Trump responds to Democratic gains by again citing his goddamn electoral victory
A year ago, the majority of voting Americans—65.8 million to 63 million, to be exact—were walking around in a state of shell-shocked horror at the utter failure of the democratic experiment. Despite the fact that more people voted for Hillary Clinton, and despite a sweeping system of safeguards designed to prevent a major political party from nominating someone so clearly ill-equipped for the job, Donald Trump’s combination of lowest-common-denominator race-baiting and sheer political nihilism managed to eke out an unlikely electoral victory. The year since then has been, for the most part, terrible, a string of humiliations, apocalyptic provocations, and catastrophic policy decisions. One of the few silver linings has been Trump’s disastrous approval ratings, as the feckless party loyalists and swindled masses who voted for him realize that, no, Donald Trump is not a competent global leader, nor does he have anyone’s interest at heart besides his own.
All the while Trump has proclaimed, again and again, that he is doing great, that things are going better than expected, that the barely concealed contempt his staff has for each other is actually normal, that the lack of any legislative accomplishment while holding both houses of Congress is not his fault, and that, despite a resounding victory yesterday for both centrist liberals and further-left progressives, things are still going fine. Sure, maybe he spent the morning still shitting on the people who lost in his own party, but, hey, remember the electoral vote, from literally a year ago, his sole political victory in a year of public office?
Not pictured in the above snapshot are the establishment Republicans like Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer initially added to help stabilize his team, nor are the apocalyptic white nationalists like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka and Michael Flynn, because his clattering clown car of an administration was never even intended to make it into office, and in just one year he has managed to alienate pretty much everyone except for the potato-faced racists and trolls who elected him. Jared seems pretty stoked about things.
Anyway, that’s one year down for the rest of us, and one sweeping set of oppositional candidates elected to state and local government positions. With luck, Trump will be responding to similar results in 2018 by still trumpeting the same goddamn numbers, because he will still not have accomplished a single goddamn thing, except for, maybe, being impeached.