First Dolly Parton, now Tim Curry. Not to get all alarmist, but the last year celeb deaths started piling up like this was 2016—and look how that year turned out. Happy Thursday.

How He’ll Lose

by Andrew Egger

Things are pretty bleak out there. But let me paint you a picture.

Sixty-nine days from now is Wednesday, November 4. We’ll wake that morning—if current trends hold—to news of a ringing electoral repudiation of Donald Trump and his Republicans. Team Red will have lost the House; they may even have lost the Senate. Trump’s chances of further major legislation will have gone up in smoke, and he may well be staring down the barrel of two years of pure legislative pain: no ability to get his nominees confirmed, no ability to stave off messaging bills aimed at his weaknesses, no way to avoid constant investigative scrutiny.

He’ll be furious. He’ll be crashing out. And we already know exactly what he’ll be saying.

Yesterday, Trump shared a post on Truth Social from the brainless MAGA influencer Matt Van Swol. “I don’t think the GOP fully grasp how badly they are fucking up right now,” Van Swol wrote. “I’m talking to people who normally have ZERO interest in politics who are legitimately pissed off. They are not seeing the major reform they thought would happen and are REALLY MAD about it.”

“I’m very worried the GOP is sleepwalking toward a midterm reckoning they don’t see coming,” he continued. “People believed they were voting for the Trump agenda. And instead, many feel like they’re getting the same old Washington. If Republicans in Congress don’t start producing tangible results, they’re going to discover that frustration has consequences . . . And by the time they realize how deep-seeded that frustration is, it may already be too late.”

That Trump would endorse this sentiment, two months and change before the midterms, is astonishing. For all his happy talk, it seems like he’s really starting to feel like his party is blowing it. And, of course, he’s deeply convinced it’s anybody else’s fault but his.

Which is preposterous. Trump has remade the entire GOP and all of American politics in his own lurid image, and it’s an image that Americans have never hated more. Trump has always struggled to turn out his motley base when he himself isn’t on the ballot, and that base is dwindling away day by day regardless. Everywhere you look, it’s warning lights blaring on the dashboard. Pollster G. Elliott Morris notes that the president’s last bastion of issue approval, border security, just went into the red: He’s now at -5 on the topic. And the enthusiasm gap is getting downright insane: 49 percent of voters strongly disapprove of Trump’s performance, while only 17 percent—17 percent!—strongly approve.

In such an environment, you might expect GOP candidates to be sprinting away from the president at top speed, desperate to convince voters who have already soured on him that downballot candidates might still have something to offer. But they’re in too deep; if they knifed Trump now, he’d turn on them, and voters wouldn’t forgive them anyway. So all they can do is white-knuckle it to Election Day and pray for a miracle.

Meanwhile, Trump seems determined to hang himself around every other Republican’s neck. He has internalized the pattern that Trump-era Republicans get crushed when Trump isn’t on the ballot in the most self-flattering way possible. To Trump, it isn’t that his unique bundle of tics and pathologies has proven uniquely compelling for shaking the chuds, racists, militiamen, and conspiracy theorists out of America’s couch cushions every four years. Rather, it’s that every politician around him is a hopeless chump with absolutely zero juice of their own. Best they can hope is to be the moon to his sun.

It should be said, too, that the party’s official organs have done nothing but flatter Trump’s priors in this regard. Guys like RNC Chair Joe Gruters have been making the case religiously since last year: Republicans don’t have a prayer in the midterms unless they throw themselves into the muscular, varicose arms of Donald J. Trump. Why was there only one set of footprints in the sand? It was then, Mr. President, that you carried us.

Trump is already taking this attitude to the campaign trail. He’s out there confiding in his base voters that he’s worried they won’t show up: “What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” he said at a rally for Sen. Darline Graham last week. “Just come and vote, it’s so important.” Next month, at an unprecedented midterm convention in Dallas, Trump and Co. will make the case again: Your Republican candidates are good because they’re for Trump.

If this message fails—and it’s easy to see why it would—Trump’s rage will be incandescent. I go out there and bust my ass for you worthless lumps and you still can’t get over the finish line! The president is never one to keep these things to himself. The post-midterms crashout will be breathtaking—and a powerful sign of good things to come.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Inside Ukraine’s Breakthrough Missile Deal… The new defense cooperation agreement with the U.K. is less about the war now than about European security for the next generation, argues MARK HERTLING.

• Tim Curry, 1946–2026… He understood that if you’re going to play a pirate alongside Muppets, a campy alien, or a monstrous clown, you might as well go all the way, remembers SONNY BUNCH.

• Trump Is Racing to Build His Ballroom Before the Courts Stop Him… On The Illegal News, SARAH LONGWELL and ANDREW WEISSMANN discuss a pair of Supreme Court moves benefiting Trump, including John Roberts allowing construction on the White House ballroom to continue and a ruling affecting Trump’s plans for mail-in voting.

• How to Win… The only likely way to end the nightmare of Trump—and Republicans supporting him no matter how much he ruins the country—is for Democrats to win in Republican-leaning states and congressional districts,