Year two: Trump still has much further to fall

1. 2018 will be a very rough year for President Trump — and almost-catastrophic for the Republican Party, which has morphed into the Trump Party;

2. Last week’s Quinnipiac poll said it all: While 66 percent of the American people rate the economy as either “good or excellent,” only 36 percent approve of the job President Trump is doing;

3. Normally, a president’s approval rating tracks the rating of the economy: When the economy is struggling, so is the POTUS’ ratings. Conversely, previous presidents generally had their approval numbers go up when the economy went up;

4. But Trump’s behavior — his divisive, boastful, dishonest, egotistical, infantile, self-aggrandizing personality — has made it impossible for most people to give him any credit for anything;

5. This has now rubbed off on the Republican Party. Most polls now give Democrats a double-digit lead in generic polling on the question, “Who do you want to control Congress in November?”

6. Such a sizable lead — more than 10 months out from a midterm election, and in an economy that 66 percent rate so well — shows that the driving force in 2018 is all anti-Trump. Period;

7. Of course, Trump is not on the ballot in 2018. So the Republican candidates will serve as Trump surrogate punching bags — and the voters will take their wrath out on them;

8. Thus, so many House GOP retirements; thus, so much money being raised by so many Democrat candidates; thus, so many impassioned female Democrat candidates running nationwide;

9. Clearly the GOP’s hope that the tax bill will spur even more economic growth and, thus, will mitigate the damage Trump himself is doing to their election chances is misguided; in fact, Trump’s recent behavior is actually growing even more toxic and negative;

10. The passion differential favors the Democrats because female voters, minority voters, young voters and independents are turning against Trump and the GOP in droves;

11. In virtually every election in 2017 — and now in the recent special state senate race in Wisconsin — Democrat voters are turning out in high numbers;

12. 2018 is also going to be a bad year for Trump because he has no agenda — and couldn’t get it passed even if he did;

13. In his first year — despite his behavioral deficits — the GOP did get federal court appointments and Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch done; did confirm Cabinet officers who are now de-regulating; and did cut corporate taxes. These were all Trump campaign promises and, to his credit, he kept those promises;

14. But the GOP and President Trump failed — monumentally — at doing what they promised over four election cycles from 2010 to 2016: to replace ObamaCare with something better. That failure — along with Trump’s dyspeptic personality — is why the GOP has so little national support;

15. The 2017 agenda was traditional Republicanism;

16. But there is no agenda for 2018. In fact, the GOP-controlled Congress and Executive Branch cannot even pass a Continuing Resolution to keep the government open for a few weeks;

17. And, when asking the Democrats for some votes to help out, Trump goes and utters the “s—hole” comment and all hell breaks loose;

18. Two GOP senators (Tom Cotton of Arkansas, David Perdue of Georgia) impugn the integrity of the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate (Dick Durbin of Illinois) and, thus, the atmosphere is severely poisoned, thereby hindering chances to work together on things like infrastructure and immigration;

19. Is this any way to run the government?

20. Trump was elected as a self-proclaimed “deal maker.” Really? After a year in office, can anyone name even one deal he has negotiated — or even one he successfully re-negotiated?

21. He cannot even get his own party to agree on either a health care plan (the No. 1 problem to a plurality of voters) or an immigration plan;

22. And Russia hasn’t even been mentioned yet;

23. The Mueller probe is clearly exerting huge pressure on Trump. It has eroded his “honesty and trustworthiness” in polling. Trump and his team has repeatedly changed their story: First, asserting that no one from his campaign talked to or has anything to do with Russians. Oh, Really? “100 percent,” the president was willing to talk to Mueller. Now it’s, there was “no collusion” so he says “it seems unlikely that you’d even have an interview.”

24. “This Russia thing,” as Trump called it after he fired FBI director James Comey last May, is a cancer eating away at the Trump presidency; 2018 will probably see it reach its conclusion;

25. We now know that the Paul Manafort and Rick Gates trials will probably begin in September, just weeks before the November midterms, thus injecting the Russia investigation into the news on a daily basis just before the voting begins;

26. We also know that former Trump strategist Steve Bannon is going to talk to the Mueller team — and, if you read “Fire and Fury,” Bannon repeatedly tells the author that Trump is in deep trouble for “money laundering” and that there was “treason” in the Trump campaign when it came to meeting with Russian agents in Trump Tower;

27. All of this means that 2018 looks bad for Trump — and hideous for the Republican Party;

28. Predictions for 2018: A.) Mueller will produce evidence of criminal wrongdoing by President Trump; B.) the Republican Party will get slaughtered in November.

John LeBoutillier, a former Republican congressman from New York, co-hosts “Revolution – The Podcast,” available on Soundcloud and iTunes.