By the time I finish writing this and post it, Donald Trump may have begun speaking to an adoring crowd in Pennsylvania. He is holding a rally there (the first one he's held in quite a while) that will be a de facto kickoff to the Republicans' midterm campaign strategy. Since the party can't run on anything that directly contradicts Trump's positions (because he has such an ideological stranglehold on Republicans), no doubt plenty of GOP politicians will be watching this rally for clues as to what will be acceptable for them to focus on in next year's campaign.

Trump is scheduled to speak about the economy today. Democrats have already seen big successes at the ballot box by running against Trump's economy, and they look exceedingly likely to double down on this strategy throughout all of next year. So Trump will in essence be unveiling the counterargument from the Republican side of the aisle.

Trump's problem is that he's got an incredibly weak hand to play. Which, of course, is all his fault. To extend the metaphor, Trump doesn't just have an incredibly weak hand, he dealt this hand to himself by stacking the deck and choosing which cards he was going to get. So it is impossible to feel sorry for the weak position he's in, since he caused it all to happen. Almost all of it was self-inflicted.

As many have noted, Trump is finding himself increasingly in the same position that Joe Biden was in during the 2020 campaign. Perhaps karma is having a laugh at his expense? The irony is impossible to ignore, really. Both Biden and now Trump find themselves in charge of the American economy at a time when things aren't completely terrible -- at least, according to the official numbers -- but it's also a time when the public is feeling awfully sour about the way things are going. There may not be an actual recession happening, but the "vibecession" has only grown deeper and darker since Trump took over.

Democrats have capitalized on this (if that's not actually a pun) by slapping a handy label on it: the "affordability crisis." Trump is left to whine about this label, pointing out the fact that this is a new term (people used to talk more about "the cost of living" or just "inflation") for an old problem. So far, Democrats have been winning this messaging battle in a big way, which is one of the main reasons why Trump is now feeling the need to fight back against it. So I would expect him to try to belittle the word "affordability" as much as possible during his rally today (as he has been attempting to do for weeks). Maybe he'll even call it "woke"? None of it is going to do him much good, though, since quibbling over what to call it does nothing to solve the problem.

Donald Trump is not one to let the hobgoblin of consistency bother him in the least, of course. So my prediction for Trump's speech is that it will be a mishmash of prepared remarks that actually attempt to address the problem of high prices (perhaps even complete with a few ideas for how to solve the problem) and lengthy off-the-cuff remarks that will center on gaslighting the American public into thinking they've never had things so good. So far, that's exactly what Trump has been doing in the past month or so -- at times admitting there are problems while promising the fixes are already in place, while at other times denying the problem exists and calling it a "Democratic scam." We'll likely see many such contradictions in his speech today. His speechwriters will have carefully prepared things to say that other Republicans will find helpful in their midterm campaigns, but then Trump will just cut loose and rant off the top of his head how we're all smack dab in the middle of a "golden age" of prosperity for all.

There will also undoubtedly be a flood of lies from Trump, because that's what he does best. He'll tell people that gasoline costs under two bucks a gallon (in some number of unspecified U.S. states which he will refuse to name) and that this means that "energy prices are way down" (which ignores electricity price hikes). He'll tell people that he's reduced the price of prescription drugs by some percentage that is a multiple of 100 percent ("700... 800... 1,200... 1,500 percent!"), which is completely impossible (since it would mean the pharmacy pays you to fill a prescription). He will lie about the fact that he has done absolutely nothing to fix the looming fiscal cliff of Obamacare subsidies running out on January first, or he will tout a plan that he insists will fix everything (spoiler alert: it won't). He will once again repeat his bizarre assertion that the word "groceries" is somehow "an old-fashioned word," which has always been a head-scratcher (for anyone who shops for food on a weekly basis, that is). He will swear that the prices of everything in the supermarkets are all "way, way down" (spoiler alert: they're not). He will insist that tariffs are the most wonderful thing ever invented, and that his use of them is making everyone's lives better (instead of driving up the price of everything, which is the actual reality everyone faces at the checkout stand).

