Once it became clear that Doug Jones had won an upset victory over Roy Moore in the Alabama senate race on Tuesday, the immediate question was: How would the president take the news? Donald Trump, after all, was deeply invested in the race to replace former Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. Elevating Sessions to attorney general seemed like a safe move back in November of 2016. Alabama was a deep red state where, in the presidential election a week earlier, Trump had won 62 percent of the vote to Hillary Clinton’s 34; and in the 2014 Senate election, Sessions had won by a margin that even a communist dictator would admire: 97 percent of the vote.

But as it turned out, Alabama was a double loss for Trump. First, Alabama Republicans rejected Trump’s choice for the primary, Luther Strange, who had been appointed to Sessions’s seat in the interim. Instead, they went with a gleaming-eyed, fanatical Moore, a candidate so Trumpian that even Trump blanched at supporting. But, amazingly, even after credible allegations of child molestation surfaced against Moore, Trump decided that he would support the theocratic candidate, spending his political capital in a rally in neighboring Pensacola, Florida.

As Cornell Law School professor Josh Chafetz noted:

A sitting Republican president lost an Alabama Senate race twice in a couple of months. Twice. In Alabama.



That's a weak president. — Josh Chafetz (@joshchafetz) December 13, 2017

When the voters once again defied Trump, he (or more likely his staff) issued a surprisingly gracious tweet:

Congratulations to Doug Jones on a hard fought victory. The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win. The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. It never ends! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2017

This unexpected civility is a form of whistling past the graveyard. Jones’s victory is a huge disaster for Trump for any number of reasons. First and foremost, it reveals that Trump vaunted skills at dominating the media landscape still leave him almost completely powerless in effecting politics and policy. Trump might commandeer the bully pulpit, but it’s not clear that anyone is really heeding his rants. He might even be realizing as much, for he tweeted on Wednesday morning: