Trump’s bizarre post-election press conference, explained

Donald Trump always manages to find new ways to shock and surprise, and his press conference held in reaction to Tuesday night’s midterm election results was no exception to that rule.

He started with a weird — but not that surprising — effort to claim that the midterm results were actually a win for Republicans. But things then took a genuinely bizarre, and then alarming, turn as he started mocking House Republican candidates who lost and then snapped at a series of reporters and complained about the existence of skeptical questions.

Along the way, he dropped hints that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Sessions’s deputy, and perhaps special counsel Robert Mueller might soon be fired. He threatened retaliation if Democrats tried to exercise their constitutional authority to conduct oversight of the executive branch. He accused them of wanting to unleash a wave of violent crime. He made a pitch that Democrats should drop the whole idea of investigating him and do a bipartisan deal on infrastructure instead. He even claimed to have a secret plan to resolve the polarized abortion debate.

But shocking as it was in its way, it confirmed what we know about Trump. He is shameless, relentlessly dishonest, poorly informed about policy, disrespectful of the norms and principles of constitutional government, and fundamentally dangerous. He also continues to benefit from a benign economic situation and from a lack of crises abroad that make a serious impact on the typical American. For all of our sakes, we’d better hope that holds up because he does not appear to have the capacity to respond in a remotely appropriate way to any kind of adversity.

Trump mocked vulnerable House Republicans

Trump launched the event by eschewing the typical presidential statement of humility after a midterm defeat. Unlike Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006, and Barack Obama in 2010, he didn’t accept responsibility or even acknowledge that his party had lost at all, saying instead, “it was a big day yesterday. Incredible day. And last night, the Republican Party defied history to expand our Senate majority while significantly beating expectations in the House.”

But the first truly jaw-dropping moment of the press conference was when Trump started making fun of vulnerable House Republicans who, having loyally supported his administration on virtually everything, tried to distance themselves from him in districts where he’s unpopular:

You have some that said let’s stay away, let’s stay away. They did very poorly. I’m not sure that I should be happy or sad. But I feel just fine about it. Carlos Curbelo, Mike Coffman. Too bad, Mike. Mia Love. I saw Mia Love, she would call me all the time to help her with a hostage situation, being held hostage in Venezuela. But Mia love gave me no love. And she lost. Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia.

And Barbara Comstock was another I think that she could’ve won that race, but she did not want to have an embrace. For that, I do not blame her. But she lost substantially lost. Peter Roskam did not want the embrace. Erik Paulsen did not want the embrace. And in New Jersey, I think that he could have done well, but did not work out too good. Bob, you can come, I feel badly, that is something that could’ve been one. John Faso. Those are some of the people that decided for their own reason not to embrace, whether it is me or what we stand for, but what we stand for meant a lot to a lot of people.

This was Trump’s key message on all fronts: The midterms were actually a triumph for him. Not just good in the sense that the GOP picked up Senate seats (which they did in fact do) but actually an across-the-board triumph.

Trump conceded absolutely nothing

Tuesday night, the Republican Party lost considerable ground in state government, with Democrats taking over the governorships of Nevada, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Maine while also flipping critical state legislatures in New Hampshire, New York, and Colorado. And, of course, Democrats won a majority in the House, putting an end to the GOP legislative agenda.

But Trump didn’t see it that way.

“And if you look at them, the four governors’ races, crucial to 2020 in the presidential race,” Trump said, “Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Georgia, the big ones. Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Georgia. It cannot get much more important than that. They were incredible.”

Those are important states, but it’s easy to get more important than that. Trump owed his Electoral College victory to wins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, three states in which Democrats triumphed across all statewide elections.

He also outlined a strange theory whereby losing the House is actually good:

So if the Republicans won, let’s say that we held on by two, one, or three, it would’ve been hard to have that many Republicans to even get support among Republicans. Because there will always be one, two, three people there for good reason or bad reason or for grandstanding, we have that too. You have seen that.

