The 100-year-old memoir that predicts exactly what will happen in November

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts at the end of the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 24, 2026. REUTERS KEVIN LAMARQUE

Like rising prices, political polls are impossible to avoid right now, and I reckon I am as sick and tired of both of them as you are.

While those escalating prices do nothing but break our budgets, those polls do offer a barometer of how the asinine American electorate is thinking about things, and tend to be more accurate than we generally want to admit. They will also be particularly important this year, when a wildly unpopular and demented Donald Trump continues to overstate his sinking popularity to justify his attack on America by mitigating the importance and accuracy of our elections like so many dangerous dictators in history have done before him.

Yesterday, I took a few minutes to look in on what little social media I still use to scream out loud about things (Bluesky and Notes) and posted news of the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll that has Trump at an all-time low 33-percent approval rating.

Then I waited for the predictable responses.

Namely, HOW can his approvals STILL be that high?!

HOW can a president fighting multiple, illegal wars with an overextended, suicidal military, that is running out of key, strategic weapons and moral high ground have ANY backing? How can a maniac who has driven myriad companies into bankruptcy, and is now presiding over a failing economy featuring rising interest rates, soaring inflation, escalating gas and food prices, and skyrocketing government and private debt get the approval of ANYBODY?

Our air, water, animals and people are under vicious attack. What is there to like?

To answer that, let’s accept as painful as it is, that the guy won the 2024 election with roughly 49 percent of the vote, so a drop-off of 16 percent since then is significant. But I sense that maybe even that explanation is lacking, so perhaps it’s worth a try to put Trump’s appeal to the most tasteless and racist people in America in some historical context.

Seven years ago, and a year before his death, my dad dumped a book on me. My father was the most voracious reader I have ever known, and consumed books by the shelf-full. I bet he read three books a week without breaking a sweat. So when that guy endorsed a book by saying “it was one of the most fascinating things (he’d) ever read,” I knew I was in for a treat.

From Exile to Washington: A Memoir of Leadership on the 20th Century didn’t get much attention when it was penned by Michael Blumenthal in 2013, which is a high crime.

Blumenthal might be the greatest, inspirational American success story that most people have never heard of. As a 13-year-old boy he barely escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, only to end up living in the barbaric Japanese-occupied ghettos in Shanghai just months later.

Inside his underrated book, he tells the story of how he ascended from those ghettos to go onto serve in both the Kennedy and Carter administrations, and was actually the Secretary of the Treasury in the latter.

For the purposes of this write and brevity, I want to break out a story in the book in which Blumenthal writes of returning to Germany in 1954, in his capacity as a rising professor at Princeton University, where he was putting together a thesis on “Labor-management relations in the German steel industry, 1947-54.”

Maybe not the most fascinating prose in history, but I hope it makes the point that the man had a lot on his mind, and nobody was going to stop him from fleshing those things out.

He was also perhaps the most optimistic man I have ever come across, but even he was taken aback by what he found during his return to Germany 15 years after his escape, and a decade after Hitler’s death, and heinous crimes on humanity had been exposed.

By Blumenthal’s estimates, fully 40 percent of Germany was still under Hitler’s spell in the 1950s, and it was understandably hard for him to bear. How, knowing what they did, were they still in the tank for arguably the most gruesome monster in history?

And a quick personal exit before returning to my point: I actually stopped reading this book that I have been bragging about three-quarters through it — something I never do — because it pained me to see the all good this man (and so many others) have done for their country so willfully destroyed by the worst man on Earth since Hitler. Instead of being an aspirational nation in 2017 when I was reading it, we had officially become an ignorant, mean and greedy one that was in the state of massive regression. Instead of feeling inspiration, I just felt terribly sad.

Today, even Measles are making a comeback in Trump’s rapidly diminishing 2026 America.

I plan to finish the book, but only if I can be convinced that America is on its way out of this mess, which I will touch on before turning you loose today.

That fully 33 percent of America still supports this ghastly, racist lowlife is hardly surprising when we look at what Blumenthal encountered during his trip back to Germany in the 1950s.

Human beings are easily the most evil living things on the planet.

As for the way out of this current-day mess? Well, you don’t need me to tell you how bad and truly scary things are right now. As I’ve typed to you before, if you aren’t aware of this, you either aren’t paying attention, are dangerously stupid, are willingly ignorant, or most likely all of the above.

It takes guts and bravery to keep up with what is happening in America, and I salute anybody who is.

The midterm elections are but 76 days away and they really might be our last chance to save ourselves from the authoritarian monster in our White House, and his abhorrent supporters who live among us.

Trump will continue to try to attack these elections because it is what dictators like Hitler do. How much success he will have is open to question.

So here’s what is going to happen:

When November 3rd rolls around Democrats will sweep to historic victories all over the map. Despite Republicans’ anti-American gerrymandering, and voter suppression tactics, the Democratic Party will win a solid majority in the Congress and slim one in the Senate. They will win important governors races, and will make tremendous gains in hundreds and hundreds of state, and local races throughout the country.

All these victories will not end the Republican attack on America, but they will be an important victory in this long war to save America from itself.

I know these things will happen because these things have been happening. There hasn’t been one important contested election since 2024 that Democrats have failed to win over Republicans. Turnout has been robust, and the energy is with the Left and blowing hard against the Right.

Nothing motivates people more than fear, and the smart and decent people in America are scared to death right now.

When the November tsunami hits, and all the votes are counted, the battle will have been joined by the real patriots in America, and that’s when hope returns.

And when that hope returns, and we are giving as well as we have been getting, who knows? I might even feel optimistic enough to return to reading the rest of Blumenthal’s sensational book.

Oh, and one final tidbit on Blumenthal before I go: In researching this piece today, I learned that he is still alive and living in Princeton, New Jersey.

He is 100 years old.

If this man, and all he has been through can stick with America that long, then so can we.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

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