On Monday Donald Trump made the last speech of an extraordinary run of political speeches. And, according to some observers, the weirdest.
Driven by the conviction that only he could save Republicans from a midterms rout, Trump has endured “one of the most relentless, far-reaching travel schedules of any modern presidency” (according to a White House press release): 30 rallies in 20 states in the last 32 days.
On Monday, in front of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in DC, the clearly exhausted 80-year-old made his final pitch to voters.
Your quick guide to the US midterms
Americans are heading to the polls for the 2026 midterm elections on 3 November.
In these pivotal elections, voters will decide which party controls Congress for the rest of Donald Trump’s presidency – and the Democrats have high expectations.
What are the midterms?
Midterms allow voters to elect members of Congress – one-third of the Senate and all members of the House of Representatives.
Votes are held in the middle of each four-year presidential term. While the president is not up for election, they are largely a referendum on their party.
The party that controls Congress has the power to shape laws and act as a government watchdog.
Control of Congress up for grabs
Trump’s Republican Party currently has power in the White House and both chambers of Congress – the 435-strong House and the 100-member Senate.
Their majority is slim, but it means they have the power to bring their preferred laws to the floor and have them signed off by Trump.
To win a majority in the Senate, Democrats need to flip four Republican-held seats, while holding on to all their own. In the House, they need a net gain of three seats.
What do the polls tell us so far?
Democratic candidates lead in well over the 218 seats (of 435 total) needed to flip control of the House, polls suggest. They are tied or narrowly ahead in Senate races.
It comes as Trump’s approval ratings hit an all-time low of 32 per cent, according to a September Reuters poll.
Despite this, recent US political history holds many examples of opinion polls being proved wrong. For example, Trump outperformed predictions on his way to White House victories in 2016 and 2024.
What are the key issues?
More than 53 million people, of the total 210 million registered voters, have alreaady cast their ballots by voting early, with more Democrats doing so than Republicans.
There are also signs that Hispanic voters who veered to Trump in 2024 might be returning to Democrats because of frustration over the economy and some of Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics.
- Domestic issues like consumer prices are likely to affect the outcome of many races and could erode support for Republicans.
- Inflation remains above the level targeted by the US Federal Reserve, partly down to the war that the US and Israel started with Iran in February.
- However, immigration and the growing influence of AI and big tech remain high on voters’ minds.
From blockades to impeachment
What it means for Trump
- If the Democrats win either the House or the Senate then Trump will find it difficult to get laws through Congress.
- Democratic control of either chamber would also mean they could use committees to investigate aspects of the Trump presidency.
- Corruption allegations, the controversial new White House ballroom and violent ICE tactics could be subject to scrutiny.
- There is also a debate within the Democratic Party about whether to impeach Trump, which means to bring charges in the House that will form the basis for a political trial in the Senate.
- However, a two-third majority is needed in the Senate for such a trial to be successful, which is highly unlikely.
Why Gen Z protests are sweeping the continent
Youth-led protest movements spread to Germany and Switzerland over the Halloween weekend, and demonstrations continued in France, Spain, Italy and Portugal in a continent-wide wave dubbed “Europe’s hot autumn”.
Protests in dozens of cities
Events were organised in dozens of cities by student groups, trade unions and movements such as Gen Z Regelt (“Gen Z takes charge”) in Germany, or the Yellow Vests in France.
Protesters cite a range of causes from the cost of living, lack of employment and housing, and funding for public services, to the rise of far-right political parties and rearmament in Europe.
Where are the youth marching?
France has seen the largest protests, with hundreds of thousands joining marches on Saturday. Police fired tear gas and stun grenades to disperse crowds.
- In Germany, tens of thousands joined events in around 30 locations. The majority passed peacefully, but looting and clashes with police were reported in Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg.
- In Spain, local authorities arrested protest leaders and sealed off parts of Barcelona to avoid unrest.
- In Portugal, thousands marched over housing costs and wider affordability issues.
- In Italy, students and workers took to the streets in several cities on Friday, with the Union Sindicale di Base (USB) union estimating over a million took part.
Same issues hitting youth
Housing is a key issue in most European countries and it’s clearly a major issue in the current wave of protest. This is absolutely clear in Spain but I think it also applies elsewhere.
Analysts suggest the movements spreading across Europe have much in common. David Madden, an associate professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, told The i Paper affordable housing is a “key issue”.
What else did Madden say?
[Youth protesters] talk a lot about the idea that the future was stolen from them, that the things that were promised to them have been made much harder to acquire. Secure, affordable housing is central to this. It’s not something that people feel they can take for granted anymore.
