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It didn’t seem to matter that these midterm elections could potentially see the President lose control of Congress for his final two years in office. What we were witnessing was a radical reinterpretation of how a president’s time is best spent on the campaign trail. On the final day of the campaign, Donald Trump was down on the National Mall to reopen the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. His speech was a ricochet of successive statements unrelated to the election. Someone close to the White House tried to justify the event to me in terms that elevated sycophancy into surrealism: they thought that his staffers were giving him a pleasant activity to put him in a better mood before he learnt the bad news about the election tonight.

“We’re giving serious thought to changing the name to the Trump Reflecting Pool,” the President said.…