Donald Trump’s terrifying plan to win the 2018 midterms

Is Donald Trump hoping foreign terrorists attack the United States?

That terrifying question is subtly embedded in a story this weekend reported by Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey, and Sean Sullivan of the Washington Post on the Republican Party’s growing alarm about the upcoming 2018 midterms.

The story details GOP woes and Democratic hopes before pivoting to some more optimistic Republican voices, including a sensible point from Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX):

“Who knows what 2018 will be like? Nobody called 2016, right?” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the second-ranking Republican in that chamber. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was going to get elected and that Chuck Schumer was going to be the majority leader. And none of that turned out to be true.”

Trump, though, is thinking about a different, possibly crazy, comparison:

In private conversations, Trump has told advisers that he doesn’t think the 2018 election has to be as bad as others are predicting. He has referenced the 2002 midterms, when George W. Bush and Republicans fared better after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, these people said.

I’m pretty skeptical that the political dynamics of September 2001 would be replicated today. But regardless, this is a frightening line of thought for an incumbent president and his team to be entertaining.

On the economy, conversely, pretty much everyone agrees that good economic news is better for Trump than bad news. And it’s probably not a coincidence that when it came time for Trump to fill the nation’s top economic policy job, he made a perfectly reasonable choice and picked Jerome Powell, whom even Janet Yellen’s biggest fans don’t have anything bad to say about. When presidents attempt to serve their political self-interest by generating good objective outcomes for the American people, democracy works for us all.

One would hope, by a similar token, that fear of undermining the effectiveness of important counterterrorism operations would restrain even the most shameless administration from, say, pursuing a partisan purge of the FBI and the rest of the intelligence community.

But if the president and his top staff are not so concerned with democracy but rather with purely political power, that’s a terrifying proposition. And given Trump’s willingness to put his own interests before democratic norms — from keeping his business interests to firing his FBI director to protect a friend — the absurd idea feels almost plausible.

If Trump thinks a terrorist attack would serve his political interests — either through a blind rally-’round-the-flag effect or by specifically validating anti-immigrant demagoguery or what have you — how hard is he really working to keep the country safe?