Trump downplays concerns about a possible Democratic majority, stepping on his message

Ahead of the 2020 elections, Donald Trump told anyone who would listen that a Joe Biden victory would lead to “a depression the likes of which you’ve never seen.” The then-president’s claim was obviously foolish and quickly discredited by reality.

The Republican is nevertheless recycling the line, declaring at a campaign rally in Mississippi this week, “If the Democrats win, you will have a 1929-style economic depression. What they want to do is so bad for our country, you’re going to end up with a massive recession or depression.”

The incumbent president never got around to saying how this economic calamity would happen, which parts of the Democratic agenda are so dangerous or why he was so spectacularly wrong when he made the same prediction six years earlier.

But what struck me as especially notable was that even Trump doesn’t seem to believe his own fearmongering.

Just hours before his event in Mississippi, the president briefly spoke to reporters, one of whom asked how he’d “work with Democrats if they have control of the House or the Senate.” He replied:

We’ll figure a way. Look, I have strong veto. I hope that that won’t be the case, but if it is, that’s happened before with many presidents. And you have strong veto and you end up working out deals.

Oh.

So on the one hand, Trump wants Americans to believe that a Democratic majority on Capitol Hill would transform the nation into a hellscape in which transgender Muslim immigrants come to your home to turn your children into communists.

But on the other hand, Trump also wants Americans to believe that if there is a Democratic majority, he’ll veto bad ideas while working on possible bipartisan agreements — which is unlikely to sound all that scary to many voters.

The president made similar comments in early September, telling Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, “I’ll block all their bad stuff for two years. It won’t be the same, but I’ll be a blocker, what can I tell you?”

He then added that he’ll “probably be able to make deals” with the possible Democratic majority.

The Republican Party’s line is that the stakes in this election cycle are effectively existential — but Trump’s line is that it just won’t be that big a deal if Democrats prevail. That’s quite a message for the incumbent president to take to the electorate in the cycle’s closing days, but here we are.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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