WASHINGTON (AP) — For Donald Trump, his party’s resounding midterm losses pave the way for investigations and potential impeachments that will put the Republican president on the defensive in his final two years in office.
The results shift the center of gravity closer to Capitol Hill, where Democrats will be angling to check Trump’s power after two years of acquiescence from congressional Republicans. It not only resurfaces a dynamic from his first term in office, when House Democrats took power in Trump’s first midterms and ultimately impeached him twice, but with control as well of the Senate, Democrats can now stymie Trump’s nominations to Cabinet posts and lifetime federal judgeships.
He’ll nuke someone before Christmas.
Trump had all but guaranteed the results would be seen as a referendum on himself by repeatedly urging voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot” as he went into primarily conservative states to shore up Republican candidates and warned of a Washington where Democrats were in power.
That was going to happen anyway—I was watching election coverage a few weeks back, and they were talking about how one of the very few overall factors that matters a lot in midterms is the approval rating of the incumbent president.
But Trump kept trying to make himself more the center of the thing even after a lot of Republican candidates and Republican-leaning media stopped, as they saw him as a liability.
I was reading discussion of how Fox News slashed coverage of him, which subsequently had him complaining about Fox News.
Another data point I saw: Democratic campaigning spent fifteen times as much on advertisements that mentioned Trump as Republican campaigning.
What Republican candidates did not need this midterm was “more Trump on people’s mind”.
Dude just loves to be the center of attention. Even if it’s negative attention. He eats that shit up.