Plenty of grandstanding. But for certain reasons that many people, you are always going to have a couple that will not do it. So that puts us in a very bad position. In other words, had we kept, and this is new. I am saying this for a very basic reason. It puts us in a very tough position. We win by two, three, and he will have one, two, three, four, or five say that we will not go along with this. We want this, this, this period, and all of a sudden, we would not be able to get in and in many cases in the Republicans hands before we sent it on to the Senate.

And now we have a much easier path. Because the Democrats will come to us with a plan for infrastructure. A plan for health care. A plan for whatever they are looking at. And we will negotiate. And as you know, it has been very hard in the Senate, because we essentially do not get the votes from Democrats. Because they do stick together well. I do not agree with them on a lot of policy. But I agree that they stick together. They stick together good. So we, going to the Senate, we do not have the 10 votes. And what happens? It does not get passed. Even if it gets out of the House, it does not pass. So under the new concept of what we are doing, I say come on. Let me see what you have.

Obviously, bipartisan dealmaking in periods of divided government is possible, but this is a bit of a bizarre take. If Trump has struggled to come up with policy proposals that can gain the support of nine or 10 Democratic senators, then it is only going to be harder to reach deals with a Democratic House caucus that’s much more liberal than the rightward wing of the Senate caucus.

Meanwhile, of course, a Democratic House means an end to the impunity Trump has enjoyed on Capitol Hill. Administration scandals and Trump’s conduct are finally going to be subject to investigation, a prospect that Trump greeted with wildly inappropriate threats.

Trump proposed retaliation against oversight

No president enjoys congressional oversight, but rather than do something normal like issue a routine statement about how he’ll comply with legitimate requests, Trump lashed out with a wild scheme to try to intimidate Democrats out of investigating him:

I keep hearing about investigations. Fatigue, like from the time, almost from the time that I announced I was going to run, they have been giving us this investigation fatigue. It has been a long time. They have nothing. Zero. You know why? Because there is nothing. But they can play that game, but we can play it better. Because we have a thing called the United States Senate. And a lot of very questionable things were done between leaks of classified information and many other elements that should not have taken place. And all you are going to do is end up in back-and-forth and back-and-forth.

What's more, in response to a later question, Trump clarified that his hope for a bipartisan infrastructure deal was contingent on Democrats agreeing not to do investigations.

“If they do that,” Trump said, “then all it is is a warlike posture.”

This defies the basic logic of the separation of powers. It’s not unusual for divided government to produce compromise legislation, but that legislation always unfolds in the context of a larger political competition. The idea that Democrats should unilaterally abdicate their constitutional obligations in pursuit of some kind of totally unspecified immigration deal is totally ridiculous.

Trump said a lot of ridiculous things

Somewhere deep into the event, Trump got a question about what kind of immigration policy ideas he might try to advance through executive authority. In his answer, he explained that when Obama unveiled the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, “he said something to the effect of, ‘I’m not allowed to do this, it will never hold up, but I’m doing it anyway.’”

This, needless to say, is not in fact what Obama said.

Nor is it the case that, as Trump said at another point, the United States “allowed a very large part of Ukraine to be taken” while America was “under Obama’s regime.”

Trump accused Yamiche Alcindor of asking “a racist question” when she raised the point that white nationalists have taken encouragement from his rhetoric.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Trump at one point seemed to claim that he had a secret solution to the abortion issue.

“I will not be able to explain it to you,” he said “Because it is an issue that is a very divisive, polarizing issue. But there is a solution; I think that I have that solution.”

And maybe he will!

(He won’t.)

Trump on policy made no sense

Much of the press conference was dedicated to kayfabe clashes with the media. Trump yelled at Jim Acosta, claimed to be unable to understand journalists who spoke with foreign accents, ranted about fake news and unfair coverage, the whole deal. He would, clearly, like to bait the press into putting themselves forward as his real opposition in order to better turn everything in politics into a kind of symbolic conflict.

