The reason why Donald Trump is terrible on the campaign trail as an incumbent goes beyond his inability to admit a mistake. Trump’s only style of politics is to behave like an outsider and campaign on how terrible everything is.
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It is a strategy that worked in 2016 and 2024, but it has failed when Trump is the incumbent, and the person who makes things terrible is him.
At a rally for Darline Graham, in theory, this rally was for Graham, but she was barely given any time; the president decided to pair his effort to buy votes by promising $5,000 if Republicans keep control of Congress, with the threat of a Great Depression if Democrats take control of Congress.
Trump said:
 If Democrats win, you will have a 1929-style economic depression because that’s how bad their policies are. You’ll end up in a depression. If that happens, that will happen. If the Republicans win, you’ll each have $5,000 in your pocket and economic success for our country like we have never seen before, like what’s going on.
And remember, just recently I gave all members of the military seventeen hundred and seventy-six dollars. Remember that? The military. Less than a year ago. And everyone said, “Oh, it couldn’t, it can’t be done.” It was seventeen seventy-five. I said, “One dollar more,” and we made it seventeen seventy-six. Can you believe it? One dollar more. I said, “That’s a strange number. Let’s do a dollar more.”
Trump has evolved from trying to bribe voters to trying to scare them with a depression.
