Basically, he's pulling out all the stops to stay in power beyond 2020. Playing to his base and them lapping it up like cream is only one part of that. Other factors include:
- Fuck all is being done to secure voting systems for 2018, despite clear evidence that many machines and systems are wide open to tampering, and others so ancient they still run off Windows 95 and crash if you sneeze on them. (Oddly enough, these seem to be in Democratic majority districts.)
- The Supreme Court gave the green light for states to purge registered voter rolls and already they are culling hundreds of thousands for fairly arbitrary or non existent reasons. I've seen shedloads of folks reporting they've been turned away from the polls when they were on the register just months ago, or because there's a letter missing in their name or address. Oddly enough, seems to be happening in areas with a history of voting blue.
- Twitter and other social media still being swarmed with paid trolls and bots posting content aiming to induce in-fighting and/or defeatism among those most likely to vote Democratic.
- If all the shit above doesn't work, Trump is already pushing the line that Democrats are trying to rig the elections in November (like he did in 2016). So if they DO make gains, his base are already primed to believe they cheated and the results aren't valid. So we could get endless legal challenges to the results, legislators refusing to leave their seats, and "domestic terror" type incidents. It won't be nice.
- Also, plenty of chances between now and November of this year, let alone now and Novemebr 2020, for a "Reichstag Fire," or some other reason to delay or cancel elections.
I'm actually not a glass half empty type of person, but fucksake, it is looking grim.