No Need To Pretend; Trump Is On The Ballot

Donald Trump. Photo from the White House.

President Donald Trump, despite cratering poll numbers that have Republicans fearing a looming November disaster, wants to make the midterms all about himself.

“I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he said to a fired-up crowd of adoring MAGA loyalists at the recent GOP midterm convention in Dallas.

In Wisconsin, Trump and his policies really are on the ballot in the person of Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor. Tiffany is a true-blue Trumper, a Congressman who has voted with Trump 100% of the time. He has never seen a Trump policy or program he wouldn’t support, no matter how unpopular or how damaging to Wisconsin.

“Pretend Trump is on the ballot” should be Wisconsin Democrats’ campaign theme.

Affordability is the top issue, and Tiffany has voted for the entire Trump agenda, raising the cost of everything from gasoline and groceries to utilities and healthcare.

Tariffs? Tiffany’s on board. He voted to protect Trump’s illegal tariffs seven times.

Gasoline prices?  Tiffany cast the deciding vote to defeat a House resolution to end the Iran war.  Since the war began, Wisconsin drivers have paid more than $1 billion in additional costs for gasoline.

Health care? Tiffany’s vote to gut the Affordable Care Act and end subsidies raised premiums and forced 22,000 Wisconsinites to drop their coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.  Food aid? Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which Tiffany supported, removed tens of thousands of Wisconsin people from the SNAP program.

The list goes on and on and on. Tiffany voted against the release of the Epstein files, which are loaded with Trump references. He is an election denier who supported overturning the 2020 presidential election and still won’t admit that Joe Biden won. He introduced a bill to ban abortions nationwide after six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions.

Trump, of course, has endorsed him, but has not campaigned for him yet. Tiffany did join him at a Chippewa Falls farm roundtable in June but has been coy about whether the president will actively campaign for him. Reading between the lines, it sounds like he hopes Trump will be “too busy.” He seems to be trying to get at least a sliver of daylight between himself and Trump, such as saying he doesn’t agree with changing the name of Lake Ontario.

Tiffany is not a Trump clone in terms of personality, only on policy.  He doesn’t spout racist, sexist, profane or demeaning insults. He leaves that to another MAGA Congressman from Wisconsin, Derrick Van Orden.

Van Orden, an ex-Navy SEAL, swears like a sailor. He cursed out a group of young Senate pages who were trying to take photos of the Capitol Rotunda ceiling, heckled Biden during his State of the Union speech, yelled at farmers who were meeting with him in his DC office, got into an altercation with a protestor at the GOP national convention in Milwaukee, and more.  All in a day’s work.

In a tight race with Democrat Rebecca Cooke in his western Wisconsin district, he is running multiple deepfake social media posts putting false, inflammatory statements in Cooke’s mouth, including one where she is helping a man wearing an Illegal Alien T-shirt to shred documents, while they speak in Spanish. Van Orden thumbs his nose at a state law requiring such ads to make it clear they are generated by artificial intelligence.

While others try to get some distance, Van Orden is embracing Trump. He spoke at Trump’s mid-term convention and says those who are shying away from Trump are disloyal.

Van Orden is a 100% Trump voter in the House of Representatives. So were all the other Wisconsin Republicans in the House last year. But the rest are in mostly safe seats, while his district is up for grabs.

And Tiffany, a 100% Trump loyalist, is running statewide, where 60% of voters have an unfavorable opinion of Trump according to the latest Marquette poll. He would have no trouble keeping his House seat in his heavily GOP district, but selling Trumpism statewide should be a real challenge.

If Wisconsin voters realize Trump really is on the ballot, that could be fatal for his alter ago, Tom Tiffany.

Bill Christofferson, a recovered journalist, is a former longtime Wisconsin political consultant and strategist, now retired. He lives in Milwaukee.