Whether you love or hate Donald Trump, he has made next week’s’ midterm congressional elections all about him. He has told his faithful flock so in no uncertain terms, saying it’s irrelevant that his name won’t be on the ballot anywhere.

Candidates of both major parties will be selling their own political wares and stories in the 435 House districts and 35 Senate races. But the headlines on Wednesday morning will tell whether Trump’s Republican Party has retained control of the House and/or Senate, allowing him to continue on his course of rule by division.

The Democrats are mobilized for a “blue wave” to stop Trump in his tracks, hoping to wrest enough political power to burst his bubble of authoritarianism and anti-immigration repression. Trump, meanwhile, has sought to build a red-wave counter based on fear and white-nationalist anger.

One of his main complaints about last week’s epidemic of violence, marked by a flurry of attempted pipe bombings of leading Democrats and then hate murders at a Pittsburgh synagogue, was that it may have slowed the momentum of his midterm political campaign.

It was perhaps an unintentional admission that his words and actions may have led to wide swaths of voters laying blame on him and his divisive rhetoric, fueling the public dialogue to a boil. He risked going to Pittsburgh to offer his condolences and set off an unwelcoming protest among many locals.

Yet the president chose as always to go on the attack, attributing the stormy public climate to “fake news” from the press as “the enemy of the people.” He also again seized on that caravan of Central Americans seeking asylum in the U.S. and still hundreds of miles south of our border with Mexico.

To elevate the impression of peril to American jobs and safety, Trump talked of sending as many as 15,000 armed U.S. soldiers to the border to bolster his anti-immigrant posture, as he strove to cast the caravan as some physical threat to the American way of life. Never mind that this is a nation of immigrants who helped build it and make it the haven for the oppressed it remains today. Unless, that is, he has his way.

In another transparent attempt to feed anti-immigrant furor, Trump has come up with a particularly onerous scheme: to deny children born in this country, including those of illegal aliens, the automatic citizenship guaranteed them by the 14th Amendment.

Trump announced that he was considering issuing an executive order as president ending that provision afforded to so-called “anchor babies.” The notion swiftly triggered outrage among legal experts arguing that he had no power to abridge the Constitution on his own — something possible only by congressional amendment.

This president’s concept of presidential power appears to reflect his abysmal knowledge of the limits of that power, as much as it reflects his overwhelming sense of personal entitlement more attuned to a monarchy or a dictatorship.

Such Trump notions might normally wake up American voters to the risk they run in having elected a leader who has both contempt for the office he holds and rudimentary ignorance of its boundaries in a free domestic society.

For these and other reasons, the approaching midterm elections are an unprecedented opportunity, and even a fortunate vehicle for informed American voters to rescue their country from a dangerous train wreck hurtling down the tracks to a historic and bizarre crack-up.

In 1974, it took a revealing Senate investigation of President Richard Nixon’s cover-up in the Watergate scandal to persuade enough Republicans to inform him that he lacked the votes to escape impeachment, leading him to resign.

This time around, it is up to individual voters to send Trump a loud message that they have had enough of his behavior and divisive rhetoric. Republicans similarly need to tell their members of Congress to step up and salvage what is left within the Grand Old Party of its once staunch respectability.

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Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.