David Madden, an associate professor of sociology and director of the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics
A BBC reporter called it “bizarre”. A Sky reporter went further: “one of the most bizarre midterm-eve presidential appearances ever”.
According to the latest Gallup polls, the top five worries of voters at the midterms – who may hand control of both the House and Senate to the Democrats – are the economy (50% ‘extremely important’), healthcare (50%), Iran (47%), income and wealth distribution (44%) and fuel prices (42%).
Trump was here to talk, mostly, about a pond.
“With the Lincoln Memorial behind us, it’s been something that, uh… For longtime generations, they’ve looked at, uh, what’s behind me from 1922. And it never worked because it was always loaded up with leaks and problems.”
Fact check: TRUE-ISH. Almost since its completion in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial Pool has been beset by cracks and leaks. A two-year rebuild and restoration, finished in 2012, resulted in a huge algae outbreak that has never really gone away since.
A huge, shallow, warm and still reflecting pool is almost designed to have algae problems. Despite what Trump on Monday called “the official opening” of the Pool it’s unlikely that this year’s fresh efforts will make much long-term difference.
But saying it “never worked” as a national memorial ignores some of the USA’s most indelible moments. A quarter of a million people gathered here for Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. A hundred thousand anti-Vietnam war protesters met here to march on the Pentagon in 1967. Four hundred thousand people gathered to celebrate the inauguration of the country’s first black president in January 2009. And, of course, Forrest Gump waded through it to be reunited with Jenny.
“We went through a lot with vandalism, the vandalism was unprecedented.”
Fact check: FALSE. Trump has repeatedly claimed that problems with his new “American flag blue” lining on the Pool were caused by vandalism. But in July a federal prosecutor asked a court to dismiss the only charge brought for alleged vandalism, admitting that the damage was the result of “a rushed and botched installation”. The Justice Department also dropped lesser charges against three other people.
“This is the largest reflecting pool in the world. It’s almost as tall as two Empire State buildings laid on its side… it’s actually the largest pool, the longest pool anywhere in the world, by far… this is a massive piece of, uh piece of pool.”
Fact check: SORT OF. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is 618m long and 51m wide. The Empire State building is 443m tall, including the antenna, or 380m without – so the pool is either 1.4 times, or 1.6 times the “length”.
It is certainly larger than the Miroir d’eau in Bordeaux or the reflecting pool at India’s Taj Mahal.
But when Trump a few minutes later drops the “reflecting” qualification, he’s just wrong. The winners are the 740m-long artificial lagoon at the Citystars Sharm El Sheikh resort in Egypt, at an approximate 97,000 square metres, and the kilometre-long San Alfonso del Mart resort lagoon in Algarrobo, Chile, at 80,000 sqm. On Wikipedia’s list of biggest swimming pools, the Lincoln Memorial Pool would rank fifth.
And yes, we’re five minutes in and he’s still talking about fixing the pool. And crime.
“Maybe the most important thing we fixed is the crime, because the crime is down close to 90%. It’ll be 100%. If there’s such a thing, it’ll be very close to 100%. Washington, DC went from one of the most unsafe places in this country to one of the safest cities in the country.”
Fact check: FALSE. According to public DC crime data, violent crime is up 12% this year in DC, while property crime is down 14%, year-on-year.
This year’s Safest Cities In America report by WalletHub, released two weeks ago, ranked Juneau, the capital of Alaska as the country’s safest city. DC ranked at number 165 – worse than New York, San Francisco or Miami.
“President Obama and President Biden together spent over $144 million, trying to figure it out and fix it, renovate it and it was closed almost during the entire time…. We got, uh, really a got it done for a small fraction of what the Obama and Biden spent on it”
Fact check: FALSE. Yes, back to the Reflecting Pool. According to the independent FactCheck.org, there is no record of any major work during Biden’s term as president, and the cost of the two-year overhaul in Obama’s term was $35m. By June this year Trump had spent about $14m on it.
Trump then revealed that the pipes and “joints” that feed water into the Pool have been replaced since 4 July, which would significantly add to the amount spent by his administration.
“This granite was all resurfaced, and, you know, because it’s granite, it’s got a, in many cases, granite, we’ll have a million what they call a million year life, it’s the strongest stone… It literally has thousands of years of life, it’s the only stone that does.”
Fact check: SORT OF. Lots of other stones last thousands of years. The oldest rock in the world is a four-billion year-old zircon crystal. An Earth rock, billions of years old, found on the Moon contained quartz, feldspar and zircon.
