Donald Trump, on the eve of the midterm elections, held a strange press conference on Monday afternoon near the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial. His closing message was that “it may take a long time to remove the stench”. Less than 24 hours before the voting, the president promoted his $14 million renovation of the Washington Monument and blamed his predecessors for the algae that once flourished in its waters. He showed a photo of the pool with algae, saying “this was in the Biden era” and that “algae is brutal, it forms easily”. The event was surprising, especially since polls showed that Americans were not satisfied with the president’s focus on renovation projects. The pool project had failed badly, becoming an international joke when Trump’s promise to return the water to “blue like the American flag” ended with an invasion of green algae.
Trump did not heed advice from his aides to focus on other issues, seeing “beautifying Washington” as one of his strongest legacies. He praised his legacy, claiming he had delivered “far more promises than he had made”. On election day, Trump turned to other priorities, publishing an “American declaration of freedom in space” that declared “the solar system and all of space beyond Earth as the property of all people”, and declaring this week “Anti-Communism Week”. On Tuesday morning, as polling stations opened, Trump appeared on Fox News with an unexpected announcement: he would cut off the $4 billion in military aid to Israel at the end of the year. This position was more in line with voters’ views, as a Quinnipiac poll found that nearly half of Americans believed the US was too supportive of Israel.
The president also openly expressed his displeasure with Democrats who attacked him on this issue, citing the message of Abdul El-Sayed. Trump said that “the left” had used the $4 billion figure as a “signal of injustice”. By Tuesday evening, as polling stations began to close, the president was lashing out angrily at Fox News, the leading conservative network. He posted on Truth Social that “The FoxNews poll, always the worst, is so insulting” and that “FoxNews ratings are way down (27%!)”. Within an hour, results began coming in: big wins for Democrats in Georgia, New Hampshire and North Carolina. As bad news for Republicans continued, signaling a shocking rejection of the president, Trump issued a brief statement with a simple message: it was not his fault. “I wasn’t on the ballot and if I had been, we would have won BY A LANDSLIDE!”, he wrote on Truth Social.
Taken from The Guardian US