President Donald Trump points to a questioner during a news conference following Tuesday's midterm U.S. congressional elections at the White House in Washington, November 7, 2018. Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

His words of self-celebration signal one thing, his actions another: that President Trump knows he is in big trouble. After American voters hit the brakes on his administration by flipping the House to Democratic control, Trump called a White House news conference to insist he had won "almost a complete victory." That referred to GOP gains in the Senate, which remains in his party's control thanks to victories in conservative states he had won handily in 2016. And then he made plain he understands viscerally what he has lost. That triumphal news conference turned into an unsettling 90-minute sojourn through Trump's psyche. Casting himself as a pitiable victim of hostile media coverage, he blew up at reporters whose questions pained him in ways unseen in the modern-day White House.

He berated one correspondent as the "enemy of the people," sending an aide to snatch away the microphone used to ask him a question. He ordered another to sit down. He told a third – an African-American who asked about white supremacy in light of his race-based appeals to white voters – that she had asked "a racist question." If that didn't demonstrate discomfort enough, Trump went on to outline a fantasy alternative to the rebuke voters actually delivered him on Election Day. He said the results indicated that voters like him, even though a solid majority of them told exit pollsters they disapprove of his presidency. He suggested he had bested President Obama, who campaigned for a Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, because the Republican had won. (NBC News had yet to make a call in the race as of Thursday morning.) Trump ascribed Democratic House gains to extraneous factors – superior fund-raising, retirement decisions by Republican incumbents – rather than the anvil his divisive presidency hung around the necks of GOP members in suburban districts. He openly mocked members who tried to survive by distancing themselves from him, calling them out by name and adding sarcastically, "too bad." That offered a bitter refresher course in his self-absorption for Republican members who have shielded his scandal-tarred presidency from oversight while they pursued shared economic goals of tax-cuts. "It disgusts me that he did that," retiring GOP Rep. Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania texted me during the press conference. "I'm so angry about it i can't even begin to speak." Costello concluded: "Those members that lost deal with hell for two years – because of him." As a result, Trump has lost his shield. Among the first actions House Democrats took on election night was to confirm they will exercise their rights to demand the president's tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service – a step Republicans refused to take.