December 5, 2025
Can Trump Win the Midterms?
By Douglas Flint
There is an expression, perhaps not relevant to this generation: “This is where I came in.” In the pre-internet, pre-television before-time, movie theaters often ran a movie on a continuous loop all day. You paid your dime and came in, maybe at the beginning, maybe halfway through, maybe at the end. You just kept watching until it came around to “where you came in.”
Life is also often this way. I came of age during the great inflation that started in the early seventies, which switched to hyper-inflation in the late seventies under President Jimmy Carter. In those times, the Fed was pumping huge numbers of dollars into the financial system to maintain the illusion of economic growth, or at least stability. The result was runaway inflation and a stagnant economy, allowing Carter to claim another first: “stagflation.”
When Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election, he, with the help of Fed chief Paul Volcker, set out to wring the inflation out of the economy. This required an immediate and severe contraction of the money supply. The short-term economic pain was great. (Taking away a junkie’s heroin is never pleasant, nor are 17% mortgage rates.) The 1982 midterms were a bloodbath for the GOP, but Reagan’s tough love worked. The economy sputtered and coughed and then roared back to life, carrying Reagan to a 49-state landslide in the 1984 election, and it would have carried George Bush, Sr. through two terms if he hadn’t foolishly betrayed his party and the country and broken his “no new taxes” pledge. But that is all “spilt milk under the bridge” now.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/12/can_trump_win_the_midterms.html
