Trump reacts to Republican election drubbing with a tweetstorm of spin
While Donald Trump has announced that he is abandoning his home state of New York to change his permanent residence to Florida, in truth the state that he spends the most time dwelling in is denial.
His public reaction to last night’s drubbing of Republicans in closely watched elections across the country demonstrates the depth of his self-deception as he tries to move from his clear declaration that the election results would be a referendum on his presidency and his personal popularity to a spin mode that would be a challenge for the finest washing machines.
As Trump told the crowd at his Kentucky rally in support of incumbent Governor Matt Bevin (R) on Monday night:
“If you win, they are going to make it like, ho hum. And if you lose, they are going to say Trump suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world. You can’t let that happen to me!”
With Bevin losing narrowly to Democrat Andy Beshear, happen it did. And let us be the first to confirm the president’s comments as correct for a change because in our hearts in certainly feels like Trump just suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world.
Not that you would intuit that by reading the president’s tweets as he frantically looked for a silver lining in the election results.
#ElectionNight Won 5 out of 6 elections in Kentucky, including 5 great candidates that I spoke for and introduced last night. @MattBevin picked up at least 15 points in last days, but perhaps not enough (Fake News will blame Trump!). Winning in Mississippi Governor race!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2019
Governor Bevin’s loss in Kentucky was unsurprising given his abysmally low poll numbers, but the real concern in that state for the GOP is the fact that one of its senators, Majority Leader “Moscow” Mitch McConnell, has even lower poll numbers than Bevin had, making his reelection bid next year seem pretty damn shakey right now.
Still, Trump spent election night and the following morning spinning the results as positively as he could through his own posts and his retweets of other GOP spinmeisters.
Our big Kentucky Rally on Monday night had a massive impact on all of the races. The increase in Governors race was at least 15 points, and maybe 20! Will be in Louisiana for @EddieRispone on Wednesday night. Big Rally!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2019
Mr. Rispone may want to reconsider that invitation to the president to attend his rally, given the Kentucky results.
No one energizes our base like @realDonaldTrump.
In Kentucky, the governor was down 17 points.
President Trump helped lift the entire ticket, winning 5 of 6 statewide races so far!
— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) November 6, 2019
Apparently Donald Trump is equally, if not more adept at energizing a Democratic base since, although Bevin actually garnered more votes than he did in his last election, a deluge of newly motivated Blue Wave voters put Beshear over the top.
Given his multiple bankruptcies, no one — except Trump himself — has ever considered the president a stable math genius. One look at the deficits created by the Republican tax break for billionaires for which he presided over the passage could tell you that. His grasp of statistics and probability — already ridiculed because of his rejection of valid, but negative, polling results — was proven to be even more pathetic than previously know when he tweeted out this prediction for next year’s Kentucky senate race.
Based on the Kentucky results, Mitch McConnell @senatemajldr will win BIG in Kentucky next year!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2019
Of course, the loss of the Kentucky governorship wasn’t the only defeat for the GOP yesterday — although Trump wisely remained silent on those losses — as Democrats chalked up victories such as gaining total control of the Virginia State legislature, seizing a majority on the city council in Columbus, Indiana —the home town of Vice President Mike Pence— and winning both the mayoralty and the city council in Tuscon, a progressive bastion in conservative Arizona.
Even the cyclist who was fired from her job after flipping the bird at Trump’s motorcade from her bicycle won an election for a local office in Virginia.
The cyclist who flipped off President Trump's motorcade in 2017, and lost her job because of it, has won her bid for local office in Virginia https://t.co/i0QxFhNUIO
— CNN (@CNN) November 6, 2019
Yesterday’s election results will surely be a come-to-Jesus moment for Trump’s staunchest Republican allies. Once they realize that they are being weighed down by the albatross of the president’s rising level of unpopularity, it will be interesting to see whether they will be willing to fight as hard to save him from the Democrats’ impeachment attempts from here on in or whether they will donning their life jackets to abandon the once luxurious Trump yacht that has now fallen into a shambolic state of disrepair as it swirls down the vortex to the bottom of the sea.
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