By
Ed Kilgore,
political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015
Vance in Dallas.
If you want a good idea of the Republican Party’s closing pitch to voters heading toward a 2026 election that doesn’t look good for them, Donald Trump’s two speeches to the GOP Midterm Convention in Dallas weren’t all that illuminating. At inordinate length on Wednesday night, and in a brief reprise Thursday night, the president suggested Americans are living in a virtual paradise of booming prosperity and swaggering global power that the evil “Dumocrats” want to take away in order to plunge the country back into the nightmare of Sleepy Joe Biden’s four years in office. The only news he made was a jaw-dropping trillion-dollar offer to give every American citizen $5,000 as a “dividend” if the electorate is wise enough (or greedy and needy enough, I suppose) to keep Congress in his party’s hands.
