If Republicans lose both chambers of Congress once all the votes from Tuesday’s midterms are counted, a leading conservative columnist warns that President Donald Trump’s “self-destructive instincts” will only be “intensified.”
In a column for the Washington Post, National Review’s Jim Geraghty predicted that Trump, with little left to lose, may indulge his worst instincts to a degree that makes the last two years look reasonable by comparison.
Geraghty noted that the final two years of a two-term presidency "tend to be the roughest" because the "staff is exhausted, or turnover has brought in lesser replacements" and, with the easiest legislative wins gone, Congress is often in the other party’s hands, and "attention shifts to the president’s likely successor."
As he explained, "Now take all those traditional factors and add an octogenarian president who has always been erratic, combative, and prone to posting furious tirades on social media and insulting reporters."
With that in mind, he cautioned, "To the extent that the president was ever under control, the next two years will be Trump unleashed."
He predicted even more praise of and concessions to anti-American dictators, more pointless fights with longtime U.S. allies, and more "unpredictable" decisions and sudden reversals.
“Buckle up, America,” he wrote, “because we may look back on the past two years as the stable part of Trump’s second term.”