U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at the Republican National Midterm Convention in Dallas, Texas, U.S., September 9, 2026.
President Donald Trump has lost the support of a former Montana governor who is not only a Republican, but used to chair the Republican National Committee.
"It's a classic bait and switch from Donald Trump," former Gov. Marc Racicot told CNN's Jake Tapper on Thursday. He was referring to Trump's promise to give $5,000 to every American adult if Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress in November. "Typical — full of holes, and frankly, impossible to accomplish without congressional approval. You're talking about $1.4 trillion being added to the deficit. Of course Congress is going to be involved, especially when you have a request from the administration for $1.4 trillion of additional defense spending."
He added, "They paid $1.4 trillion this year on the national debt. There's another trillion dollars of spending over appropriation levels. So they're spending money — he's spending money like a drunken sailor. And the fact of the matter is, I think it's going to be virtually impossible to bring about and see adopted by Congress. It's a bait and switch."
Racicot concluded, "He senses what's going on in the country, and as a consequence of that, he resorts to his typical prevarications — claiming at the very beginning of his discussion that the hall was full. Well, it wasn't full. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of seats that were empty. So the fact is, he'll make up what he has to say at the moment in time that it's necessary to say it. It's like carnival barking, and he's not the least bit concerned with what's true or untrue. If he told me that the sun was going to rise tomorrow, I'd wait till morning to make sure."
When Tapper asked Racicot about Trump's strategy of making the midterm elections an explicit referendum on himself, particularly at a midterms convention which was full of empty seats, Racicot characterized this as desperate.
"Frankly, I think everything he's done in the last 24 to 48 hours — and even preceding that — is a sign of desperation," Racicot told Tapper. "He senses his escape hatch has served him well over the course of time, and whatever he has to employ to accomplish that — whether it's untruths, half-truths, or no truths — he's going to put into the mix and tell people what they want to hear. So I think, frankly, he's desperate. And if the polls are any indication, and the public in America is seeing it turn as I have been watching it over the course of the last three to four years, I think the screw is turning, and they're going to be in some difficult times."
Trump's inability to break that despair was perhaps most evident on Wednesday night when he said that he had stopped America from being a "laughingstock," only to be met with a tepid response from the normally enthusiastic crowd. As Dr. Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, told AlterNet earlier in September, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has gotten the advantage over the United States in the ongoing trade war that Trump started.
"It's not just Mr. Carney, he is the expression of something that he knows as a politician is now a very popular view in Canada," Wolff said to AlterNet. "He's not going to be held to blame because this or that difficulty happens. If he can show, as he often can, that the United States' hostility, tariff policy number one, is the root cause, then he gets a pass. The kind of anger that might often be addressed to a politician won't be, because they correctly perceive that the problem is something else. And so they appeal to the politician when he comes up with solutions or attempted solution to keep workers' needs in mind."