Granite’s lifespan in architecture depends a lot on how it’s used. Its high level of hardness (6ish on the Mohs scale, better than marble but less than quartz) makes it very resistant to abrasion, but it is brittle and quite porous, so vulnerable to chips and stains. Granite kitchen benchtops often need replacing after a couple of decades. Granite pavers can last a century or more. There are granite paths that still survive from ancient Roman, Incan or Chinese civilisations – but they aren’t exactly in mint condition.
“This was put out on the surface: 8647. You know what that means? That was a Comey phrase, 8647. That means kill 47. That’s a Mob expression that Comey, I guess, was the first one that I heard put it out.”
Fact check: FALSE. We are well into the speech, and Trump is still talking about the Memorial. He now pulls out a series of photos of vandalism, including the spray-painting of “8647” on some “brand new grass”.
86/47 is a fairly common political slogan, shorthand for getting rid of (“86-ing”) the 47th president (Trump). According to the Meriam-Webster dictionary, 86 as a slang term originated not from the Mafia but from an American diner code for being out of stock, broadened to meaning to refuse to serve a customer. It now usually means “to throw out or get rid of”. It has also been used as a military metaphor for killing someone.
An indictment against former FBI director James Comey, who Instagrammed a photo of some seashells spelling out 8647, is unlikely to succeed. Comey says he did not know of any violent connotation, or mean it – and he certainly didn’t invent it.
“We’ve created 25, think of it, $25 trillion in wealth in the country since the beginning, $25 trillion in wealth with what we’ve done with tariffs.”
Fact check: FALSE. Trump’s argument is that, in order to avoid his elevated import tariffs, companies are moving factories to the US. There is no doubt that foreign companies are investing or planning to invest in America, and it is likely that some of this was influenced by tariff policies. But the White House’s own website estimates “new investment in America” at $11.3tn.
The single biggest investment touted on the site is by NVidia, a US company riding the AI wave. Much of its planned investment in local manufacturing is motivated by geopolitical risks posed by China to the massive chip factories in Taiwan: to be fair, risks that have not been helped by Trump’s foreign policies.
“Our whole country is booming. We’re booming like we’ve never boomed before.”
Fact check: FALSE. The US economy is performing respectably well, with GDP growing at 3.2% annually this Trump term – better than any other G7 economy.
Historically, it’s only a moderate boom, less pronounced than the postwar boom, or economic growth recorded in the 1960s, 80s or 90s.
The ordinary American isn’t necessarily seeing the benefits. Much of the current growth is tied to the AI datacentre construction bubble, and the current 3.7% inflation rate is higher than the 3% rate Trump inherited in January 2025. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculates Trump policies have increased taxes and consumer cost for all but the richest 1% of the population.
“This is the last day before the midterm elections, the most important midterms, I believe, in our lifetime.”
Fact check: STUMP SPEECH. Trump finally mentioned the election 25 minutes into his speech. What followed were 15 minutes of mostly false or exaggerated claims he has recited many times on his rally tour.
He said, falsely, the Democrats had “the most extreme and dangerous slate of candidates in American history…. jihadists and Muslim brotherhood members and people that nobody can even believe”.
He added, falsely, that the Democrats wanted “open borders, raising your taxes by trillions of dollars taking away your guns, transgender mutilisation [sic] of your children, abolishing oil and natural gas sending energy costs skyrocketing, and opening the floodgates to millions of migrants from all over the world. hoping to get them to be able to vote.”
He claimed, falsely, that “we’ve gone 17 months without one person entering our country illegally from the southern border” (Border Patrol have apprehended about 98,700 people along the southwest border in 2026).
He took credit for a $10 drop in the price of crude, which he falsely called the “biggest drop in oil in history”, omitting to mention that crude oil prices are still near multi-year highs due to his Middle East conflict. Hours after the speech the US carried out air strikes in the Strait of Hormuz.
Also in relation to oil, Trump said “we got Greenland on an unlimited basis”. Greenland says claims of fresh oil exploration in Greenland are hugely exaggerated and could take years if not decades to yield a drop.
And so on…
There was a lot more on the Pool, the pipes, and the algae, and the vandalism, the “grass and surroundings”, the White House lawn and helipad, limestone fountains in DC, the capital’s “Corinthian columns that are the most beautiful in the world” (hello, Athens), his plans for a Triumphal Arch and a new golf course.
His final words were:
“We have a country that we can be proud of again. We were laughed at all over the world. For four years, we were laughed at like we were stupid people. We were laughed at by every ruler, every president, every prime minister, every king, but they don’t laugh anymore.”
Fact checking this is left as an exercise for the reader.