guy is incapable of learning lessons. His only play is to bellow at the clueless sheep who bahhh at his rallies, though not in sufficient numbers to fill all the seats. There’s still a market for his amped-up rants about “radical left Dummocrat communists” who supposedly plan to “raise your taxes by $5 trillion.” There’s still a market for his on-stage stunts, like last week when he pardoned two guys who’d confessed to violating the Clean Air Act, declaring them “as clean as a newborn baby’s ass.” And there’s still a market for pearls of wisdom like this: “We have five states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy three or four days later. It’s true.”
But that’s just crap for the shrinking cult. Everyone else in America recoils or tunes it out.
Indeed, his travel itinerary exposes his desperation. Since early September, 21 of his 22 visits (including the five this week) have targeted red states only. He spent an entire day flying all the way to Alaska to support an endangered Republican senator. He has stumped in places like Alabama and Tennessee and Oklahoma and Texas and Nebraska and Montana. This week he’s due in South Carolina to support an endangered Republican senatorial candidate (he refers to the Democratic nominee as “Annie Trannie”).
He’s just trying to plug multiple leaks in the porous MAGA dike, and none of those pit stops would be necessary if he was politically healthy;. He hasn’t dared show his face in any purple swing states, because independents have told the pollsters he’s dead to them. But even his red-enclave efforts have been undercut by Republican candidates who in some cases have discovered that at rally time they needed to wash their hair. Republicans in Ohio and Nebraska have omitted him from their campaign ads. Elsewhere, some have scrubbed him from their websites.
I almost feel sorry for them. Republican candidates want to talk about stuff like tax cuts and highlight whatever qualifies as an administration achievement, like his efforts to lower prescription drug prices. Instead, they’re drowning in his never-ending sludge, like his diesel deal with Vladimir Putin, firing his new press secretary after just five days, and so much more. One GOP operative privately complained to a reporter last week that while the guy is everywhere, he is effectively nowhere, because he’s “not focused on what the voters care about. It’s insane.”
Which is fine by me. The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave needs to settle in and wreck the premises for another two weeks. For the Democrats and independents who are yearning for accountability in D.C., there is arguably no better mobilization message than what recently fell from his lips, in the service of his narcissistic mindset:
“Pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.”
Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]