A whiplash election year enters its final stretch as Trump holds wild cards

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the earliest days of this election cycle, the U.S. The East Wing of the White House was still standing and the Kennedy Center wasn’t threatened with demolition. Artificial intelligence data centers weren’t bipartisan shorthand for the tech sector’s excess.

Democratic socialists were largely confined to the outer edges of political discourse. Lake Ontario’s name wasn’t in question. Since President Donald Trump entered politics more than a decade ago, he’s had a knack for dominating the national conversation so thoroughly that it can be hard to keep up.

But as the final midterm of his presidency rapidly approaches, the landscape is proving especially volatile, with Trump often stirring the tumult. “Some of these things are out of our control,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, told reporters last week when pressed on whether the frenzy will hurt his party’s election prospects. Even the map itself has been in flux, with Texas, California and Florida among the states that have redrawn congressional districts.

Missouri’s Republican attorney general is appealing a court ruling last week that blocked a Trump-backed map there. The economic fallout from Trump’s tariffs on Canada may intensify as the election nears. His effort to limit mail ballots could add uncertainty to the voting process just as such ballots are being distributed in states like North Carolina, home to a critical U.S.

The president is sitting on more than $400 million that could shape the election’s trajectory. And Trump’s gilded remake of Washington stands in contrast to the economic anxiety many Americans are expressing. The wealth he has amassed in office has little modern presidential precedent, with Trump taking in $1.2 billion from his crypto businesses last year, according to a federal filing released this summer.

That’s threatening a bipartisan effort in the Senate to advance legislation to strengthen cryptocurrency regulation as soon as next week. Democrats are insisting the measure include a more robust ethics provision. “We’ve watched this president enrich himself,” said Sen.