Trump Exhibiting "Bunker Behavior" as Democrats Pick Up Biggest House of Representative Gains Since After Watergate

I will make the reckless prediction that “Donald Trump” and “good news” are not fated to appear in the same sentence unless the good news happens to be that his presidency is ending.

Everything about his behavior since the midterms suggests that even he has figured this out. It has belatedly dawned on him that (a) he lost the election he thought he won; (b) the Robert Mueller investigation has moved faster than his efforts to thwart it; (c) any of his legislative fantasies, notably the funding of his border wall, are doomed; and (d) and his pouting in Paris elevated his international image as a buffoon to a whole new level of notoriety. Remember when Republicans attacked Barack Obama (falsely) for allegedly barring Winston Churchill’s bust from the White House? Now the GOP’s hero is a president whom Churchill’s own grandson, the Conservative member of Parliament Nicholas Soames, has labeled “pathetic,” “inadequate,” and “not fit to represent this great country” after Trump failed to show up at the French cemetery rites honoring the fallen of World War I.

That all this makes Trump panic at some gut level is visible not merely in his widely reported spells of rage and bitterness and in his increasingly empty official schedule. He is also stepping up his already impressive efforts to discredit and destroy those democratic institutions that might prevent him from escaping criminal jeopardy. And so he has returned to ridiculing the very lifeblood of America, the electoral process, by declaring elections that don’t go his way a fraud; he has escalated his assault on a free press by barring a CNN reporter and trying to frame him as a fellow misogynistic bully with a deceptively edited video; and, last but not least, he has appointed an acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, who has ridiculed the judicial system, been on the board of a fly-by-night company that practiced Trump University–style consumer frauds, and publicly attacked the Mueller probe in Trump’s own language.

This is bunker behavior. Only a desperate man would try to derail Mueller by installing this transparent reprobate at the Department of Justice. Even more revealing is how Trump has become more and more unhinged since making his Whitaker move. The growing fury, most manifest in his latest anti-Mueller tweetstorm this week, suggests that he already realizes that the ploy has backfired. It seems to be finally sinking in, perhaps under the frantic tutelage of his lawyers, that his fate and the fates of his son and son-in-law, among others in his immediate orbit, are tied to the fates of Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and all the other president’s men whose comprehensive narrative Mueller is bound to tell America no matter what Trump and his stooge at Justice do to try to foil or decapitate him.

The end of Trump (cannot come too soon):

How can we be so certain that Trump’s political days are numbered? First, now we can see more clearly that the blue tide kept rising as many of the closest races, especially for the House, flipped to the Democrats as the final votes were counted. Democrats are now set to gain nearly 40 seats in the House — their biggest gain in decades. Second, we have the smart analysis this past weekend from Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg that the shift away from Trump in 2018 was more profound than many initially believed. In fact, Greenberg makes a strong case that the election was “transformative” with Trump losing support, not only with suburban, college-educated women, but all women. And Democrats gained ground in other areas, too, including working-class men and in rural areas.

The likelihood that Democrats will maintain these gains though the 2020 election is very promising. Unlike many incumbent presidents who have retooled their approach in the face of stinging midterm rebukes, Trump has signaled he’s sticking with his risky behavior. The attack tweets, the latest puerile joke about a congressman’s name and indefensible behaviors, such as believing a foreign power instead of the CIA about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, will continue. Trump will not pass from our politics suddenly from a single dramatic cause, but rather from the accumulation of self-inflicted wounds. It has taken much longer and done more damage than many hoped, but the end of Trump is finally in sight.

Trump of course continues to act like the world's biggest crook and asshole (etc, etc, etc), and it's just hard to imagine a president who so widely loathed as Trump, but he is in fact reviled by over half the country, and for good reason.

I mean, how can anyone so fucking stupid and delusional still be president?

He complained at length that a new Navy ship was using electromagnetic catapults to propel planes off ships. He said steam was better and was incredulous the military would consider otherwise. “Would you go with steam or would you go with electromagnetic? Because steam is very reliable, and the electromagnetic, unfortunately, you have to be Albert Einstein to really work it properly,” he asked. “You have to be Albert Einstein to run the nuclear power plants that we have here, as well. But we’re doing that very well. I would go, sir, with electromagnetic,” the officer responded.

Trump repeatedly asked military commanders what they were seeing in their regions, a conversation not usually held on a televised broadcast. He asked if those serving in Afghanistan were enjoying themselves. (Later, he demurred when asked by reporters whether he would pull troops out of the country.)

He bragged during part of the conversation about sending troops to the Mexico border, a mission that is controversial and seen by many as a waste of time. He expressed no second-guessing about the constitutionality of signing an order giving soldiers the right to use lethal force at the border, although many in his government harbor such concerns.