Donald Trump’s name was nowhere to be found on the ballots of the 2018 midterm elections, but the vote, as he put it at one rally, “is a referendum about me.” In recent weeks, as he appeared at one rally after another, the President became himself, only more so, slamming the press, sliming opponents, and waging the most bigoted national political campaign in this country since the days of George Wallace.

The Democratic Party failed to achieve a “blue wave,” an overwhelming victory that would have represented a nationwide repudiation of the 2016 election. Our divisions have only deepened. But Trump lost in some consequential ways. In a high-turnout election, the G.O.P. yielded control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats for the first time in eight years—a crucial check on Presidential power. A record number of women were elected to Congress—a reflection, in part, of a #MeToo movement that the President has disdained. At least four of them were young women of color, including Rashida Tlaib, in Michigan; Ilhan Omar, in Minnesota; Lauren Underwood, in Illinois; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in New York. Democrats also improved, since 2016, among Midwestern and suburban voters. And, for the second time in two years, Trump and his allies lost the popular vote.

The midterm results, however, will provide Trump adequate reason to claim victory and, despite his low approval ratings, feel confident that he can win a reëlection campaign that leans heavily on rural voters. Republicans continue to dominate beyond the cities and suburbs, and they widened their margin in the Senate, which is a far less representative body than the House. They also held off statewide Democratic challenges in Florida and Texas, though the narrow margins of victory in those red states should give the G.O.P. leadership pause. Beto O’Rourke, who narrowly lost in the Texas Senate race to the incumbent, Ted Cruz, ran an especially compelling race.

Live Election Map Follow the national and state results of the 2018 midterms with our interactive map.

Trump will doubtless take no blame for his party’s loss of the House. He never takes blame for anything. In the last days of the campaign, he made sure to inoculate his political ego against criticism by saying that there just wasn’t enough of him to go around: he could not campaign for many House candidates—there were so many. He could even blame “illegal voters” for his shortfall in the popular vote, as he did in 2016.

A Democratic majority in the House will not only make it harder for Trump to achieve his legislative ambitions; it could also intensify the state of crisis and siege in Washington. The loss in the House of Representatives means that an array of committees—Judiciary, Intelligence, Ways and Means, Foreign Affairs, and others—will now be chaired by Democrats who can initiate, or accelerate, investigations into Trump’s past, his Presidency, and his associates. They replace Republican chairmen like Devin Nunes, who, as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, often seemed to act less as a detached lawmaker and more like the President’s personal attorney.

The Republican leadership in the House has been dreading this prospect for months. Late last summer, Axios reported that the G.O.P. had compiled a spreadsheet of the many areas in which Trump was vulnerable to investigation. The spreadsheet includes, Axios reported, “more than one hundred formal requests from House Democrats [in] this Congress, spanning nearly every committee.” Democratic-led committees could issue subpoenas to investigate the President on a range of subjects. The Ways and Means Committee can request his tax returns. Other committees can launch more aggressive inquiries into his communications and business relations with Russia; his family businesses; possible money-laundering schemes; his payment to Stormy Daniels; the firing of the former F.B.I. director James Comey and various U.S. attorneys; the Muslim travel ban; the family-separation policy on the southern border; the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico; Jared Kushner’s compliance with ethics laws; election security; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s business dealings; and more.

Whether the House leadership pursues impeachment remains a vexed strategic question. The Republicans hold a decisive majority in the Senate, making a conviction nearly impossible. What’s more, Democratic lawmakers are wary of a precipitous move toward impeachment; they recall how the Bill Clinton impeachment was, in the end, a political debacle for the G.O.P. They also know that Trump has proved repeatedly that he is an impulsive and vengeful politician on an ordinary day; when he is cornered, when he feels under attack from the press and his opponents, there is little he will not do or say.

The last weeks of the campaign were full proof of that. Though Presidents, even seemingly popular Presidents, frequently lose ground in midterm elections—under Barack Obama, the Democrats lost sixty-three House seats in 2010—Trump made his historical mark in these midterms by running a campaign distinguished by its naked appeals to racism, xenophobia, and paranoia. These were not inadvertent gestures. They were not gaffes. He did this deliberately and incessantly. His calculation, as it had been in 2016, was that his supporters’ deepest anxieties are connected to the country’s changing demographics. He showed little interest in running on matters of policy. Health care, it turned out, was a losing issue for him. Instead, without restraint or shame, he whipped one crowd after another into a frenzy by waving the banner of fear, resentment, and white nationalism.

Trump is hardly the first Republican to use race to define a national election. Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush each used racial dog whistles or campaign commercials and surrogates to exploit the racial currents that persist in American life. Trump, however, made no effort to conceal his intent, no effort to employ a Lee Atwater to do his dirty work.

He warned that criminal gangs from Central America and the “Middle Eastern” terrorists in their midst—“the worst scum in the world”—were heading north toward Texas and carrying out a full-scale “invasion of our country.” At a rally in Florida, Trump said, “A Democrat victory on Election Day would be a bright, flashing invitation to traffickers, smugglers, drug dealers, and gang members all over the world. Republicans believe our country should be a sanctuary for law-abiding Americans, not criminal aliens.”

Trump felt no compunction about using the U.S. military as a political prop for his midterms fear campaign. He ordered thousands of active-duty troops to the border to ward off a caravan that was, in fact, many hundreds of miles away. Fox News amplified the sense of encroachment and insecurity by suggesting that the destitute men, women, and children in the caravan were being underwritten by the financier and philanthropist George Soros—a blatant anti-Semitic trope—and might even spread deadly diseases throughout America, after leaping Trump’s “beautiful” barbed wire.

Trump did not stop there. He called for the support of whom he portrayed as the nation’s beleaguered defenders: “Where are the Bikers for Trump? Where are the police? Where are the military? Where’s ICE? Where’s the Border Patrol? No, we’ve taken a lot.”

Calling on powers that he does not have, Trump said that he would override the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and ban “birthright citizenship” by executive order. He was undeterred by any criticism, and spoke in larger truths. As he told supporters in Montana, “I’m the only one that tells you the facts.”