Tomorrow is Election Day.
Trump made his closing argument for the midterm elections in a speech today at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The choice of location made Democratic consultants exultant. The reflecting pool has become a symbol of the Trump administration: an expensive boondoggle that failed immediately.
After touting his experience as a developer and claiming he was an expert at building pools, Trump refused to accept the conclusion that the installation had been faulty—a conclusion the contractor agreed with—and instead insisted that vandals had ruined the project. Under his control, the Department of Justice went so far as to launch a criminal case against a man who reached into the pool to touch the liner. In October, a judge dismissed the case.
Highlighting the reflecting pool in the last hours before Election Day recalled the Greek myth of Narcissus, the young hunter who falls in love with his own reflection in a pool and is unable to tear himself away. In today’s world, that choice also seemed to show Trump’s conviction that he can shape the narrative according to which Americans act.
But his speech seemed to prove the opposite.
The very small audience heard Trump go on and on about the reflecting pool, showing photos of the repairs, seeming to want to convince people that he was the brilliant developer who had fixed a problem 100 years in the making and that his efforts had been beset by vandals. It’s possible his speech writer intended for the theme to suggest that Trump was fixing the U.S. as he fixed the reflecting pool, but Trump’s obvious interest was in his Washington, D.C., projects rather than the nation. He didn’t move off the reflecting pool, algae, bubbles, granite, vandals, and liners for the first 16 minutes of his speech.
Then he turned to his usual wild exaggerations—the investments he has drawn to the U.S., the thousands of criminals he’s captured, the school “mutilizations” of children, his conquest of Greenland and Venezuela to give the U.S. control of “almost 50% of the world’s oil,” his victory over Iran, and so on—before veering back to his Washington projects, including replacing the “very inferior grass” at the White House, near his new helipad. He boasted of repairs he’s made to fountains, then turned to praise his planned “triumphal arch military complex,” his “National Garden of American Heroes” to be filled with statues of Americans he admires, and his new Washington, D.C., golf course.
“[I]t’s a golden age of America,” he concluded. “We have a country that we can be proud of again. We were laughed at all over the world for four years. We were laughed at like we were stupid people. We were laughed at by every ruler, every president, every prime minister, every king, every queen, but they don’t laugh anymore. Thank you very much, everybody.”
We will not know the results of the midterm elections until after the polls close and votes are counted, but early voting and polling suggest this election will see a Democratic wave.
Certainly, Republicans appear to be preparing for such an outcome. Alec Hernandez, Meredith Lee Hill, Erin Doherty, and Andrew Howard reported in Politico today that Republicans are bracing for big losses and are already privately blaming Trump. His trade wars, attacks on immigrants, killing of U.S. citizens, war on Iran, corruption, and alliance with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, as well as his lack of concern for the cost of his actions on the American people, have ruined his popularity and leave Republicans with little to run on.
“We all know who the problem is,” a Republican strategist told the Politico journalists. “It’s Trump. And do we continue down a path of losing?”
But this moment is far bigger than Trump.
At key moments in American history, the majority of voters have woken to the reality that a small group of men has rigged the system to funnel the wealth produced by ordinary people into their own pockets. With that wealth, they have bought power and undermined democracy in favor of themselves.
The potential for this perversion of the principles of the Declaration of Independence—that all people are created equal and have the right to an equal say in their government—became clear even before the creation of the United States of America. Shortly before the Revolutionary War, Daniel Boone had crossed the Appalachian Mountains and reported back to Virginians the miraculously rich resources of the land to the west, the land called “Kentucke.”
When the Revolutionary War ended, settlers rushed to push aside Indigenous Americans and lay claim to Kentucky. Once there, they quickly discovered that equality was not the inevitable result of economic freedom. Some men settled on better land than others, some had family money, some were just lucky, and quickly, those men accumulated more than others.
Along with their wealth, Kentucky’s landowners gained political power, which they used to secure legislation that promoted their interests at the expense of poorer settlers. Wealthy men came to control the government by working with lawmakers who shared their values and by buying the channels through which voters got information. Gradually, the laws they put in place circumscribed other men’s ability to rise, and wealth moved upward. Equality of opportunity faltered.
In 1787, when the Articles of Confederation were still in force, the congress assembled under that document passed the Northwest Ordinance, which was designed to prevent wealthy men from dominating the new western lands. The measure outlawed both primogeniture—the system in which the oldest son alone inherited a family’s wealth—and slavery, systems that the men who wrote the Northwest Ordinance believed were instrumental in concentrating wealth.
The men who wrote the Northwest Ordinance thought it would protect democracy, but over the next fifty years, a handful of wealthy enslavers tightened a stranglehold on the South. After 1854, when their intention to control the whole nation became obvious, Americans from a range of political parties came together to oust them from power. They created a government that worked to develop the economy from the bottom, educating young men and giving them land to farm. They tried to make America into a land where every man, regardless of race or background, could rise through hard work. They abolished human enslavement except as punishment for crime, then gave freedmen the vote to enable them to protect their own economic interests.
They argued that a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” had a responsibility to expand economic growth that benefited everyone.
But that vision came under attack after the Civil War, as men who opposed Black rights began to insist that government-funded programs that protected formerly enslaved people and helped immigrants redistributed wealth from hardworking white taxpayers to the undeserving. Money and power again began to concentrate at the top of society, among those who became known as “robber barons.” When their control of the government helped to crash the economy in 1893, the American people once again came together to oust them from power, and the Progressive Era recreated a government intended to work for everyone.
The same old pattern of demonizing Black Americans and immigrants for supposedly stealing tax dollars repeated. Men determined to control the country insisted that government regulations and taxes took away a man’s liberty to run his business as he saw fit and undermined the individualism that made America great. In the 1920s, they convinced American voters to turn the government over to businessmen, whose policies, once again, concentrated wealth. When the bottom fell out of that system in 1929 with the Great Crash, Americans came together to demand government work for all Americans, rather than a privileged few.
The system they created promised a “New Deal” for the American people, and most Americans thought the system that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights was so popular it would last forever.
But President Ronald Reagan began to undermine that system in the 1980s, insisting that the modern government redistributed the tax dollars of hardworking white men to people like the “welfare queen,” who played the system to live large without working. Like their predecessors from a hundred years before, Reagan and his allies claimed such a system was perilously close to socialism.
And, as before, cuts to regulation and taxes helped money—more than $50 trillion—move upward to the richest 1% of Americans. With it moved political power. Republican-dominated states suppressed voting by likely Democratic constituencies until we are now, in 2026, seeing people having to wait for hours to vote or having to march to distant polling places while billionaire Elon Musk pumps at least $446 million into the midterms to buy Republican control of Congress.
Still worried about losing, the administration is trying to rig the midterm election. After losing repeatedly in the courts over their demands to segregate 20,000 California ballots they insist might have been cast by noncitizens, it today appealed the question to the United States Supreme Court. California officials have said the list was haphazard and inaccurate, and today, in a different case, a Department of Justice lawyer told a judge it was “fair” to say the list has a “high” error rate.
This evening, the Supreme Court denied the administration’s emergency appeal to require California officials to set aside those 20,000 ballots.
The Republicans’ fear comes from the fact that the open looting of the government in Trump’s second term appears to have revealed to a majority of the American people that the policies the Republican Party has enacted since 1981 benefit only a few. Once again, it seems, Americans are coming together, ready to follow the pattern of the past and rebuild a government that works not just for the wealthy, but for everyone.
—
Notes:
https://calmatters.org/politics/2026/10/trump-voting-claims-counties/
https://abc11.com/post/trump-administration-appeals-supreme-court-push-sideline-20000-california-mail-ballots/20008299/
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/02/republicans-blame-trump-midterms-2026-01143980
https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/charges-dismissed-permanently-olympian-david-hearn-reflecting-pool-canoeist-prosecutors-refiling-pirro-jeanine-attorney-general-doj-dc-washington
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/09/we-toured-trumps-dc-vanity-projects-its-a-mess/
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/oct/31/elon-musk-midterms-spending-visualized
YouTube:
watch?v=2ONk9n1gu4M
Bluesky:
ariberman.bsky.social/post/3mzdxtqnsjk2q
thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3mzf2liqyck2j
victinibcn.bsky.social/post/3mzem3x5qv223
rgoodlaw.bsky.social/post/3mze5mhnvpk2f
chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3mze55fytws2m
kelseyreichmann.bsky.social/post/3mzefvgbwyk2m
Share
Market Design
