The results of the 2018 midterm elections were both predictable and predicted, although that wasn’t necessarily how it seemed when Nancy Pelosi started Election Day by telling reporters that Democrats would absolutely win control of the House of Representatives. “One hundred per cent,” she said, in what felt at the time like an act of breathtaking chutzpah. Clearly the once and likely future Speaker of the House is not the superstitious sort. The Republican gains in the Senate, given a map that strongly favored the Party, were equally foreseeable, even if the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, made no similar effort to brag about them in advance. Forecasts before the election suggested a Democratic pickup of between thirty and fifty seats in the House and gains of up to five seats for the G.O.P. in the Senate. As of Wednesday afternoon, Democrats appeared likely to end up with a gain of about thirty-five House seats, while Republicans added three Senate seats. In other words, what was predicted is more or less exactly what happened.

Still, two years after Donald Trump’s surprise win of the Presidency, few were ready to be as publicly unequivocal as Pelosi on Tuesday morning. Many around town went into the election with a palpable sense of dread, whether out of partisan jitters or a fear that 2016 marked the death of reliable political handicapping. “Washington felt like a nervous breakdown,” a foreign visitor who was here in the days before the balloting reported. The congressional expert Norman Ornstein, a vocal critic of both the President’s and Republican stewardship on Capitol Hill, e-mailed me not long before the polls closed. “If Democrats do not at least win the House,” he wrote, “we are done for.”

The forecasts may have been dead-on this time, but that hardly means Washington is reverting to the old normal. There will be no going along to get along; no moment of national reconciliation. Americans voted for divided government, as they so often have in our history, but if what they wanted was compromise and bipartisan consensus, it is not what they will get. The last few weeks of the 2018 campaign were, by any measure, unusually contentious, angry, and worrying about the state of our democracy.

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The unleashed President campaigned across the country bearing a message of hatred, division, and lies, downplaying his party’s message of economic growth in favor of demonizing opponents as “evil,” and sending tens of thousands of U.S. troops to the Mexican border to stop a “caravan” of would-be asylum seekers who remained hundreds of miles away from the border. Increasing numbers of Democrats believe that the only way to stop Trump is to impeach him in the House and begin the process of trying to remove him from office, no matter how remote the prospects of a Senate conviction seem. This stalemate will not end now that the campaign is over. Washington will get worse, not better, as a result of Tuesday’s results. The political scripts of the past have been destroyed. They are not coming back.

There is a time-honored Presidential playbook for how to handle such moments, but Trump will not follow it. Every President in recent times has suffered a midterm-election setback and responded by acknowledging the defeat and promising to work in a new and more bipartisan fashion. In 2006, George W. Bush conceded the “thumping” his Republicans experienced amid the unpopular Iraq War. Barack Obama took responsibility for the “shellacking” his party suffered in 2010. But not Trump, who not only ignored the Democratic takeover of the House but, on Tuesday night, tweeted about his “very Big Win.” It was minutes after 7 A.M. on Wednesday when Trump made it clear that he was going to be, well, Trump, threatening a war with the House if it proceeded with investigations of him and his Administration. This was only hours after his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said, on Fox, that Trump was “willing to work across the aisle to get things done,” a statement that didn’t have much credibility at the time and underscored once again the extent to which Trump undercuts his staff and flouts political expectations.

Just before noon on Wednesday, Trump made the previous night’s results official with a day-after-the-election press conference—but the only traditional part of the session, in the stately grandeur of the White House East Room, was that he held it at all. “This is not going to be a Kumbaya moment,” CNN’s Jim Acosta predicted right before Trump appeared. And it was not. Before it was over, Trump would nearly engage in fisticuffs with Acosta. (“You are an enemy of the people,” Trump practically shouted at the reporter, pointing his finger as he finally ended their exchange.) In the course of nearly an hour and a half, the President interspersed angry rants about what he called unfair coverage by the media with ever more inflated claims that Tuesday’s election had actually been a “history-defying” victory for him. “I thought it was close to a complete victory,” Trump said. “I think it was a great victory, to be honest.” To the extent that he acknowledged any defeats at all, the President blamed House losses on the large number of Republican retirements there, while at the same time openly celebrating the ouster of a long list of members of his own party who had distanced themselves from him and went on to be beaten. “Mia Love gave me no love,” he said, referring to the Utah Republican. “And she lost. Too bad.”

As for the prospects of bipartisan legislating, Trump’s rhetorical nods to compromise were few and far between. Instead, he offered a vision of bipartisanship as a form of blackmail: He would agree to work on measures such as investing in infrastructure or lowering prescription-drug costs with House Democrats only if they did not go through with threats to investigate him. Otherwise, he vowed to adopt a “war-like” posture. “We can’t do both,” Trump said repeatedly. Should Democrats persist in showering his executive branch with subpoenas and resurrecting the investigation of Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election, Trump said, he would make sure the Republican-controlled Senate retaliated by unleashing its own investigations against House Democrats. If Pelosi and her party defied him and proceeded anyway, Trump vowed, “They will be blamed.”

These were hardly the words of a chastened President. No matter that he was clobbered across the states of the Midwest that brought him the Presidency just two years ago. Never mind that he lost the House despite a strong economy that truly deserves some of the bragging he engages in about it. Trump acted as if he actually believed his own overblown claims of a grand victory.

As if to underscore the point of a President who refuses to be constrained by Congress or anyone else, a little more than an hour after his jaw-dropping press conference, Trump, at 2:44 P.M., tweeted that he had finally decided to force out the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, whose decision to allow the Russia investigation to proceed had infuriated him. For more than a year, Trump has belittled and taunted Sessions as “very weak” and “disgraceful,” an “idiot” who betrayed him. In firing Sessions, Trump effectively barred Sessions’s deputy, Rod Rosenstein, from overseeing the Russia investigation, since he was only supervising it due to Sessions’s recusal.