Presidential forecast

Will the second two years of his first term be any different from the first two years? His actions and words in the days following the midterm elections indicate things actually could get worse rather than better. He has never been a gracious winner. In defeat, he has shown worse: ill-tempered, withdrawn, even more unpredictable.

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He has driven suburban voters, especially college-educated women, away from the Republican Party. His hold on rural America remains strong, but the midterms suggest possible slippage.

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He was elected to lead a world in transition and under stress. He has added to that stress by weakening traditional alliances and embracing authoritarian leaders, while offering no clear strategy for key areas of the world. He has sought to dismantle or redraw global trade deals and other arrangements that his predecessors helped to construct.

  WaPo

Captain Destructo. It's all he's ever done in his life: take things and destroy them. A large toddler clomping through the world knocking things down.

He has reinforced what his presidency has wrought, domestically and internationally, and left others to worry about what comes next.

At home, Trump claimed that the midterms were “close to complete victory” for his party and especially for himself. It was an extravagant assertion at the time he made it — the day after the elections — and even more so today. Other presidents have accepted some responsibility for the losses of their party in midterm elections, or at least acknowledged the reality of defeat. Trump is having none of that.

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Republicans defeated three red-state Democratic senators. GOP candidates also won or are leading in four high-profile statewide races — gubernatorial elections in Florida and Georgia and Senate races in Florida and in Texas. But the party surrendered GOP-held Senate seats in Nevada and Arizona and lost senatorial or gubernatorial contests in three presidential battlegrounds in the Midwest.

The House results produced a string of defeats that have left the GOP weaker in key parts of the country, states such as New Jersey and Pennsylvania, for example. In New England, other than Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Republicans will have no congressional representation. In California, Orange (as in County) is the new blue, after several victories by Democrats in competitive House districts in a county that once was the symbolic and real heartland of American conservatism.

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DuPage County, outside Chicago, has been a Republican stronghold for years, though the GOP’s grip had been weakening. Now, not a single House member in the new Congress whose district includes a part of DuPage County will be a Republican.

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The 2020 elections will test the resilience of these new members, whose races will enjoy less prominence and potentially less money than they had this year, given the overriding attention the presidential race will receive.

But this year’s elections laid a foundation, thanks in large part to voters’ negative reactions to the president. Young voters supported Democrats by margins well beyond those rung up even by Barack Obama in his two presidential campaigns.

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The president’s advisers argue, fairly, that people should be cautious about projecting forward as to how those rural areas will vote in 2020, when Trump’s name is again on the ballot. But if the suburbs are trending away, he will need all the rural ground he had in 2016 and perhaps more.

[His] trip to Paris to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the armistice of World War I brought a reminder of the degree to which he has chosen to stand apart from traditional U.S. allies. He was absent physically at key moments, and absent intellectually in providing the leadership that long has come with being the American president.

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The centenary was meant to be the biggest such commemoration in decades. Yet Trump did not go, as scheduled, to pay respects at an American cemetery outside Paris, where more than 2,000 American troops are buried. Weather was blamed for the decision, but he later vented at his staff for making him look bad.

The next day he chose not to march in the rain with other global leaders on the Champs-Elysees, choosing instead to be driven to the Arc de Triomphe for the later ceremony. Another leader who skipped the solidarity march was Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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After returning to the United States last Sunday night, Trump chose not to make the traditional presidential trip to Arlington Cemetery the following morning to observe Veterans Day. Later in the week, apparently seeking to make amends, he went to the Marine Barracks in Washington for a lunchtime visit. On Friday, he acknowledged he had made a mistake by not going to Arlington Cemetery. He said he was busy making “calls for the country.”

Actually, he said it MIGHT have been a mistake, before lying that he was busy making calls, which even if that had been true, was no excuse.

He has plodded through the days after the election, seeming mostly unhappy in what was “close to compete victory.” He now must know what was lost in the midterms, but he seems lost in knowing how to respond.

He really is clueless about proper social behavior. He's a complete and total narcissist. After constant tweet-slamming the process (and the Dems who were stealing elections) when it looked like Florida and Georgia votes might go against the Republicans, now that the counts have finally been made in favor of Rick Scott and Brian Kemp, he's tweeting about what great races Democrats Gillum and Abrams ran and how they'll be great candidates in future races. I don't even know if he realizes that people can see right through him, but I suspect he doesn't. He's gone through his life unconcerned about his effect on other people; I see no reason to believe he's gained any insight along the way. He's very much in a self-centered toddler state of mind all the time.  Never any attempt to mature or behave like a genuine human being.

Wait for the tweet rant about this Post article being FAKE NEWS!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

From an interview with Chris Wallace:



Other people are no concern of his.