There are pipe bombs in the mail, racist invective is flying, a synagogue has been attacked. The president feeds the fire

Maureen Osiecki remembers the shock of Donald Trump winning her home state, Michigan, on his march to the White House. “My heart died,” she says of that night nearly two years ago. “My father turned over in his grave.”

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On 6 November, Osiecki gets her first chance to formally pass judgment on the Trump presidency. The midterm elections will decide control of Congress and could give the commander-in-chief a black eye. Few can remember midterms taking place in an America so perilously divided – underlined this week by pipe bomb packages sent to leading Democrats and a massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue – or with a president so actively stoking the culture wars as an electoral strategy.

“He’s a pig,” said Osiecki, a 76-year-old retiree from a city planning department, sitting with friends in a Wendy’s restaurant in Pontiac. “No feeling, no empathy. My father was a Republican but we got along and didn’t call each other ‘horseface’.”

Across the road at a Taco Bell, Linda Andrews, 66, took the opposite view. “I like he tells us what he’s thinking,” she said. “His tweeting might not be politically correct but the politically correct people weren’t doing a dang thing in my opinion. He’s done what he said he was going to do so he’s a man of his word. We tried the sweet talking and it didn’t work.”

Andrews, an army veteran and retired nurse who will vote Republican, added: “Trump is like a surgeon. You might not like the bedside manner but he fixes what’s ailing you.”

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The midterms, which early voting indicates could have their highest turnout in decades, are always more or less a vote of confidence in the sitting president. But Trump has put himself front and centre. “I’m not on the ticket, but I am on the ticket, because this is also a referendum about me,” he told supporters in Southaven, Mississippi. “I want you to vote. Pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Where his predecessors have sought to build bridges and unify, he has embraced the politics of polarisation across gender, race and culture lines in the hope of firing up his base, tacitly acknowledging he has lost a vast swath of the nation for good. The midterms will provide the first official measure of whether the sum of love for Trump is exceeded by the sum of hatred.

Amy Walter, national editor of the Cook Political Report newsletter, told an audience at the Washington Post this week: “The best way to think about where we are today is that we’re having elections in two different Americas.”

She noted that many of the Senate seats being contested are in Trump country - Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, West Virginia, Tennessee, Texas – which probably means that Republicans will retain and perhaps even expand control of that chamber. But in suburban America – in Chicago, Denver, Dallas, northern Virginia – and especially among white college-educated women, the president is deeply unpopular, suggesting that Democrats will gain a majority in the House of Representatives.

“So it feels more and more like we’re going to end up with an election night where everybody gets something they want,” Walter said. “It’s like a soccer game – everybody gets a trophy, everybody wins – but where the country remains as polarised and divided today as it was the day after the 2016 election, where there’s going to be a big chunk of Americans who say, ‘We like where the country is going, we like the president, we’re doing to support him,’ and they will have their victories, and a whole part of the country that says, ‘We don’t like the president, we don’t like what he stands for,’ and those victories will take place in the House.

“So you have a House that’s blue and a Senate that gets maybe a little more red, or at least stays red, and we’re back kind of where we started.”

‘It did not start with Trump’

The blue versus red tribalism predates Trump. In his new book The Red and the Blue, the author Steve Kornacki traces it to the ferocious showdowns between the Democratic president Bill Clinton and the Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich in 1990s. Gingrich and Pat Buchanan were crucial to putting abortion rights at the centre of the “culture wars” that also came to weaponise issues such as censorship, drug use, gun rights, homosexuality and immigration.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters on the steps outside the supreme court, after the Senate voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. Photograph: Erik S. Lesser/EPA

Barack Obama commented in a speech at the University of Illinois last month: “It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalising on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years.”

But as the midterms approach, Trump has been capitalising as only he can, intensifying the attacks, fear of the other and outright lies while sowing discord and setting Americans at each other’s throats. “This will be an election of Kavanaugh, the caravan, law and order and common sense,” he said at a campaign rally in Montana.

These are all issues Trump would rather talk about than healthcare or social security. The recent battle over his supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, accused of sexual assault when a teenager, was acrimonious even by current standards. Trump and senators such as Lindsey Graham bludgeoned the confirmation through despite the pleas of female protesters who staged sit-ins and were arrested at the Capitol. Republicans have sought to brand them as an angry leftwing mob, in the hope it will animate the party’s largely white male base.

Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant and pollster, said: “Kavanaugh did not play well for the Democrats. For three nights the pictures were all about the outrage, the yelling and screaming, in the chamber and the gallery. I think what Americans saw frightened them. It communicated that a Democratic majority would be just more chaos.”

The red states are going redder and the blue states are going bluer Frank Luntz

Early voting on the Republican side is higher than anyone expected, Luntz added. “The red states are going redder and the blue states are going bluer. There is a blue wave but there is also a red wave.”

