Opinion - Election time is here, and voters have caught on to con-man Trump

President Trump is one of history's most successful con men, winning two elections by convincing millions of voters to believe his false boasts and promises. But with early voting now underway for the midterms, Americans are finally wising up to his dishonesty, selfishness, incompetence, corruption and disregard for legal restraints on his power.

Most Americans now realize Trump's tariffs on imported products and his disastrous war of choice against Iran — which has lasted more than seven months, despite him saying it would last less than eight weeks — are to blame for the rising prices of gasoline, diesel fuel, groceries and many other products.

An Associated Press-NORC Center Public Affairs Research poll published Oct. 1 found that 71 percent of adult Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the war. Sixty-five percent believe his policies have caused high prices that have created an affordability crisis.

The New York Times latest average of polls shows less than 40 percent of voters approve of Trump's overall performance in office.

And yet, Trump refuses to acknowledge this reality. "Everyone thinks the prices are high because of me, but they're not," he said Oct. 1. "We have the greatest [economic] numbers of any president in the history of our country," he falsely stated. "The only thing we're doing badly at is public relations."

When told recently by a Time Magazine journalist that "your polls have never been lower," Trump responded : "They're fake numbers. … The pollsters are corrupt."

While polls are sometimes inaccurate , reputable pollsters all strive for accuracy and don't deliberately undermine their own credibility and future earnings by falsifying results.

Trump frequently calls polls, news stories, elections lost by Republicans, and anything else unfavorable to him "fake" or "a hoax." In fact, he is the greatest purveyor of fake news and hoaxes ever to lead our nation.

CNN reporter Daniel Dale, who has been fact-checking Trump for 10 years, recently wrote that by September 2020, "I'd recorded more than 8,500 false claims since September 2016" by Trump. Dale said he stopped fact-checking every Trump statement then because he "was telling so many campaign lies that I'd become physically unable to look into all of them."

The Washington Post's fact-checking team found that Trump made 30,573 false and misleading statements during his first term (including the final months after Dale stopped counting), peaking at 503 in a single day before the 2020 presidential election, which Trump still falsely claims he won.

During his 2024 election campaign, Trump announced "the goal of cutting the cost of a new home in half." He said he would reduce gasoline prices to less than $2 per gallon , "bring interest rates way down" (something no president has the power to do), and end Russia's war against Ukraine "in 24 hours" if he was elected. He said in the same year that "I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars."

Trump also said in 2024 that he would "bring the cost of everything way down" and cut "energy and electricity prices by half, at least." He even promised that "Every problem can be solved, and every wrong can be rectified."

None of these things happened. This makes it obvious that Trump won't keep many of the promises he is making now.

An Economist-YouGov poll in September found that only 21 percent of Americans believe Trump will keep his promise to send every adult U.S. citizen $5,000 if Republicans keep control of the House and Senate in the midterms.

Another Economist-YouGov poll in August found that 50 percent of Americans believed the war with Iran would last another year or more, even though Trump claimed in September that the war will end "immediately after the [midterm] election" and "oil prices are going to be tumbling downward."

The truth is that Trump has made life far worse for Americans with his war against Iran, tariffs, cuts to healthcare and government services, tax cuts for the rich and corporations, brutal immigrant arrests and deportations that have created worker shortages, rollbacks of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs, attacks on voting rights, war on freedom of the press and academic freedom, and many other actions.

With such a dismal record of failure, someone in any job other than the presidency would be fired. But Trump wants us to give Republicans continued majority control of both chambers of Congress so they will allow him to inflict even more harm on us.

As the president campaigns for Republicans running in the midterms, he is repeatedly telling Americans to "pretend I'm on the ballot."

Like many of my fellow Democrats, I also want voters to pretend Trump is on midterm ballots. The more voters think about his disastrous policies and abuses of power, the more likely many will be to vote for Democrats.

Even many of the most successful con men eventually get caught and are held accountable for their actions. It's time for this to happen to Trump. If Democrats win control of at least one chamber of Congress, it will.

A. Scott Bolden is an attorney, NewsNation contributor, former chair of the Washington, D.C. Democratic Party and a former New York state prosecutor.