What did Donald Trump do today?
He blamed a massive repudiation of his party and his presidency on everyone but him.
As of the end of the day on Tuesday, Democrats were projected to gain about 40 seats in the House of Representatives and seven or eight in the Senate. They will unquestionably control both houses of Congress for the next two years. Democrats also won stunning upsets in gubernatorial races in red states like Texas, Iowa, and Ohio.
Democrats also flipped at least five state's legislative chambers as well, and are now likely to control the legislatures of states representing more than half the population for the first time in almost fifty years.
It's impossible to overstate the extent to which Trump involved himself in this election. He demanded that Republican-controlled state legislatures try to gerrymander safe Republican seats, often against the better judgment of the legislators involved. Few if any of those redrawn districts elected Republicans tonight.
He convened a "midterm convention" and made himself the center of prime-time attention every night of it. Here, too, Republican candidates were wary: Trump was deeply unpopular in August and only became more so as the year wore on. Most vulnerable Republican candidates avoided it.
He ordered the Department of Justice, an institution that is supposed to enforce the law without partisan bias, to bring states into court to try to force them to submit to his demands about how they ran their elections and which Americans they allowed to vote.
And he campaigned for the better part of the last month of the race, holding some 32 rallies in 30 days, and at every single one he asked voters to "pretend I'm on the ballot." But even as the month wore on, Trump found himself speaking in redder and redder areas, shoring up races that, in some cases, haven't been competitive for Democrats for more than a century—like the Kansas Senate seat that Democrat Adam Hamilton won tonight.
Tonight, after an early angry outbursts on social media blaming the ultra-conservative Fox News for its election coverage and then a much longer period of silence, Trump explained the night's results:
Why does this matter?
- It doesn't. The results of the election are the same no matter why Trump thinks they happened.