Musician, broadcaster and author Thomas Seltzer returned to Norway roughly a week ago after a trip to the United States, his first visit to his former home country since the 2024 presidential election. In an interview with Nettavisen, the 57-year-old said much has shifted in America since Donald Trump won a second term, and he argued that the MAGA movement is losing its grip on its own supporters.
Seltzer told Nettavisen that everyday costs stood out immediately during his stay. In a California supermarket, he said, a punnet of strawberries cost nine dollars — more than he would pay at the Norwegian grocery chain Rema — despite the region being among the world's largest strawberry producers. He also cited petrol at six dollars a gallon.
He noted that prices were already high under President Joe Biden, something he believes helped Trump defeat Kamala Harris in 2024.
Why it matters
Seltzer has spent the past decade building a reputation as an unconventional but well-informed observer of American politics. The Norwegian-American, who lived in the US as a child, made three seasons of NRK's acclaimed UXA series in 2020, 2022 and 2024. He is now promoting a rock biography, "Visjoner, digresjoner og digre ereksjoner", and hosting Trygdekontoret's "USA-valg Spesial" alongside political scientist and US expert Hilde Restad, covering Tuesday's midterm elections.
His read on the mood matters because the midterms will decide control of Congress and dozens of governorships at a moment when voter frustration over living costs is dominating the campaign, according to Nettavisen.
"MAGA is over"
Seltzer was blunt in his assessment of the president's political coalition. He told Nettavisen that one of his close friends had been a hardline MAGA supporter but has now given up, and he argued that two issues currently drive American voters: the Epstein case and petrol prices.
Trump's party currently holds majorities in both chambers of Congress, but discontent within MAGA ranks and among the president's backers is showing clearly in the polling. Nettavisen reports that statistician Nate Silver, writing in the Silver Bulletin on Friday, put the Democrats' chance of winning the Senate at 77.7 percent and their chance of taking the House of Representatives at 95.1 percent.
Seltzer framed fuel costs as an existential matter for many households. A six-dollar gallon, he said, forces families into a choice between affording the drive to work and feeding their children — between pork chops and petrol. He added that Norwegian commentators should be more careful when discussing this, because fuel prices are central to daily life for a great many Americans.
According to Nettavisen, Trump's ongoing war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have driven a sharp rise in global oil and fuel prices. The president's aggressive tariff policy and protectionist measures are among the other factors weighing on the US economy, its labour market and household costs.
Fears over how the result will be received
Seltzer expects the Democrats to perform very strongly next week, but he does not expect Republicans to accept a defeat. He told Nettavisen he believes Trump will try to use the federal apparatus to interfere with vote counts in various states and districts, describing the prospect as a wave of "lawfare" — the use of legal systems and proceedings as weapons.
He acknowledged that there are concrete limits on how far the federal government can reach into state-run elections, but said Trump has plainly not read the Constitution closely. As an example, he pointed to the FBI's seizure in January of this year of election material from the 2020 vote in Fulton County, Georgia.
Seltzer also recalled the 2020 episode in which Trump phoned Georgia's top election official, Brad Raffensperger, and asked him to "find" 11,780 votes — a number that would have been enough to flip the state. Biden won both Georgia and the presidency.
Seltzer did not rule out interference in the midterms. He said heavily Democratic districts are likely to be hit by what some have called "shenanigans", but stressed that far more dramatic things are at stake than mischief. In his words, what is under way amounts to an attempted coup in real time, and he said many people have already been removed from voter rolls around the country.
A long count, and a long fight after it
Voters on Tuesday will decide all 435 House seats, 35 Senate seats and 36 governorships. Nettavisen notes that results for many of these races will be clear on election night — early Wednesday Norwegian time — but Seltzer cautioned that counting takes time, particularly in large states such as California.
He explained that nothing is fully settled on the night itself, given the volume and variety of ballots. Some states do not permit postal votes to be counted until the other ballots are tallied, and since most mail ballots lean Democratic, the 2020 shift in the count as the night wore on led Trump to believe trucks were arriving with fake votes, Seltzer said.
Trump has repeatedly pressed baseless claims that fraud cost him the 2020 election. Nettavisen reports that the Brookings Institution examined the 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections and found on average only about four cases of fraud per ten million postal votes.
Seltzer predicted Trump will keep repeating what has become known as "The Big Lie", arguing the president has learned from Goebbels that a large falsehood must be told again and again. He expects the dispute to run until January, when a new Congress is sworn in, and said that period will be dramatic.
He also declined to fully rule out Trump turning to military means to pursue political goals. Seltzer said it would be difficult for the president to deploy regular forces, but noted the National Guard — the US reserve force normally under state governors for domestic emergencies, which can be placed under presidential federal command in wartime or during national emergencies — remains an option. He referenced comments attributed to former Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley, quoted in Bob Woodward's book "War", and Milley's final speech as the top US military officer in 2023, in which he made clear the armed forces had not sworn an oath to a "wannabe dictator".
Attention now turns to Tuesday's vote and the count that follows, with the timing of results in the largest states and the reaction of the president's supporters likely to shape the weeks between election night and the seating of the new Congress.