And that’s no surprise, because when he tries to address actual issues of public policy, he can’t come up with anything to say that makes any kind of sense.

Asked how he could deliver on his repeated promises to protect people with preexisting conditions outside the framework of the Affordable Care Act, he simply said nonsense:

What we are doing, and if you look at the Department of Labor, also secretary, separately but they have done, they have come up with some incredible health care plans, which is posing great competition and driving the prices right down. We are getting rid of individual mandate. It was unfair to a lot of people. But we are covering the people that need it. The individual mandate was a disaster because people that could not necessarily afford it or having to pay for the privilege of not having to pay for health care. And it was bad health care at that. So we are working many plans for health care. Creating tremendous competition.

What the administration is actually doing, of course, is simply legalizing skimpy plans that provide little in the way of benefits and don’t protect patients with preexisting health care conditions. Trump is a liar (what else is new?) and doesn’t care about social policy.

But what's truly amazing is that he doesn’t make any sense when talking about his signature issues, either.

Asked, “What about healing the divides in this country?” Trump pivoted to the presumably more comfortable terrain of trade with China but again just spouted total nonsense:

We are really successful now, we got $11.7 trillion, if you know, China has come down tremendously, tremendously. China would have superseded power; now they are not even close. China, I found it very insulting. I said it to them, China, 25 is very insulting. 25, they are going to take over economically, the world. I said that’s not happening. We’ve gone way up and they’ve gone down — I don’t want them to go down, we’ve had a good meeting and we will see what they can do. Millions of dollars will soon be pouring into our Treasury from taxes China is paying, and if you speak to Mr. Pillsbury, who is probably the leading authority on China, you know who else hasn’t? China hasn’t. We are going to try to make a deal with China, I want to have great relationships with President XI, as I do, and also with China.

To try to translate this out of Trumpese, he is complaining about the Made in China 2025 plan, which is a kind of import-substitution agenda focused on key strategic industries that Trump’s trade policies are supposed to be countering. I have no idea what the $11.7 trillion is a reference to; China has not “come down tremendously” in any meaningful way and was never anywhere close to superseding the United States on any reasonable metric. Tariffs on Chinese goods will in fact raise some tax revenue, though this is a highly regressive form of tax increase, and there’s obviously something bizarre about a Republican bragging about raising taxes.

Also — this was a question about healing the divides in this country, not a question about trade with China!

There’s really no checking Trump

Trump’s accession to the presidency alarmed liberals on two levels.

On the one hand, there was the policy damage he might wreak. That policy worry doesn’t go away with the House in Democratic hands, since control over the judiciary and the administrative state still matters. But in truth, the GOP’s legislative accomplishments in 2017-’18 were quite modest, and Tuesday’s results mean that there will be no further Republican legislative agenda. If you were worried primarily about a new round of regressive tax cuts offset by cuts to the social safety net, you should breathe easy today.

The other worry was simply about the implications of such a flagrantly unfit man, so seemingly incapable of emotional, moral, or intellectual growth, holding a high office.

We’ve seen, from Hurricane Maria to the mass shooting in Pittsburgh, that Trump is basically incapable of responding in an appropriate way to national tragedy. And we’ve seen that though Trump has presided over a continuation of economic growth that started midway through Obama’s first term, he has no actual grasp of the relevant issues. His one real political skill is for demagoguery — turning policy problems like the trend of migrant “caravans” into mostly fake crises that appear and disappear on the national agenda when it suits Trump’s whims.

The price of this sort of conduct has already been high. An island destroyed, a wave of Trump-inspired bombings, a needless destabilization of relations with key allies, and a growing diminution of the standards of conduct that we accept for public officials. But for most Americans, day-to-day life has proceeded apace and that’s put a floor under Trump’s approval ratings that’s been good enough to keep the whole Republican Party afloat given gerrymandering and a skewed Senate map. Losing the House would be a wake-up call for a normal president, but there is no waking up Trump — only the hope that nothing goes too badly wrong while he lasts in office.