The caravan of about 4,000 to 5,000 people mainly from Honduras is travelling through southern Mexico, still 1,000 miles from the border crossing at McAllen, Texas. Such caravans have taken place regularly, passing mostly unnoticed. But this is election season and the president is a self-declared “nationalist”.

Exploiting fears about the caravan and illegal immigration, Trump tweeted that “criminals” and “unknown Middle Easterners” are mixed in the group, only to later acknowledge that he had no proof. The pro-Trump Fox News network has been following the immigrants’ progress with morbid fascination. Gingrich has made it a personal obsession.

Charlie Sykes, a conservative commentator and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, said: “If Trump was the executive producer of the midterms reality TV show, the caravan would be perfect episode: the brown people are coming here to invade the country and only he can protect the country from the invaders. Kavanaugh gave him a big win for his base and allowed conservatives to feel like winners. The caravan allows him to replay his greatest nativist hits.”

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Sykes worries about the forces being unleashed and the president’s unwillingness to control them. “You do have a feeling the nation is on edge and Trump is very comfortable with pushing those divisions. I remember ’68 and the assassination of Martin Luther King. Political violence is always a possibility and always beneath the surface. Trump’s rhetoric can really bring out some dark impulses. The president is uniquely positioned to unite us and he is uniquely positioned to divide us.”

‘A president like no other’

This week, the point was brought home in a way that no one expected. Thirteen packages containing explosive devices were addressed to prominent Democrats and other targets of Trump’s vitriol, including Obama, former vice-president Joe Biden, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and cable network CNN. On Friday, justice department officials announced five charges against Cesar Sayoc, 56, of Aventura, Florida, an amateur body builder, ex-stripper and “partisan” whose van was plastered with Trump’s image and whose social media accounts trafficked in far-right conspiracy theories.

The crude attempt to wipe out the leadership of a major political party was a moment of truth for the president. Instead of offering reassurance to those targeted, he used it to threaten the American media for political gain. “A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News,” he tweeted. “It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!”

He’s making Richard Nixon feel better about his place in history Bob Shrum

At a campaign rally on Friday night in North Carolina, Trump accused journalists of using the pipe bomb incident to “score political points”. The crowd broke into boos when and there were loud chants of “CNN sucks” – a slogan that appeared on Sayoc’s van.

Bob Shrum, a veteran Democratic strategist, said: “He reads a perfunctory thing written by his staff and then he goes after the media. He’s back in the mode he was in for the presidential campaign but it’s the sharpest edge of the knife. It works well with his base but his base is not sufficient. He’s a president like no other. He’s making Richard Nixon feel better about his place in history.”

Then, on Saturday, a man named by police as Robert Bowers, armed with an assault rifle and three handguns and yelling anti-semitic abuse, rampaged through a synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing at least 11 people and injuring six. It was one of the bloodiest attacks on the the Jewish community in American history. Trump went ahead with a campaign rally and called for wider use of the death penalty.

Biden said, pointedly: “Hate is on the march in America. And when hatred is given a safe harbor – when it’s given space to fester – when it brazenly puts itself on display in an historic American city – when its distorted world view is fueled uninterrupted in forum after forum on the web – when it hears an America political leadership say good people can be found among those spewing this ugly bile - it grows.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ron DeSantis looks on as Andrew Gillum makes a point in a debate in Tampa. Photograph: POOL/Reuters

The bile has seeped into many of the midterm campaigns. Andrew Gillum, an African American candidate for governor in Florida, was targeted by a robocall that says in a demeaning minstrel accent: “Well, hello there. I is the negro Andrew Gillum and I’ll be askin’ you to make me governor of this here state of Florida.” His Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis, previously urged voters not to “monkey this up”. Gillum said during a debate: “I’m not calling Mr DeSantis a racist – I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.”

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In Georgia, where Democrat Stacey Abrams is seeking to become the first black female governor in US history, her opponent, state secretary of state Brian Kemp, is accused of leading efforts to suppress African American turnout. In a campaign video, Pennsylvania’s Republican candidate for governor, Scott Wagner, warns his opponent: “You better put a catcher’s mask on your face because I’m going to stomp all over your face with golf spikes because I’m going to win this for the state of Pennsylvania.”

It all suggests America is a tinderbox and its president is like a child playing with matches. At last, after the anger and grief since January 2017, voters have an opportunity to impose some sort of check on his power. Should Democrats take both the House and the Senate, they will have the power to impeach Trump and seek to turf him out of office. But a divided government is more likely, enabling the president to take credit for his party’s wins and blame others for their defeats, and teeing up an even more noxious contest for the White House in 2020.

Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “It’s going to be a mixed picture and pretty unsatisfactory for those who expected Donald Trump to be punished. Republicans will be punished in the House, yes, but in the Senate they might expand. For those expecting the 2018 election to be a satisfying referendum on Trump: not going to happen.”