You can see his problem. Trump is firmly convinced that the American economy is fantastic and the best ever, simply because he is in charge of it right now. Any other possibility is unthinkable to Trump. Of course everything is peachy-keen, because he's in charge. Any possible negativity in the numbers or in prices people are paying is (obviously) somehow the fault of Joe Biden. He will lie about inflation and state that Biden handed over "record inflation" to him and that he's gotten it down to "almost nothing." Actually, the spike in inflation that happened on Biden's watch (up to 9 percent) had almost completely abated by the summer of 2023 (when it hit 3.0 percent). Inflation has actually been creeping back up under Trump, from 2.3 percent in April back up to 3.0 percent in the most recent figure available. New numbers will be out one week from today, and if the inflation rate goes up again it is only going to add to the negativity Trump and the Republicans are going to face on the campaign trail.

So that's what I expect -- a combination of Trump trying to put lipstick on a pig (the parts written by his speechwriters that contain actual helpful slogans for other Republicans to use) and Trump just flat-out denying reality altogether by refusing to admit that any prices have gone up for anybody; and even if that somehow happens to be the case, then it's all Biden's fault.

Today's rally will be just the start of the midterm campaign rhetoric from Trump. It may not get much media coverage (outside of the fawning rightwing media echo chamber), and therefore might not be all that impactful. At some point in the new year, however, Trump will deliver the State Of The Union speech to Congress, where many of his slogans will no doubt be refined a bit further.

But Trump's problem is identical to Biden's. He can talk up official numbers all he wants (or even make them up out of thin air), but the reality that average people are feeling -- every time they make a run for those old-fashioned "groceries" -- is not nearly as rosy. Trump ran last year by promising that he'd bring prices -- on everything, mind you -- way, way down, starting on Day One. Well, here we are at Day Three-Hundred-Plus and prices just keep going up. In fact, they're going up faster due to the chaotic tariff game Trump's been playing with the rest of the world. All Trump has, at this point, is exactly what Biden had one year out from the election: a desperate hope that people's attitudes about the economy will somehow radically change into shining optimism due to some boom period that quickly develops in the first half of next year. This didn't work for Biden -- when people sour on the economy it can take a long time for them to regain their optimism. And the signs don't look good for Trump, because a lot of American businesses have essentially been eating the cost of the tariffs up until now -- but they can't do this forever, so they're going to be raising prices (again, on pretty much everything) over the course of the next year. Which doesn't bode well for Trump's hope that everyone suddenly feels great about the economy by next summer.

This week, Trump finally announced a long-promised bailout for American farmers. He presented this as a triumph, but in reality it is a mark of abject failure. The reason the farmers (soybean farmers, especially) desperately need a bailout right now is because Trump blew up the world marketplace for their goods with his insanely-high tariffs on China (who buys more than half of the soybean crop in this country, in normal years). And the $12 billion Trump announced is only roughly one-fourth of the amount of damage done to American agriculture by Trump's trade war.

Trump wants Congress to try to sweeten the pot for everyone else too, by passing a budget that allows him to send out $2,000 rebate checks to everyone -- ideally some time late next summer, right before the midterm elections. This is also a mark of abject failure, because it is a de facto admission that all of Trump's tariffs are actually a tax on the American consumer. But that is not how Trump will present it, of course.

Trump ran on such grandiose promises (such as "lowering the cost of gasoline by one-half in my first year in office!") that it's pretty easy to see why he has lost a monumental amount of support from the voters. The fact that he hasn't made good on any of his sweeping promises just becomes more and more glaring over time. People are feeling economically pinched right now, for good reason. Trump's polling on the economy has been in the basement all year long, and his numbers are only getting worse. That's why he's holding today's rally in the first place, in fact.

My final prediction for Trump's speech today is that every time Trump insists that the affordability crisis is some scam or some hoax perpetrated by Democrats and that in actual fact prices have never been lower on every product and service under the sun, Democrats everywhere are going to cheer. Because it's all just going to make it easier for them to point out how incredibly out of touch Trump truly is on the subject, and how the real con here is all the pie-in-the-sky promises he himself made during his own campaign -- promises that all remain unkept. It wouldn't surprise me if clips of today's rally are immediately repackaged into Democratic campaign ads, in fact, since every time Trump tells a whopper or tries to gaslight everyone on the subject it just proves he has no clue what average people are going through.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant